“‘Best part of the season we’re in,’” I read off an orange index card. “Oh! Stepping on the crunchiest leaves! I haven’t done that since I was a kid.”
We race around the quad, looking for the biggest, driest oak and maple leaves we can find.
“Sweet-tart,” Marcus calls. “This one’s all yours.”
“‘Sweet-tart’? That’s fuckingadorable. Go, go. Step on the crunchy leaf, sweet-tart. Kit-kat.”
In the end, we crush it together, Marcus filming the two of us as we laugh so loud you can’t hear the crunch of the leaf at all.
“Is it wrong to be laughing right now?” I ask, my voice raw, as we make our way back to the residence halls for the next task.
“It’s not wrong,” Simon swears. “It’s necessary.”
“Two omegas have gone missing.”
“And so, we search for them—or those drastically more qualified than either of us search for them. And we worry and we mourn, but kit-kat, if we don’t go on living… Look, I don’t know. If there’s no joy, then it’s all darkness. All despair. And if it’s all despair, what does any of it matter? So… so no. It’s not wrong to laugh.”
“Really?”
“Cross my heart,” he swears.
I take his gloved hand in mine, lean into him just enough to bump shoulders with him, and smile up at him. “Then thank you. For giving me a reason to laugh.”
In the spirit of trying something new, Simon grabs his skateboard from the dorms, and I pretend I don’t see black horns in the distance while flicking through the pictures we’ve already taken.
He emerges, board in hand, casts a slowing spell on it, and helps me step up onto it.
I wobble and his hands go around my waist, and saints, standing on the skateboard makes me just tall enough that I could lean forward and press my lips to his. His breath catches and his gaze darts to my lips and then back up to my eyes and… and I fall, ass-first right off the skateboard and into the frost-damp grass. He helps me up, but the moment is gone. I gamely try skateboarding one more time for the video, wheeling my arms and letting out little yelps as I scoot just a few feet on the slow-moving board. Simon and Marcus, meanwhile, laugh their asses off at me.
“You do better then,” I tell Marcus, and roll the skateboard his way.
He doessomethingwith his feet, flipping the board in the air and landing on it with perfect grace. He putters around on the spelled board, and I scowl at him.
“Okay, um, ‘something no one else knows about.’ Man, that one’s kind of tough.”
“It’s not,” I say quietly, and lead the way across campus to the crumbling ruins of the old temple, buried deep in the campus woods.
“Luca and I came here once,” I murmur, carefully stepping over the cracked stone threshold, taking care not to slip on the moss as I venture inside. Even hundreds of years later, the temple is suffused with magic, every stone, every mote of dust, every shoot of grass springing up through the foundations. Old windchimes someone hung outside the temple tinkle lightly in the autumn breeze.
I beckon and Simon stoops under the broken door frame to follow me.
“Whoa. I had no idea this place was out here.”
“Yeah. It was built before the academy was—one of the earliest parts of Marmora’s settlement. It’s pretty cool, right?” I cast a magic light to banish some of the gloom of the damp temple and carefully trace it over the cracked stone ceiling until I find it—the crystal prism that sends the light of my magic glittering in tiny rainbows around the small temple.
They catch in Simon’s glasses and when I turn, the awe on his face is enough to make my heart thump hard in my chest.
But it’s me he’s looking at, the way the prismatic rainbows catch in my white-blond hair and fall across my face. He steps close and I’m glad Marcus stayed outside because I’m sure—so absolutely sure—that this is when Simon Monroe will finally kiss me.
He drops his head to mine, just as he did before, but it’s a promise he gives me, not a kiss.
“Juniper, I swear to all the saints, I will always be here for you, and I will always, endlessly try to give you reasons to smile. To laugh. No matter what. Forever and always.”
I shut my eyes tightly against the prick of tears and nod fervently. For the second time today, he brushes away my tears. His touch, featherlight and so tender against my skin, is as much a promise as his words, an unspoken admission that he knows that everything will get worse before it gets better. Knows I’ll need him. He presses the sweetest kiss to my forehead, lips lingering against my skin, and I break, falling into his arms, into a tight embrace that doesn’t make me smile or laugh: it gives me strength.
We stay like that until Marcus pops his head into the temple to check on us, and as we’re making our quiet way back through the woods, we decide to take the loss on the challenge to “make a promise”—because what just happened is between us and only us.
We make quick work of the rest of the challenges. Simon was right and we easily find the most scandalous drawing in a library book Bitsy left open right in one of the aisles. Simon cocks his head, staring down at the tangle of limbs and bodies rendered in fine lines of ink. “Shit,thisis what packs get up to?”
