Before I could finish that thought, he plucked her hand off his lap and tossed it with a violence that made her slap her own body. “You fucking touch me again, and I will cut off your hand.” And then he shot up and walkedout.
Tristan followed him, but Petra didn’t even flinch. It was only once the lights came on for the intermission that she, too, rose and left without an apology or passingglance.
I didn’t move. In part because I was pinned to my seat by all that had unfolded in the span of an operatic act, and in part because if Jarod returned, I wanted to behere.
Minutes ticked by, and none of them returned. Only Amir had stayed, but I imagined it was more out of duty thanpity.
When he turned to look at the hallway behind the box, I picked up my fallen feather. I didn’t particularly want to relive an episode from my past, but I forced myself to. Jarod’s outburst might’ve been borne from guilt, but it had served to remind me how deeply I was rejecting mykind.
The walls of a drab, gray high school appeared around me, and then the muscled body of the star running back popped into my line of sight—Sean. I’d posed as a transfer student, who’d helped tutor him in order to curb his habit of cheating on exams. I’d spent several weeks convincing him that he was smart and as capable of success in the classroom as he was on thefield.
At the memory of his face lighting up after scoring his first B- without copying the answers off his friend, a lump clogged my throat, and the tears that had welled up finally spilled. I missed the girl I used to be and grieved for the one I’d dreamed ofbecoming.
I grieved for her, because I’d felt too much during this last mission, learned too much, to ever become her. I dragged both my hands over my wet cheeks, not caring if I ruined what little makeup I’dapplied.
The air around me shifted, and I knew Jarod hadreturned.
Which didn’t mean he wouldn’t eventually abandon me forgood.
His steely gaze scoured the floor beneath my chair, probably seeking out the fallen feather. When he didn’t find it, his gaze climbed up tomine.
“You didn’t leave.” Every syllablesplintered.
“You didn’t either.” Unlike mine, his tone wasstiff.
When the golden-red drapes lifted, I murmured, “I’ll never be the one to leave,Jarod.”
He turned tostone.
The lights dimmed, and he still didn’tsit.
I crimped the green tulle, trying to prepare myself for a decision I’d be powerless to overturn, trying to remember that if he left it wasn’t because he didn’t care but because he cared toomuch.
When I could no longer stand the sight of his stillness, I shut my eyes. The least I could do was not watch ithappen.
A warm hand spanned my cold fingers. My lashes pulled up slowly, afraid my skin was conjuring a touch that wasn’t there. But long fingers dusted with dark hair overlapped myknuckles.
Jarod forced my hand off the tulle and speared his fingers through mine, pressing our palms together until I could feel his brisk heartbeat through the pad of his thumb. I glanced at him, but his eyes were affixed to the stage and the progressing scene. He didn’t say a word to me throughout the entire secondact.
But I didn’t needwords.
Not when I had hishand.
Chapter 53
Petra had never returnedafter that first intermission, yet her hand stroking up Jarod’s lap had haunted my sleep and awakened me more than once throughout the night. Each time, I’d tracked the wisps of light trickling from his balcony and through the drawn curtains as they danced across the ceiling like ghosts until they lulled me back tounconsciousness.
Unlike me, Jarod had slept soundly, but I suspected it was thanks to all we’d done once we’d gotten home from the opera. Three times, he’d made love to me. The first was sweet, an apology for how he’d acted. The second brisk, an assurance of my desirability. The third, slow and unfinished—he never climaxed even though he made sure I did—a promise that there would be no end to us just as there had been none forhim.
When morning seeped around the edges of his curtains, I stopped trying to fight wakefulness and reveled in the unspoiled peacefulness of dawn, turning onto my side to study Jarod’s profile, the dense swoop of lashes brushing his bladed cheekbones, the burnt-coffee locks falling arbitrarily over his forehead, the cracked seam of his full lips parted intranquility.
I wanted to wake up to this sight every day of my immortal life, but that was an impossibledream.
How.Unfair.
A thought skated into my mind, blasting away my little misery-party. If he could see inside the guild, then he could enter it. It was far from ideal, butifI ascended, maybe I could convince the archangels to bend their hundred-year rule of no traveling out of Elysium. Within the confines of the guilds, I would raise no mortal eyebrows. Excitement began to plug all the little fissures loitering in myheart.
“Jarod,” Imurmured.
