Iris pictured a small towheaded boy with gray eyes, surrounded by the tall, imposing figures of the Silver Council. How good could the Council have possibly been at helping out with algebra homework? Tending to skinned knees? Even the perfect unicorn poster boy must have taken a spill off his bike at some point, right? Who had he come crying to?
She had the disconcerting feeling that the answer was no one.
“Would you do that with your kids?” she said.
“No,” Keith said immediately. “No, I wouldn’t—I couldn’t. But my parents—”
He couldn’t seem to complete the sentence, and Iris understood why. He was too smart not to know how fucked-up his parents’ decision had been, despite the good intentions behind it, but he was also too loyal and respectful to criticize them for it.
She was more than willing to do it for him, but she made herself cool it. Yes, he’d had a much harder, colder childhood than he should have, but they hadn’t even known each other for a whole hour yet. She had no way of knowing if hewanteda virtual stranger, mate or not, talking about how his parents had messed up.
If nothing else, what she’d asked had apparently made him realize that on some level, he already knew his parents leaving him behind had been a bad idea. She didn’t have to push it.
Instead, she found herself wanting to take the pressure off.
“I have an older sister,” Iris offered. “She still lives here.”
“Parents?”
“They moved to another unicorn village in Colorado, a couple of years ago. My grandma lives there—my mom’s mom—and she’s almost ninety now. My mom wanted a little more time with her.”
They had visited Iris after the accident, but they hadn’t stayed very long.
“Your face,” her mom had kept saying. “Oh, Iris, your poor sweet face. Your beautiful smile! Why couldn’t you justlisten to us?”
She felt that awful about-to-cry feeling building up in her throat, and she moved to head it off at the pass. There was nothing worse than crying when she couldn’t smile to balance it out. She hated only being able to show how she was feeling when she was feeling awful, so she kept everything as bottled up as possible.
And that’s the strategy that’s made me the well-adjusted person I am today.
She didn’t know where this sudden streak of dry humor was coming from. She hadn’t cracked a joke—even inside her own head—in a long time.
She changed the subject. “Where do you want to stay while you’re here?”
Keith frowned. “I’m not sure.”
He had a sweet, worried frown that was as endearing as someone else’s smile, and she hated herself for noticing it. If she started letting herself like him, then it would really hurt when he inevitably learned she couldn’t live up to his standards.
Keith said, “I used to have a bedroom here, in the housing annex. Or someone on the Council might let me sleep on their sofa.”
Iris shook her head before she even realized what she was doing. It was bad enough to imagine tiny child Keith in the Silver Council’s clutches and their icy, comfortless living quarters. She couldn’t change how he’d grown up. But he didn’t have to be therenow, especially since it was obvious the idea made him uneasy.
“Why don’t you just stay with me?”
Some emotion flickered over his face too quickly for her to read it.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Iris said brazenly, even though she absolutely wasn’t. Did she really want to invite Keith into more of her life than she had to? Wouldn’t that just keep her on edge the whole time, waiting for the other shoe to drop?
Her house wasn’t exactly what a tribute would probably expect. It still felt a lot more like the old Iris than the new one. Once he was there, it would get even easier for him to figure out that she wasn’t the person he thought she was.
“Or you could stay with my sister,” Iris said. She wished she’d thought of that a couple seconds earlier. “My house isn’t exactly sprawling, but Seraphina has plenty of room, and I’m sure she’d be happy to have you.”
Well, she was sure that if Seraphina wasn’t happy to have him, she would never be gauche enough to actually say so. She didn’t know if anyone, unicorn or not, was ever ecstatic about a surprise houseguest.
And Seraphina would have a few questions for her, starting with why on earth Iris hadn’t told anyone that the Council had found her a match.
“I think,” Keith said slowly, “that if you really don’t mind, I’d like to stay with you. I’ll try not to be a bother. But I’d like to ... get to know you.”
