“I was good for you last night!” he exclaims. “I pleased you well. You should want to give me a braid!”
Are those tears in his eyes? It can’t be. It has to be a trick of the light.
“Why else are you helping me get back to the palace if you don’t want me?”
I’m staring blankly at him, I know I am. But I’m so lost right now. Completely flummoxed. I have no idea what is happening. Words are flying around. We appear to be fighting, but no one has told me the rules.
Mabon draws in a big, shuddering breath that shakes his chest. He looks distraught. Devastated. Like he is teetering on the very edge of losing his shit.
My heart beats frantically against my ribs. I’m being an idiot. I don’t need to understand. I don’t need to know why he has got so worked up. I just need to do this simple thing he has asked. It clearly means a lot to him, and that’s all that matters.
“Okay,” I say.
He moves swiftly and sits on the floor with his back to me, between my spread legs. He releases his hair and hands me the shoelace, then hunches his shoulders and hugs his knees.
All of his glorious hair is loose and free before me. I know this means something. It’s important. Symbolic. It signifies a shift in whatever is between Mabon and I. But I am unable to fully decipher it.
Carefully, I pick up the silken strands of his hair and start twisting them into the best approximation of a plait that I can manage. As I work, his shoulders slowly relax.
Okay, this hair stuff is clearly very important, and I think I’m starting to get it. In that horrible duel I witnessed, Osian’s opponent undid his hair. I’m beginning to understand that it was a big deal.
So, I think when the Resistance took Mabon’s hairpins, and he couldn’t stop them, in Mabon’s mind, it was like he lost a duel? Is that what’s going on?
If I run with this theory that someone undoing your hair is bad, then someone doing your hair up, must therefore be good. And that’s why Mabon was so keen for me to do this.
Keen? Really? Bile rises in my throat. He wasn’t simply keen. There were tears in his eyes. He was shaking. He was on the verge of breaking down. Mabon was desperate. Why am I downplaying it by using the word keen?
His words echo around my mind.‘I was good for you last night. I pleased you well.’
Oh lord. Heaven help me. Please tell me this isn’t true. Please tell me that I am putting together these puzzle pieces all wrong and coming to the incorrect conclusion.
I’m the one who is shaking now. My fingers are trembling so hard it is difficult to tie off this shoelace.
“Mabon,” I croak. I cough and try again. “Did you…was last night, so I’d do your hair?”
Why am I asking? I don’t want to know. Denial is wonderful. Ignorance is bliss. I need to learn to keep my mouth shut.
He stiffens. “No.”
It’s the worst denial I have ever heard in my life. The tone is all wrong. The inflection is off. He sounds like a toddler trying to deny that he got into the cookie jar. Mabon is a horrible, terrible liar.
As the meaning of his feeble lie sinks in, a cold, dark horror floods my guts. It churns and starts to flow along my veins. It freezes and paralyses me.
While I’m immobile, Mabon runs nimble fingers over his new braid. Then he exhales. And slumps. He rests his head on my thigh and wraps his arms around my leg.
His actions make me want to whimper, but my throat is so tight I can’t breathe. Conflicting, opposing emotions are crashing through me. Ice and fire raging against each other and birthing steam that is clouding my mind.
Here is Mabon. Being all small. Needy and soft. Clinging to me. Upset. Hurt and traumatised. By events that are all my fault.
Yet he used me. His passion last night was false. A means to an end. He thought he needed to seduce me so that I’d partake in this hair tying ritual. And the pain of this knowledge is immense. It’s tearing my soul apart. But it is no less than I deserve.
I don’t want to be used. I don’t want to be manipulated. But Mabon is sitting here on the floor hugging my leg as if his life depends on it. All his carefully built walls are down. No, not down. Scrub that. Broken. His walls have been broken. By my actions.
I force my frozen lungs to work. My hand reaches up and strokes the top of Mabon’s head as if he is a cat. He melts into it, and my heart pounds at his reaction.
What a fucking mess this is.
Chapter thirty
