Kill Me Softly

by Sarah Cross

  Viv sipped her Coke, her eyes hooded and dismissive, like she was used to this. “You know, if I had to break your curse, I would kill myself.”

  “I would, too. I need something to feel up if I’m fated to be stuck with one girl for the rest of my life.”

  “There are ladies present,” Freddie said—his silver voice taking on a sharp edge.

  Finally, Blue threw a piece of toast at Rafe. “Keep your curse talk to yourself, Wilder.”

  Rafe snatched the toast off his lap, folded it like a taco, and ate it in two bites.

  “You don’t get to complain,” Rafe said with his mouth full, jabbing a meaty finger at Blue. “That’s one problem you’ll never have—being stuck with one girl. You can have as many as you want. Just keep going on to the next.”

  Blue glared at him, coldly, steadily—with genuine loathing.

  Then another one of their friends arrived, diverting their attention and keeping Blue and Rafe from fighting.

  “What’s all this curse talk?” Mira murmured to Freddie.

  “Just a joke,” Freddie said, flashing an unconvincing smile.

  Mira pouted at him. It was obvious there was something he wasn’t telling her.

  The new girl took a seat at the foot of the table, between Mira and Freddie, and when Mira looked at her—really looked at her—she forgot why she’d been pouting at Freddie in the first place.

  The new girl was the most beautiful girl Mira had ever seen.

  Glossy, straight, black hair hung to her waist. Her doe eyes were long lashed, so dark they were almost black; her skin gleamed like silk. Her face was so lovely that just looking at her made you happy, and she even smelled pretty—like honeysuckle. There were no butterflies floating around her head—but there should have been.

  Freddie introduced them. “Mira, this is Miss Layla Phan. Layla, meet Mira.”

  “Hi,” Layla said. Her voice was gentle, sweet—but there was something fierce in her expression when she looked at Rafe.

  “You don’t want to sit by me?” Rafe called to her with a grin.

  “No, I don’t,” Layla said. “I wouldn’t sit by you if every other seat in the room was on fire.”

  “Ouch.” Rafe winced, then rebounded with a sleazy smile. “That would hurt me if I believed it. You know you’re curious to go for a ride.”

  “About as curious as I am to get syphilis,” Layla snapped.

  “He meant a ride in his car,” Freddie clarified for Mira, looking like he desperately hoped she was dumb enough to believe him.

  “His car has syphilis?” Mira asked, feigning shock. When Freddie blushed, she said, “I know that’s not what he meant.”

  Freddie nodded, abashed, and rubbed his hands over his face. “You’re right, I’m sorry you had to hear that. He will—be reformed, eventually.”

  “He is such a tool,” Layla muttered. Her hand was trembling against the table. “I would love to just shoot him with a hunting rifle when his transformation day finally comes.”

  “Transformation day … ?” Mira prompted.

  Layla’s big, dark eyes blinked at Mira and she seemed to remember where she was. “Oh. Nothing. Never mind. Hello. I forgot I don’t know you. I … exaggerate. A lot. I don’t even own a rifle.”

  “You can get one at Walmart,” Viv said. “Charge it on my card. I’ll use my coma as an alibi.”

  Mira focused on eating her pancakes, even though she was starting to feel sick. What was wrong with these people? Was everyone insane?

  Next to her, Blue seemed edgy. He was breaking his bacon into pieces. His fingertips glistened with grease.

  “I’m starting to think it was a mistake to introduce you to the whole gang,” he said.

  Rafe was still hitting on Layla; Layla was fighting with him, insisting that fairies didn’t turn good people into monsters, they just exposed the monstrousness that was already there; and Freddie was doing his best to play peacemaker, or etiquette coach from 1850, or whatever he thought he was doing. Henley was watching the group from outside, leaning against the window, smoking a cigarette. Viv was sawing into an apple tart with a masochistic grin on her face.

  “No wonder you’re such a freak,” Mira said finally.

  “Oh yeah, I learned it from watching them,” Blue said with a faint smile.

  “I want you to know,” Mira said, “that whatever your intentions are, even if you think they’re good, I didn’t travel all the way here to be shuttled around and babysat by crazy people. There are things I need to do here, and I intend to do them.”

  “Fine, just stay away from our casino.”

  “No,” she said.

  Blue turned fully toward her then; grabbed her wrist—hard, like he was trying to intimidate her—and she flung her syrup-sticky butter knife at him and twisted free from his grip. Causing a scene, of course. Sometimes you had to.

  She sprang to her feet. “Don’t tell me what to do. And don’t manhandle me unless you want to be dismembered. This is your last warning.”

  “Will you keep your voice down?” Blue hissed.

  “No, I won’t,” she said, getting louder on purpose. There was a syrup stain the size and shape of a gash on Blue’s chest. People were staring at them, but oddly enough, no one seemed all that surprised by her outburst—and she didn’t care if they were. Anger blended with the sugar in her body and made her feel nauseous. She just wanted to go. So she grabbed her bag and, for the second time in two days, stormed out.

  “Always popular with the girls, Blue,” Viv said. Mira heard a chair being pushed back like someone was about to chase after her, and then Blue’s voice saying:

  “Forget it, Freddie.”

  “But she’s upset,” Freddie said.

  “She’s a big girl; let her play with fire if she wants to.”

  “Nice ass,” Rafe said.

  And then the door swung shut behind her, mercifully silencing the peanut gallery; and Mira was plodding through the hot parking lot, her flip-flops squishing like they were about to melt on the steaming asphalt.

  Henley looked up at her approach. “Need a ride?” he asked. He didn’t look particularly enthused about giving her one.

  “No,” she said. “But thanks. Have fun with the crazies.”

  He snorted. “I wouldn’t call it fun.”

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  Henley nodded, raising his cigarette to his lips, and she set off toward the Dream.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MIRA STOPPED IN ONE OF THE Dream’s glitzy bathrooms, changed into wrinkled—but normal—clothes, and dug some defrizzing, detangling serum out of her bag and rubbed it through her hair. She still looked like a mess, but at least she wasn’t wearing pajamas, and her hair was behaving a little. Then she went to the front desk and asked for Felix Valentine. Her heart was thudding like crazy. She wondered if the check-in woman could tell.

  When Felix showed up, he looked even better than she remembered. His eyes were brighter, his smile came faster.

  “Hey, Mira,” he said.

  She started babbling immediately. “I don’t know if this is a good time. If it’s not, that’s okay. I would’ve waited for you to call, but your brother broke into my room this morning and made me leave, and I—I thought you should know.”

  “Wait—say that again? Blue broke into your room?”

  “One of his friends busted my door and they forced me to leave with them.”

  “I can’t believe no one told me about this,” Felix muttered. “Give me a minute.” He got out his phone and stepped away to make a call. She couldn’t hear much—the lobby was bustling this time of day—but she could tell by his face that he was yelling at someone. When he came back, the irritation was gone from his face.

  “It’s taken care of,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”

  “Thank you,” she said, scuffing one flip-flop against the floor. Suddenly, she felt shy. She wasn’t used to people getting angry on her behalf—but she kind of liked it.
It made her feel like she mattered to him.

  Felix ran his fingers through his hair and cocked his head to look at her. “I need to get out of here for a while. You want to go searching today? I’m all yours if you want me.”

  She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

  They started their search in the largest cemetery in Beau Rivage, then moved to the most picturesque. Eventually, the sweltering heat chased them indoors, into a mostly empty Vietnamese restaurant, where they sat at a rickety black table for two hours, ordering iced coffees and summer rolls and dishes Mira couldn’t pronounce, while caffeine and his undivided attention made her giddy.

  Felix had changed before they left the Dream—out of his suit and into jeans and a plain white T-shirt that made him seem like a different person. He wasn’t intimidating when he tramped through graveyards in the heat, getting just as sweaty and dirty as she was. He’d brought sunglasses, which she thought was unfair, since the bright white of the sun was making her squint; and at the restaurant, she swiped them and put them on, propped her chin on her hands, and dared him to steal them back with her best impassive diva face.

  He raised an eyebrow at her. “I’m not fighting you for those. Those are my cheap sunglasses.”

  She scrunched her nose at him, channeling Myrna Loy in The Thin Man—and he laughed.

  She drank so many iced coffees and looked at him so long her blood buzzed. Her heart wouldn’t stop racing.

  In the car—which was black, with tinted windows—Felix played jazz. Mira knew some of the songs because she’d danced to them, and Felix admitted that it was his mother’s influence. One of the only things about her that had stayed with him.

  “It was all she ever played when I was a kid,” he said. “She’d give me a puzzle or something, turn on some jazz and get dressed up like she was going out, just to sway around her room for an hour. Music was her escape, I guess—from me, from my dad. Not that he spent a lot of time with us before she left.”

  Mira asked about his father—what was he like?—but Felix seemed reluctant to talk about him, so she let it go.

  They sped past gorgeous old homes, deserted brittle buildings, stretches of brilliant white sand. She told Felix about her upcoming birthday, how she’d felt like it was time to stop wishing and finally do something. Then how nervous she’d been that she’d made a mistake … and how grateful she was to have his help.

  They ended the day in an old, sad graveyard by the sea. Most of the headstones were cracked, the mausoleums had collapsed, but you could still read the inscriptions. Mira had actually been relieved not to find her parents’ graves in this broken place.

  They were sitting side by side on a stone bench, in the shadow of a tree that dripped with Spanish moss, when Mira took out the photograph she’d brought. The one she kept beside her bed at home, and whispered good night to before she went to sleep.

  She held it by the edges, so as not to smudge it with sweaty fingers.

  “This is a picture of my parents,” she said. “If you want to see.”

  “Of course I want to see.”

  She handed the photograph to Felix. It was a portrait of her parents on their wedding day. Her mother wore an antique gown with a lace collar that crept all the way up her throat. Her father looked dashing in his black tuxedo, standing with his arm around Mira’s mother, with the noble bearing of an army officer, or a knight. They were both so beautiful. So happy.

  “Adora and Piers,” Felix said, repeating the names she’d told him earlier. “They look good together.”

  “They were perfect together,” she said. “I mean, I imagine they were. When I think about what they might have been like.” Mira dipped her head, embarrassed. “I … make up stories about them. It’s kind of weird.”

  “It’s not that weird. I think about the past sometimes—how I wish it had been different. There are things I’d give almost anything to change.”

  “Like what?”

  He laid the photo on her lap; lifted the stolen sunglasses off her nose. “Driving you around isn’t enough? You need to know my secrets, too?”

  Mira laughed. “Of course.”

  Felix squinted at the sky, serious now. Leaves rustled above them, casting indistinct shadows that shivered across his face. “How should I put this? A lot of times … I’ll think I know someone, that I can trust them. And then I find out I’m wrong. And I wish I could undo ever meeting them.”

  She watched him carefully as he tried to explain. She felt like she was seeing something he didn’t want to show her, and she wanted to be worthy of that.

  “I’ve been burned a lot,” he said. “It makes you—after a while, it makes you feel stupid. I keep telling myself—” He tensed his jaw and went quiet, like he was debating even saying it.

  “What?” she asked softly.

  Felix sighed, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and glanced away, toward the sea. “I keep telling myself that love isn’t something that destroys you. Because I don’t want to believe that it is. That it has to be. But every relationship I’ve been in has ended in disaster. So it feels like … love destroys you. Like that’s all it does.”

  Mira wondered how he’d been betrayed. What a girl, or girls, had done to break his heart.

  And she told herself that she would never hurt him like that.

  Not that she would have the chance.

  Felix stood up, like the conversation was over. “Sorry, Mira … I didn’t mean to unload on you like that.”

  He went and stood at the edge of the graveyard, amid broken bits of stone angels, and stared out at the water. There was a crack in him, in the person he wanted to be. It was a crack she recognized, because it was in her, too.

  Mira sprang up, the photo fluttering from her lap, forgotten. She tiptoed toward him, like it was a dance with very precise steps, and rested her fingers on his back. Lightly, just so he’d know she was there.

  “It won’t always be that way,” she said, trying not to sound naïve. She knew she was a girl he could trust. If he wanted to …

  The water glinted like glass, the sunlight breaking it into glittering shards. The endless heat, the moisture, and the heavy perfumes of summer made her aware of the physical, of every sense—and weakened the allure of daydreams.

  She wanted to wrap her arms around him, press her cheek to his back, and hold on tight. But she couldn’t make that leap. Not without some sign that he wanted that. It would be too humiliating if he pushed her away.

  Felix was quiet so long she didn’t think he was going to answer her. But then he turned, and her arms slipped around him before she could think about it—and suddenly he was holding her, too, very naturally, and he looked down at her, like he was trying to see who she really was. One side of his mouth turned up, so briefly it could barely be considered a smile—but at that moment, it was everything.

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  Felix dropped Mira off at the Dream, told her to charge dinner to his room, and gave her a key to his suite. He had to get back to work, but he promised he’d get her a new room later—one with an intact door, where Blue wouldn’t bother her. Until then she was free to hang out at his place.

  Now she lay on Felix’s bed, leafing through an old fairy-tale anthology she’d found on his bookshelf, and daydreaming—remembering the way his arms had felt around her—while breaking apart the giant chocolate chip cookie she’d filched from the buffet.

  The book of fairy tales was in bad shape. The cover wriggled loose from the binding whenever she moved it, the table of contents was missing, entire stories had fallen out and disappeared. But flipping through it, she found most of the famous tales, and many that were new to her.

  “Cinderella.” “The Red Shoes.” “Beauty and the Beast.” “The Juniper Tree.”

  Mira had seen most of the Disney fairy-tale movies, and had vague recollections of owning a Grimm picture book or two, but fairy tales hadn’t been a big part of her childhood. Elsa and Bliss had plied her w
ith classic novels from an early age, so she’d gravitated toward those—Frances Hodgson Burnett, Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder—and had only scattered memories of kids munching on candy houses, “can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man,” geese that laid golden eggs, glass slippers, and sparkly transformation sequences.

  Tonight, she’d chosen the book because it seemed an odd thing for Felix to have—a fairy-tale anthology surrounded by business tomes. But the more she read, the more the tales absorbed her.

  In “The Juniper Tree,” a boy who was decapitated by his stepmother came back from the dead to murder her. Cinderella’s stepsister chopped off her big toe in an attempt to fit into the too-small slipper and fool the prince. And “The Little Mermaid” was downright tragic. Every step the mermaid took on land was agony, as if her feet were being cut by knives; and in the end, the poor girl failed to make the prince love her, and was faced with the choice to either murder him on his wedding night or dissolve into sea foam, soulless and dead.

  Love and death. Death and love and transformation. Mira read for hours, transfixed.

  It was one minute after midnight when the door clicked open. Mira heard someone moving around the suite with an absolute lack of stealth, and then a muttered:

  “Asshole. Where are you?”

  So not housekeeping. And not Felix.

  It was Blue.

  Mira sighed and climbed off the bed to confront him. They nearly collided in the doorway.

  “Stupid girl,” Blue said, his lip curling.

  “Miss me?” she said.

  He made no attempt to move away from her. He stood so close she could feel the heat radiating off his body. He’d changed his clothes since this morning and was wearing a dusky purple shirt with an anatomically correct heart on the chest.

  “At least you’re not naked,” he said.

  “Because if I was, you’d pass out from the glory of it.”

  “No,” he said. “That is not why. Where’s Felix? He chewed me out on the phone over you. He must like you—for all the wrong reasons.”

  Mira rolled her eyes. “Maybe he doesn’t approve of your bad behavior. You know—breaking into my room, assaulting me, kidnapping me? I suppose that didn’t occur to you.”