“Then, why me?” I asked, his words not making sense based on what we had just done. Even though we didn’t have sex, it still was something. Or had that only been a small piece of him too? And if so, would he ever be willing to give me everything?
Julian’s chest caved. He hung his head and looked down at me, resting his palm over my stomach under my tank. The stars cast little light over his flushed ivory skin. His wild black hair was damp from the heat firing between us earlier, a glow gleaming off the tips down to his hairline. I waited with a held breath for him to tell me that what he did with me was a mistake because he was intoxicated from Mina’s drink, and I was only a strange girl he’d found in the woods at the right time.
“Because when you look at me, you seeme. It’s different with you. You make me forget the mask is even there,” Julian said, telling me, instead,hewas the strange thing in the woods.Hewas the freak, not me. “I’m going to break this curse,” he added in a whisper. “I have to.”
For a long time, we sat in the train car listening to the night under a comfortable silence between us. I’d always imagined being with someone as strange and weird as me, and yet how beautifully bizarre the story would be, falling for Julian Blackwell—one of the monstrous things who made the woods their hiding-place, yet looked at me as if I were a mosaic masterpiece. There was no doubt I was equally terrified and intrigued by him, one of the cursed Hollow Heathens.
Terrified … because he could very well destroy me.
But I was sure to be destined for a grotesque love my grandchildren could tell their grandchildren about, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, wasn’t I? The kind of stories Marietta had told me. The kinds of stories written about creatures everyone feared the most, yet loved painfully without limitations. Because freaks like us deserved the strange and the weird. A love so severe.
“I want to show you something,” Julian said.
I lifted myself off him before he popped onto his feet. The train car moved when he jumped down with a loudthump!over the earth, then turned to grab my waist. Once my feet hit the ground, Julian was off, running through the woods. My eyes fixed on his magnificent form, the stars outlining his silhouette as it passed under the cascade of moonlight. I took off after the Heathen who wore his soul, chasing him wherever it was he wanted to go. Julian’s hands slid over the skin of the trees as he glided through the naked forest, allowing it to soothe him, guide him, nurture him.
We chased each other in the deep dark woods until he guided me to a tree he called “the upside-down, half-heart tree,” where he lifted me and sat me in the bend. I clung on to the white bark of the trunk as he gazed up at me, wonder passing through his silver irises as I smiled down at him. Julian tilted his head to the side for a moment, then looked up at me through thick and heavy lashes.
Afterward, we balanced over fallen logs, and Julian walked backward with such stealth, his hands behind his back, eyes on me.
His eyes were always on me.
“Do you like fixing cars?” I asked him, carefully putting one foot in front of the other.
“Yes,” his answer laconic.
I jumped off once my feet reached the end of the log. “Why?”
He thought for a moment, looking up at the canopies. When his eyes settled back on mine, he said, “I don’t really know why. I just do, I suppose.”
Then we laid under the moon where he showed me the constellations, pointed out Orion’s belt, the dippers, and told me the story of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. We did all these things before we stumbled upon a hidden greenhouse. Glass windows of all sorts, shapes, and sizes made up the walls, and behind the glass, vibrant deep and dark colors reflected off the night. White flowers bloomed from vines that wrapped around the pillars, and I followed Julian around the structure.
“What’s this?”
Julian rubbed a petal between his fingers. “When I was a boy, Phoenix and I built this for my mother. It’s her night garden. She owns the apothecary in Town Square, and this is where she grows her medicine,” he explained, but I already knew of his mother, Agatha. I’d met her on my first day.
“Ipomoea alba,” he said and plucked a white flower from the vine and turned to face me. He swiped my hair from my face and tucked the flower behind my ear, his eyes sticking to mine. “There’s an entire world that wakes after nightfall. The moonflower only opens up under the light of the moon.” My breath held in my chest as his fingers lingered on my cheek, as if he were telling me so much more. As if there were more meanings planted between his words.
Together, we spent our time in a way the rest of the world had forgotten. Unhurriedly, slow. Free to be real. Free to roam. Free to wander. We kissed in the tree’s shade until the sun rose, and he kissed me once more after, neither one of us wanting our night to end.
On our walk back to the funeral home, where my scooter was parked, the threatening sun spilled into the pre-morning darkness. The building to the funeral home was in our line of sight, and Julian grabbed my hand and turned me to face him.
“Hey.” He squeezed my hand with the same look he’d given me plenty of times before he was about to rip my heart from my chest. I turned my gaze away, unable to look him in the eyes. The poison had left his system, and he was about to take it all back. “Fallon, I want to keep it real between us, I do,” he said, determined. “But I’m a private person. What happens when we’re together, I don’t want anyone else to know. Even if things were different, if I weren’t cursed, and you weren’t … friends with Sacred Sea. What happens between us, I never want to share it with anyone else.”
“I don’t wanna share it with anyone else either,” I agreed. “So, what do we do from here?”
“We keep it in the dark.”
Chapter 17
Fallon
Monday groanedthat morning in her chair, face down over her desk and arms sprawled out. “I feel like a failure today. I have no motivation to do anything,” she groaned. “And I think I made a few mistakes last night.” I looked over, and she turned her head to the side and opened one eye, squinting. “Why areyousmiling?” I lifted my shoulder. Her head popped up from the desk, papers sticking to her wet cheek from the drool. “Oh, you’re bad. Kane? Did he slip you the tongue last night?”
I almost said no, but swallowed down the word. Monday would only probe until she got all the dirt, and I couldn’t give her any ideas that it was someone other than Kane. Even if Julian hadn’t said not to tell anyone, I wouldn’t. What happened the night before was ours—only ours—and I wanted to keep it that way too.
I shrugged again, giving her no explanation or reasoning.
Monday peeled the papers from her cheek and raised a brow. “Fine, I see how it is. I have a body to embalm, anyway.”
