by Maggie Hall
Maybe after shutting everyone out for so long, I just wanted somebody to hold me and comfort me. But if that was the case, I would have turned to Jack earlier rather than breaking it off with him, right? I knew it wasn’t just that. If I was being honest, I’d been hyperaware of Stellan ever since that kiss at the Melechs’. I had no idea why. It had been a fake kiss that had made me panic. Not exactly the stuff of romance novels. And yet. No matter what, it wasn’t something I wanted in my head, not least because recently, those thoughts led to other, uglier ones.
I grabbed the second pillow and pushed it over my face like it would block out the images. I pictured every fancy dress I’d worn that had ended up torn or bloodied or burned. I tried to remember all twelve Circle families’ mottos and symbols. I started the alphabet backward—and around R, there was the memory again, kissing him on the steps of a bar in Cannes, under a green striped awning, at Colette’s villa. Us with Colette not long after that, in Paris, right before—
I was only under one blanket, but it was stifling. I shifted restlessly.
There were more footsteps outside, and they stopped. There was a light tap at my door. I bolted upright, and my first thought was to feel guilty about what I’d just been thinking. The second was to grab my gun, just in case. I padded on bare feet across the cold brick and said, “Who is it?”
“It’s me,” Stellan said.
I had known it would be.
I set down the gun, unlocked the deadbolt and the chain lock, and opened the door. The lamp on my bedside table cast only a dim glow, and he stood silhouetted in the lobby light.
“Did I wake you up?”
“No,” I said.
“How is your shoulder feeling?” His accent was thicker than usual.
“Hurts.”
He was chewing on his lower lip, looking different from the person who had just been kissing me in my head. He’d grown more gaunt recently. His eyes looked tired. Sad. A little broken. They had for a while, and I just hadn’t noticed. Probably because all of ours did.
But he looked—oh God. He looked good. He was wearing a new T-shirt he got from the mall earlier and tracksuit pants that were too short for him. His hair was down again, and wet like he had just showered. He looked so much better than I wanted him to look. I had the distinct impression that, for maybe the first time ever, I was thinking impure thoughts about him and he wasn’t reciprocating.
“I lied. I’m not doing entirely okay,” he said, without looking up from the floor. “Can’t sleep.”
I was a terrible person.
I opened the door all the way, and he hesitated, then came inside. I glanced down the hall and locked the door behind him.
“Worrying about Anya, or something else?” I said quietly, trying to make up for what I’d just been thinking.
“That. And everything I told you in the tunnels. And—”
“Flashbacks from the hospital?” I asked, remembering my hunch. “Or from other stuff?”
He looked surprised. “Yes, actually. And—”
“What?”
“You.”
I was quiet. Yes, we’d been friendly earlier, but I didn’t want to hear that he was feeling this way because of anything to do with me. I didn’t want to feel better knowing he was in my room right now. I didn’t want to be looking at his mouth and realizing I’d been looking at it all day. I didn’t want to need him, even if it was just for purposes of distraction. I didn’t want him to need me at all.
“You make me feel too many things,” he said abruptly. He crossed to the window, pulling back the heavy curtain to look down at the street. “I had gotten good at blocking it all out. And ever since you got here, you’ve made me feel all these things, and some of them aren’t good.”
I couldn’t do anything but blink at him, taken aback. I felt my heart pounding in my bullet wound.
“I don’t mean it’s your fault.” He dropped the curtain and paced in front of the carved wooden armoire, both his hands in his hair. “I don’t know why I said that.”
I stood in the middle of the room, my feet cold on the brick floor. “But some of them are good?”
I didn’t know why I’d said that.
Stellan stopped pacing and looked up. He crossed the room in two long strides, taking my face between his hands, obviously warring with himself. The side of him that had nuzzled into me in the hospital because someone was showing him a tiny bit of kindness. The side that had been a huge pain since Jerusalem. The side that, when he couldn’t sleep, had decided the thing to do would be to come to my bedroom.
He let out a long, shaky breath. “Yes. Some of them are good.”
My hands found his chest. It was just about the hardest thing I’d ever done not to reach up and kiss him.
And then it wasn’t, because I was doing it. I was stretching up on my tiptoes and pulling him closer, and he responded so quickly, I knew he’d been about to do it himself if I hadn’t. There was no should-we, shouldn’t-we, no trying to pull away, no trying to stop.
That kiss for the Circle hadn’t counted. This, as far as my body could tell, was the second time we’d ever kissed. More deliberate than the first time. Much more complicated.
I wasn’t sure who led us to stumble across the room and onto the stiff sofa, and it didn’t matter. I didn’t know how I ended up with my knees on either side of his hips, my hands running through his hair, damp and smelling of unfamiliar soap.
I let myself get lost in it and my focus narrowed down: his lips—his hands—my skin. Just like it had after the bomb in Jerusalem: live-survive-escape. Just like after my mom—
Screams. Thundering of a stampede of footsteps out of the room, but too late. The metallic smell permeating that room, hands slick with blood.
The memory broke and I was left blinking at Stellan’s concerned face.
I pushed away. Stupid. What did I expect would happen if even thinking about kissing him triggered it?
His eyes shuttered. He dropped his hands from where they were tangled in my hair. “It’s okay. I’ll leave.”
I couldn’t even pretend. That’s how much of a lie it would have been. “No. Don’t.”
He rested his hands by his sides, his face wary, confused. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I rubbed both hands over my face. “I don’t know. It’s stupid.”
He gestured for me to go on.
“All the stuff I told you earlier. It doesn’t just make me feel weird about Lydia and Cole and my mom . . . It’s all tangled up in you. Us. Not that there is an us. I don’t mean—” I felt myself flush. This was a ridiculous conversation to be having anytime, but it was especially mortifying while I was straddling him. I continued in a rush, “Just the first time we did this, it was only a few days later—” I shrugged helplessly.
He linked his hands on top of his head and leaned back into the sofa. “Are you saying you think our kissing each other that night had something to do with what happened?”
“No. Of course not. I mean, not exactly,” I said, because he was right. That was crazy. “It’s just that if I’d been paying more attention those days”—I tried to explain—“or if I’d let my mom persuade me to leave the Circle . . .”
“Is this why—I thought—” Stellan’s hands moved tentatively back to my thighs, his thumbs making circles. “When we kissed at the Melechs’. Or when we were dancing, or anytime I hold your hand. You tense up. Is it because you associate that with . . .”
So he’d noticed. Of course he’d noticed.
I shrugged. But then I whispered, “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.”
He looked off into the dark over my shoulder. “I’ll stop kissing you if you want. It doesn’t mean I have to leave. We could just talk.”
My fingers clenched in his shirt. My nails were ragged, one of them torn at an awkward angle. Every t
ime I moved my left arm, my shoulder burned. I was exhausted. I should just go to sleep. I shouldn’t want to do anything that made me feel this panicky. What I should want and what I did want were annoyingly at odds right now. “No,” I said in a tiny voice. “Don’t. Please.”
His lips twitched up. “So are you using me for some kind of desensitization therapy, then?”
“I don’t know.”
The look in his eyes was still complicated, but he didn’t resist when I pulled him to me by the shirt and kissed him again. It wasn’t long until the bad memories started knocking against the place where his lips touched mine. I pulled away. The corners of the room were all shadows, too heavy for the single lamp to extinguish.
Stellan’s hands rested on my waist. “Kuklachka—” He caught himself. “Avery.”
“It’s okay. I know you don’t mean anything offensive by it. I kind of miss it.”
His eyes sparked. “Kuklachka,” he breathed again, lower and rougher.
“I’m sorry. It’s stupid. I know us kissing didn’t actually cause anything. It’s just—”
“It triggers something in you. I know. It’s not stupid. It’s . . . inconvenient.” He ran his palms down my arms. “Can I propose a theory? I wonder if you think you shouldn’t be doing this and that is what’s causing this reaction.”
“What do you mean?”
His thumbs stroked my palms. “I mean, it’s okay to feel the things you were talking about earlier. Grief doesn’t just mean sad. The anger at your mother, the guilt—it’s not wrong. It doesn’t mean you’re betraying her. It’s okay that you were thinking about things other than her when it happened, and it’s okay that you are now. It’s normal. It’s even okay to feel . . .” His eyes fell to my lips. “To feel good.”
I found myself shaking my head. I hadn’t felt anything near happiness or peace since my mom died, and for good reason. I couldn’t just go on like normal, pretending everything was okay when nothing would ever be okay again. Who pictured their mother dying while kissing a boy and wanted to keep kissing him anyway? There was obviously something terribly wrong with me.
“Or maybe I’m wrong and it’s just an association. In which case—” He looked around. The side table between the sofa and the bed was within reach, and he poured tea into the little silver cup. He took a sip. And then he pulled my mouth to his.
Mint. The taste of it was stronger on his tongue than the scent of it was. Surprisingly sweet. As thick as dessert. I deepened the kiss.
“Think about mint tea instead,” he murmured when we paused. I could feel all ten of his fingertips through my leggings.
“What?”
“Make a new association. When you think of kissing me, think of mint tea instead of . . . other things.”
“You’re planning to do this often enough we need a new association?” I whispered.
He traced the curve of my hips. “If we’re ever in public again, we might have to kiss occasionally. It might as well not be painful for you.”
I rolled my eyes, but pushed away anyway, self-consciously. “We’re destruction, remember? I don’t think mint tea will change that.”
“Our blood may be.” He took another sip of the tea, set it down. “This is not.” He kissed the corner of my mouth lightly. “This is not.” A kiss on my jaw, on the opposite side. “When you think of this—” He pulled at my bottom lip with his teeth, and I let out a shaky breath. “You will no longer think about ruin and grief. Now it will be here. This room. Mint tea. Incense.”
I breathed in the sweet, spicy scent; every one of my senses shivered at the heat of the tea and the cool of the mint on his lips. When the screams echoed in my head again, I tried to ignore them. “So this is how you get over something?” I whispered.
“No,” he said, suddenly serious. “And at some point we’ll get you better help than I can be. But while you’re in survival mode, you do what you can.”
A door slammed in the lobby—real this time, not in my head—and we both startled. I knew I wasn’t the only one who needed more help than a few kisses could be.
“I’m scared of it happening again, too,” I whispered, watching the door, watching him. The tension in his jaw when he’d first showed up here tonight had come back. “I was so afraid Elodie—and it would be my fault. I’m scared all the time.”
He blinked a few times. I could tell I’d hit a nerve. “I know.”
“I hate this.”
He drew my face back around to him. “I know. Let yourself not think about it right now.”
“I don’t think it works that way.”
“Maybe it could, just for now, if you let it.” He reached to the table again. Instead of sipping the tea this time, he dipped his little finger into the plate of pastries, tasted it. “Honey,” he said, pleased.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what?”
“Why help me?” I said awkwardly. He had plenty of his own demons, as I could see. I didn’t know why he’d want to come near mine. “There’s no border crossing to ruin here.”
I understood him showing up at my door. I understood me kissing him, him kissing me back. It was all a part of this strange, shifting push and pull of attraction between us. It was becoming increasingly less clear-cut, but I still understood it. I didn’t understand all this unnecessary kindness.
He leaned his head against the back of the couch. “I suppose I like making you feel better.”
I looked down at us wrapped together. “I admire your sacrifice. Very noble.”
He nodded gravely. “I take my job seriously, even if it’s difficult.” Just like my own teasing, it was a little shakier, a little more lost than the words implied. “Really, I think helping you makes me feel better. So what I’m saying is it’s selfish in every way.”
“Well, if it’s helpful . . .”
He grabbed my hips and pulled me tighter to him. “Thank you for your sacrifice, then,” he murmured, nuzzling into my neck, and I almost giggled.
Maybe the flashbacks were because I thought I shouldn’t feel happy. And maybe I kind of thought that was true. But that didn’t change the fact that I wanted this. I did. Everything had felt so terrible lately that maybe he was right and I was allowed just a tiny bit of something that didn’t. And the past few hours had been notterrible. He had listened to all the troubling things I was thinking and didn’t look at me like I was crazy and never once did anything well-intentioned but infuriating like suggest I leave this quest to someone else for my own good. Plus, doing this right now gave me something to concentrate on besides sadness and fear. And yes, it just felt good.
His T-shirt still had creases from the store running down the front. I traced my finger down them, felt his chest rise to my touch. Rather than letting it trigger a memory that led down an ugly path, I made how warm and solid and alive he was tether me to the here and the now. Not all over the world, not in Paris on the day my mom died, not earlier in the tomb. Now. This room. Safe. At least for the moment.
Stellan dipped into the dessert again, then picked up the plate to hand it to me. Instead, I took his hand. I pressed the pad of his finger between my teeth, felt the honey thick and sticky on my tongue.
His eyes went dark. He set down the plate. Then he dabbed honey across my mouth and took my sugared lip between his.
“Honey,” he murmured roughly against me, “and mint. Let that be all this is.”
He took another sip of tea and I drank in the sweetness. Another, and I arched against him as his lips tingled coolly at my collarbone. I worked on thinking only about the way this felt, cozy, hazy, almost peaceful in the dim room, his thumbs ghosting across my hip bones and mine sliding under his shirt.
And maybe I didn’t want us to need each other, but I needed this. I let myself sink into it, sink into him. And slowly, softly, as sweetly as the honey on his tongue, everyt
hing else fell away, and I let myself—for tonight at least—not feel bad about feeling good.
CHAPTER 17
In the morning, I woke up alone and staggered sleepily out of my room. Elodie was already in the lobby, drinking what I could tell from the scent wafting from it was thick, sweet mint tea.
I blinked at the pot for a second. That association thing was supposed to work in the other direction. Kissing means think of mint tea. Not mint tea means think of—
“Are you just going to stand there?” Elodie said.
I sat, hugging my arms around myself. If I was going to feel like this every time I smelled mint, that would be seriously inconvenient.
“Feeling all right?” I asked Elodie.
She rolled her eyes without looking up from the newspaper. “Yes, your miracle blood has rescued me from death’s door.” She glanced up, then did a double take. “Oh really?”
I surveyed myself, alarmed. My clothes were wrinkled, but so were hers. She certainly couldn’t tell what I’d been up to last night just from that. I relaxed. “What?”
Elodie rummaged through the bag at her feet and pulled out a makeup compact. She tossed it to me with a smirk. “Go look in the mirror and do something about that, if you want. Nothing to be embarrassed about as far as I’m concerned, but you might disagree.”
I knew I hadn’t been sleeping well, but were the circles under my eyes that bad? I clicked on the light in the bathroom, and—oh.
There was a dark purple bruise the size of a quarter at my collarbone. When I pressed on it, it was tender. I was certain it would taste like mint and honey.
• • •
It wasn’t like it had taken long to pack up this morning, so I sat in the hotel lobby, picking at the breakfast buffet: a bean dish with flatbread, cheese, eggs, and sliced tomatoes and cucumbers. We’d be leaving shortly. It was possible we could have gotten on a commercial flight from Egypt—the borders weren’t as strict here, and the Circle might not be watching as closely as they would have been out of Israel. But we didn’t want to risk it. Luc had sent one of the Dauphins’ planes for us, and it would be here in a couple of hours. This way, we wouldn’t have to show passports leaving Egypt or arriving in France, and there would be no record of where we were.
