“What?” I stare at him, stunned. “I don’t think you understand what I’m saying—”
“I understand exactly what you’re saying. I don’t care if the world burns to the fucking ground, Rosabelle. You’re going to eat first.”
Nazeera is watching us, her eyes wide with alarm. Carefully, she says, “I think I should page Warner.”
“Good idea,” says James. “Invite him to join us for dinner.”
“Wait, is this a joke?” says the other one, the man with the dark hair and the familiar blue eyes, the one who was never formally introduced to me. He looks panicked. “Is this—What the hell is happening right now?”
“This is not a joke,” I say, turning my attention to him, hoping someone will listen to me. “I need to get back to the Ark immediately—”
“We can discuss it over dinner,” says James, before abruptly leaving the group to head down the hall.
“Bro, what the hell—”
“An hour isn’t going to make a difference if we’re all going to die anyway,” James calls over his shoulder. Then, “Nazeera, can I grab one of your jackets for Rosabelle?”
“Yeah,” she says, shell-shocked. “But—”
“I think I liked you better when you didn’t talk,” says Winston. He crosses his arms, frowning at me.
“Me too,” I say, looking away.
The quiet truth I’m struggling to admit is that, despite my urgency to return to the Ark, if I don’t eat something soon I’ll be useless to everyone.
I’m feeling dangerously faint.
Floaters push in and out of my vision. I’m experiencing a general, heightened debility that scares me, and my efforts to marshal self-possession are more tenuous than ever. James’s effect on me has grown only worse with time. I used to be able to summon greater measures of composure in his presence, but now—
Now, I have no defenses against him.
I still haven’t processed the fact that I fell asleep in his arms. There’s no precedent for it.
It’s incomprehensible.
When I was forced to imagine my life married to Sebastian, I could hardly tolerate the idea of holding his hand, much less sharing a bed with him. I don’t enjoy proximity to other people in general; I don’t like to be touched. I can’t even trust the affection of my own sister. That I surrendered so easily to James, that my body yielded to him without hesitation—with implicittrust—
Something dangerous is happening to me.
I’ve broken; a jammed lever has released a dam inside of me and I don’t know how to repair the damage. I can’t even see James now without feeling breathless. It’s hard enough to look at his face—the juxtapositions of hard and soft, the balanced arrangement of his beauty—but there’s something visceral and potent about simply being in his orbit. I’m getting addicted to the relief I experience when I see him. I’m getting distracted by the need to touch him; to be touched by him. What I feel for him now is worse than perilous. It’s lethal. It’s scaring me.
I need him to stay away from me.
Something soft lands at my back and I look up to find that James has draped a big, puffy pink jacket over my shoulders. I try, once again, to pull myself together.
“Please, James, listen to me,” I try to say, but when he draws closer I feel unsteadier right away: I can already feel the tremble in my right hand intensifying, the tremors rocking up my arm, and I make a fist, trying to contain it. “I—I have to get back to the Ark,” I force out.
“No,” he says. “You’re in time-out.”
Winston chokes.
“What?” I blink, my eyes pinging between them. “What does that mean?”
“It means we’ll discuss this over dinner,” says James, moving toward the hall again.
“But I have to get back as soon as possible,” I call out to his retreating back. “And I can’t leave without the vial,which means I’m going to need—”
“The vial?” says the blue-eyed man. “What vial?”
