by Keary Taylor
He didn’t say anything. His gaze had fallen to the ground, and I could tell he was lost in his past.
“I know you don’t like to talk about it,” I said, venturing into these unstable waters. “But I think it would have helped, if you really talked about your past. What you’ve been through. How you were. Because you just gave me the bare minimum and it’s made it hard to relate to. It’s made it hard to see it as real.”
Nathaniel’s eyes rose up to meet mine. “You really wanted to hear about the nightmares I had as a child, of being left alone in a crib for days by myself?” he asked. I heard his words grow darker and heavier with every word he spoke. “Or the time I punched a kid who kept taking my lunch in preschool, knocking out all four of his front teeth? Or the time that Myrtle Bloom convinced Danny Shaw to shove me into the fountain at school, and I came out with my hands around his neck so tight, it left bruises for an entire month? You really wanted to hear about all of those things, Margot?”
I swallowed once. “Yes. Because you’ve blocked me out of all of these things that make you who you are, and then I just can’t understand when certain things happen. You just expect me to accept that you’re somehow magically two entirely different people.”
“So, is it too late now?” he asked. And his tone softened. His words sounded a little lost. “Did we just jump in too ignorant and now we’ve destroyed our chance?”
I shook my head, and I just kept shaking it for a while, because I couldn’t accept that. “No,” I said, my word breathy. “But maybe…” I cut out, trying to think when my head was spinning. “Maybe we needed to get to know each other as friends first. Maybe the kind of love we had was just too blind.”
I could see it on his face, just how much this was killing Nathaniel. And it was breaking my heart, too.
But we were both more broken than we realized.
“I do love you, Margot,” he said, his words little more than a whisper. “And I wish I could just let you in. But all I want to do is ignore everything that ever happened to me before I came here to Alderidge. I don’t want to go back into the past, and I can’t stand the thought of showing you who I was then.”
I wrapped my arms around myself, because it hurt that we kept looping back in circles over and over again. I nodded once. “Alright then. Maybe you can learn to trust me more as a friend first then. Maybe we cut it all back, and maybe we don’t talk about that future that we thought was so sure. We just take it back. And maybe someday you will trust me enough to help me understand.”
Nathaniel didn’t say anything for a long time, and we both just stared at each other.
Because I’d finally been able to put into words what I’d been struggling with all this time.
And he didn’t want to hear the truth of it. But he was accepting it.
“Alright,” he said, and he stood as he did. All of his features were tight, as if he were holding something in, trying to control every movement and every breath he let out. “We become friends, Margot. And see what happens from there.”
I gave a curt little nod but didn’t say anything else. I watched as he walked back to the spiral staircase and went down. I listened for the sound of the bookcase closing again.
And when I knew I was alone, I grabbed the pad of paper laying on the desk, and I threw it as hard as I possibly could against the opposite wall. Very unsatisfyingly, it simply made a noise and fell flat to the ground, barely even crinkling any pages.
I wanted Nathaniel to fight with me. I wanted him to yell and tell me he did trust me. I wanted him to counter me and tell me that of course we were friends. I wanted him to say it didn’t matter, and that we loved each other, so we could figure all this other crap out.
But he had just sat there so calm. He just acted so logical. And he got out of here without ever once raising his voice.
I wanted us to scream at each other and yell it all out and work through every single issue right here and now, and then fall into each other’s arms and kiss and touch and for everything to be fixed.
But here was the problem.
We handled things differently.
So, I took four deep breaths. I stuffed a few more things into the box, and I walked out of the hidden office. I walked out of the library without looking around for Nathaniel.
I went home. I scoured the shelves at home, debating what was expendable. I grabbed a dozen glass jars from the kitchen, ones we had emptied over the winter.
I went down to the beach. And I hurled them out over the ocean before making them explode into tiny bits of sand with my mind.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Are you okay?”
I looked over at Borden as we walked out of the jewelers with a thick envelope of money. “Yeah, why?”
He shook his head, his eyes fixed ahead. We turned the corner, aimed for the store. “You’ve just been exceptionally quiet the last few days.”
I shrugged as he held the door open for me and we stepped into the store. “There’s just a lot going on in my head right now. I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“That’s fine,” Borden said. “I get it. We can pretend there’s nothing else to worry about besides packing for a long trip overseas.”
I glared at him, because he knew I was stressed about it already.
I looked around the store, catching sight of Mary-Beth at the back, looking through a rack of suitcases.
“Hey, you,” I said, smiling as I bumped her hip with mine.
“It’s a good thing I’m not a penny pincher,” she said as she considered the row of luggage. “I have three sets back at home, all much better than these. But what’s the harm in one more set?”
“You are ridiculous,” I said, shaking my head. “Which set is cheapest?”
I said it, despite the thousands of dollars in my purse.
“No,” she said, correcting me. “It’s not about the price tag. It’s about which one speaks to your soul.”
“Do you really never worry about sounding like an arrogant braggart?” Borden asked, raising an eyebrow at Mary-Beth.
“Never,” she said, grabbing a set that was far more colorful than all the others. “And since when did any of us care what people thought about us?”
Leave it to Mary-Beth to instantly make me feel better.
In the end, I still picked the least expensive set, and Borden got the most practical gray set they had. We each picked out a new jacket, and got our travel-sized necessities.
I picked out a new set of everything for Nathaniel and asked Borden to take them to him. He didn’t have any money, and I knew he was stressed out about missing two weeks of work for our trip. He hadn’t done his own shopping because he was currently working at the library.
And it was a truly nice afternoon. We shopped. We ate at a diner, leaving our massive pile of things by the front door while we ate.
We didn’t mention magic once. Just talked in excitement about our trip like the young adults we were.
And then we all went our separate ways home to pack.
I stumbled through the door with all of my things to find Dad eating a bowl of cereal at the table.
“Good gracious,” he said, his eyes widening at all of my things. “Did you need to buy out the entire store?”
I laughed, tripping over one of my shopping bags. “It’s kind of awful, right? But I can’t remember the last time I had extra money to buy two new pairs of shoes, let alone one.”
Dad just shook his head at me and took another huge mouthful of food. Maybe he was related to Mary-Beth.
“Where are your stress levels?” I asked as I dumped all of my things and walked into the kitchen to sit across the table from him.
“This is the part where I stop stressing and all the students start having heart attacks because they’ve been slacking all semester,” he said with a laugh.
“Oh, I knew you weren’t worried about the finals,” I said, raising an eyebrow at him. “I’m losing my mind about the i
nternational travel. I can’t imagine you aren’t feeling the same way.”
He dropped his eyes back to his cereal bowl. “Okay, maybe that part is keeping me up at night lately. There’s just so much to do once we get there. I have so many people to connect with and so many things I want to accomplish in just a few months.”
And his expression sobered, and his eyes grew far away.
“And I was supposed to do this trip with your mother,” he said, his eyes sliding up to meet mine. “This was all about her. Her ancestors. Her country of origin.”
“I wish she could be going with us,” I said, and it all hit me again. How much I missed her. Her laugh and her smile. The stories she told and how she would tell me bedtime stories in different languages.
“You look so much like her,” Dad said as he raised a hand and brushed his thumb over my cheek.
It was true. While he had my same sandy blonde hair, and a slight dip in his chin, I got everything else from my mother. I had her eyes and her nose. Her same oval-shaped face. Even had her same serious, thoughtful stare. If you put pictures of us side by side, there was no question we were mother and daughter.
“Someday we’ll get our answers,” I said, offering him a sad smile.
He suddenly sat up and reached for a box that was sitting on the chair next to him. “That reminds me. I picked up the last of your mothers’ things from her office today. And it reminded me that there were two books sitting on her desk in her normal office when I cleaned it out. I’d returned them to the linguistics department when I cleaned out her office. But I remembered them, because they were in a language I knew your mother didn’t speak.”
He pulled out two books from the box, and my heart instantly thumped with hope.
I reached for them and opened the pages of the first one. The words swirled instantly at my touch and rearranged themselves into a language I didn’t recognize.
“I can’t read it,” I said, shaking my head. “I…I don’t even recognize the characters. They look like some kind of Asian language to me.”
Dad nodded, though he looked disappointed. “And there’s something interesting about the other book.”
I reached for it and tried to open the pages.
Tried. But failed.
It was almost as if the pages had been glued shut. Like every single page had been sealed to the other, the front and back cover included.
Instantly, I darted from my chair and went to my wand which had been left useless on a bookshelf. I grabbed it and returned to the table.
I covered my hands with my sleeves and touched it to the sealed book.
It glowed brilliant blue.
And even though I didn’t need to, because I already knew the answer, I touched it to the first book, and it too, glowed.
“These were in the linguistics private collection?” I asked, instantly thinking of the place. It was a room in the center of all the linguistics professors’ hall, stuffed with shelves of books from all over the world.
“They were,” Dad said with a nod, and I was impressed that he knew exactly which ones Mom had kept on her desk.
“I need you to go back there tomorrow and test to make sure there aren’t any more magical books in that library,” I said, and instantly, I was shocked at my own stupidity, that I hadn’t considered checking all the private department libraries. “Try this,” I said, handing him the wand that looked like a pencil.
Dad picked it up, and at my instruction, he touched it to the sealed book. Instantly, it glowed blue.
“Perfect,” I said, my brain spinning a million miles an hour. “Dad, mom talked about two books that she’d just bought from overseas. She said they took months to arrive. These…these have to be the ones she was talking about.”
I stood, grabbing the books. I stood there, debating with myself for a solid ten seconds.
I wanted to run right over to the solarium and see if Nathaniel could read the language that was in the glamoured book. Or if he had any ideas why the book was sealed.
But he would be studying for his finals tomorrow. He didn’t need the distraction.
So, I would wait until the day after tomorrow, when we would all be on a plane, bound for Scotland.
Chapter Twenty-Three
While all the other students at Alderidge were taking their finals, I counted the money I had made from selling gold.
I’d spoken to a real estate agent and asked him what Asteria House was worth. It had been hard to get him to take me seriously, and I couldn’t exactly blame him. I was only nineteen after all. And a single woman at that, talking about buying an abandoned mansion by herself.
But he gave me an amount he thought the owners would consider.
As I counted out the bills one by one, I found that I was exactly halfway there. I’d earned enough to put down half, in cash, in just over a month. I could get the rest in another month, though that was going to be more complicated since I was going to be overseas and I’d have to deal with currency conversion.
But in two months, I would have earned enough to hopefully buy the house. And in another two months, hopefully I would have enough to pay for the mass amount of renovations it needed to make it livable.
I stuffed all the money into an envelope, and then hid it behind the frame of a large painting in my bedroom.
I headed down the stairs to go make some lunch, when there was a thump against the door. My brows furrowed and I reached for the knob, but suddenly the entire door swung open, and in stumbled Borden.
His eyes looked hazy and he could hardly keep himself upright as he walked in. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes.
“Are you drunk?” I asked stupidly, even as I had to back away from him because he reeked of alcohol so bad.
“Yes,” he said simply, stepping away and dropping down onto the couch.
“Why?” I asked, walking to my mother’s chair and sitting cross legged on it.
He looked over at me and gave me this look that entirely questioned my intelligence. “I was supposed to be graduating tomorrow, Margot. With my bachelor’s degree in international finance. I was six weeks away from finishing my schooling. And now I have no degree, no family, and every bit of my trust fund that was still available has now been allocated to my fourteen-year-old sister.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” I said stupidly, ignoring all the other painful things he’d just said.
“Chloe,” he said, turning his face up to the ceiling and closing his eyes. “She’s spoiled rotten, the apple of our father’s eye.”
“I take it you’re not close,” I asked.
He let out a sigh, and the air instantly smelled even stronger of alcohol. “We’re eight years apart in age. She was a surprise that came after my parents started expecting me to be a man. So no, we’re not close.”
“I’m really sorry, Borden,” I said again, wishing that somehow I could make it all better. “If you need money—”
He made a pft sound and waved a hand in my direction. “Please, keep your pennies. I started investing my own money into stocks when I was twelve and learned how to work the market as well as my father by the time I was fifteen. I have more than sufficient for my needs.”
I raised an eyebrow at him and shook my head, even though he wasn’t looking.
“I have put all of my things in storage however,” Borden said. “Landlord wasn’t willing to work with me while I’m gone. All my bags are somewhere outside. Can I stay here tonight?”
I huffed and shook my head at him, even as I got up and went to the door. “Of course,” I said as I pulled it open. There was a shoulder bag dropped in front of the neighbor’s house, and a large suitcase laying half on the sidewalk, half in the road.
“Are you kidding me?” I said quietly as I walked down the stairs into the warm end-of-April air. I retrieved Borden’s bags, and hauled them up the stairs. They were lighter than I expected, considering Borden was planning a long-term stay.
By the time I had them in the door and it closed, Borden was fast asleep on the couch.
I just shook my head at him and went into the kitchen to make lunch.
Dad got home from work earlier than usual that afternoon. He declared finals done. And disappointingly, he reported that he’d gone through every department library, and hadn’t found a single mage book.
I tried to not let that get me down. I pushed it away.
It was fine.
We’d been lucky to find as many as we had.
The two of us headed to the bank. I felt a little embarrassed and bad when I brought twice as much money as he did to exchange currency. But he didn’t say a word. We simply pocketed our money and returned home.
The smell of food filled the air when we walked inside. I turned to find Borden and Mary-Beth in the kitchen, creating dinner.
“Feeling better?” I asked Borden.
“Yes,” he said, and he actually blushed a little. “I’m sorry you had to see me like that.”
I just smiled and shrugged. “How did finals go?” I asked Mary-Beth as I walked in and sat on the edge of the table.
She shrugged. “Good enough to keep me in school for another year.”
I shook my head with a smile. Her family donated too much money and too many assets to this school for them to ever kick her out. “This mean you’re sleeping over, too?”
“Why not?” she asked. “We’re going to be roomies for the next two weeks anyway.”
I just smiled and hugged her, and then turned to watch as the front door opened, and in walked Nathaniel.
He offered a small, controlled smile when his eyes found mine. He set the suitcase I’d bought him next to the door and awkwardly walked in to join all of us in the kitchen.
“How about you, Mr. Smarty-Pants?” Mary-Beth asked as she stirred something in a pot. “You show everyone up again?”
