Page 86 of Dark Night Golden Dawn
“Hey, McKay,” she replied, unable to get anything else past her dry mouth. Petra peeked around the corner and gave her an extremely uncharacteristic two thumbs up.
Finn followed Harlow’s startled gaze and he shook his head at his best friend. “Sorry about that. And about her coming over earlier. I didn’t ask her to. In fact—”
“I know,” Harlow interrupted. “She said you told her to stay out of it, but I’m glad she came.”
“You hugged her?” Finn asked as he steered her into the library, away from prying eyes. Her sisters were craning their necks trying to hear what they said to each other. He closed the door and the sounds from the kitchen died immediately, as though the door had sealed them in a world of their own. There were no books on the shelves still, and no furniture in the room. Something about the emptiness felt sad to Harlow, instead of full of possibilities as it had just a week ago.
“Petra told you that?”
Finn nodded as he sat in the window seat, gesturing for her to sit across from him. It was large enough that they weren’t touching when she obliged, and this too felt sad, like lost potential.
“Yeah, she seemed sort of delighted, actually.” His smile faded as he raked his hands through his dark hair, sending it in wild directions. He hadn’t had it cut recently, she noticed, nor had he shaved. In his t-shirt and jeans, he looked likeherFinn, not the person trying to please his parents and the rest of the Orders in the season. Her heart thumped hard in her chest, making her question every instinct she had about staying apart.
When he spoke, she heard the strain in his voice, but also a measure of resolve. “Harls, I thought I was protecting her, but I neveraskedher what she wanted. I just assumed, which was shitty of me.”
Harlow nodded, crossing her legs and resting her elbows on her knees to cradle her chin. It was infinitely cool that he could admit the ways he was wrong so effortlessly. A little voice inside her suggested that it probably wasn’t effortless, but that he’d done the work to learn how to do something she found difficult. And that voice gave her hope that if he’d done it, maybe she could learn to do so as well.
His fingers stretched toward her, but he clasped them in his lap. “You look just like you did when we were ten, learning to play chess.”
Her smile at the memory felt weak. Here, in his presence, she felt like crying, though she wasn’t sure why. “I shouldn’t have screamed at you like that,” she said after what felt like an awkwardly long pause.
He shrugged. “Maybe not, but what you said was spot on. I was a coward about the whole thing.”
“But it changed something between us, didn’t it?” she asked, wondering if he felt it too.
He nodded. “Yeah, I think it did.”
She knew it. The way things had been going was all too good to be true. She’d screamed at him, and after a lifetime of being treated like shit by people who were supposed to love him, he was doing the right thing, drawing strong boundaries and cutting her out. She sank deep into her sadness before saying, “So that’s it then.”
His brow furrowed as every muscle in his body tensed. “Wait—what do you mean?”
Harlow shook her head. “I assume you want to call this whole thing off. Just be friendly… I mean, we can still work together, but…”
He leaned forward, but still didn’t touch her. “Is that what you want? To stop what we’ve been doing?”
Harlow’s jaw clenched. “What do you want?”
He looked down at his shirt, frowning and tugging on the hem.My girlfriend is a witch. “I thought it was pretty clear what I wanted.”
Air caught in Harlow’s throat, momentarily unable to reach her lungs. Surely she was misunderstanding him. “You still want that? You still want… me?”
His slate eyes widened. “Did you think getting mad at me would make me stop wanting you?”
Her eyes watered, but she couldn’t answer.
“Harls,” he said, his deep voice gentle as he cupped her chin in his hands, one of his thumbs stroking her bottom lip so tenderly she thought she might sob. “You are allowed to get angry. I hope we don’t spend all our time yelling and snapping at each other, but if it happens, it happens. We’ll make up and move on.”
Harlow stared at a place on the windowsill behind Finn’s head, avoiding his eyes. “I want all that,” she choked out. “I just… I just…”
Finn moved her chin slightly so she had to look at him. “Whatever it is, you can tell me. I’m not going to fly off the handle and get mad. Please, just talk to me.”
She wanted to tell him everything, but she couldn’t quite manage, even though shewastrying. What if the Quinns decided that all that angerwasactually hers? If she told him about her fears now, and Enzo was wrong, she’d look like she was making excuses for bad behavior, and she didn’t want that. She wanted to take responsibility for herself. So she kept it to herself; she was accustomed to keeping secrets. Secrets had always kept her safe in the past.
She settled somewhere in between the truth and her secrets. “I need more time to process what happened with Mark. There’s something in my memory, this blank space about the night we broke up. I need to figure out what happened and let go before I start something new with you.”
“Okay,” he said softly. She saw the disappointment in his eyes and his hand fell from her face, but slowly, back into his own lap. “Can I ask you one thing that will make me sound pathetic?”
“You can ask me anything,” she said, hating to hear the strain in his words.
