The rideshare driver, idling on the curb, tapped his horn, and Griffin turned his neck slowly. “A minute,” he snapped, not even trying it in French this time. She knew now that he usually did—determined, halting efforts, twelve-weeks-of-therapy efforts to prepare for this trip. He always waited until someone spoke back to him in English to concede.
She looked at him. Mind over matter. Her better self said,It’s pain. What you are looking at is pain.
She’d suspected he had it. Had observed him enough to know that he had the sort of scars that felt alive to him, like a lot of physical medicine and rehabilitation patients who sustained and managed complicated scarring, or nerve injuries beneath burns. But she hadn’t been thinking of it. Not tonight. Not in that little world they’d been in. Not in her wounded pride, her embarrassment.
So when he looked back at her, she remembered it all in a newway now:herdrifting and clutching hands,herrolling hips,herleg hitching up.
Her grabbing at his sides, when he started to pull away.
“Did I hurt you?” she said.
“No.”
But it was the most dishonestNoshe’d ever heard. A violation of everyMaybe I’ll tell youfrom today.
She could not let it go.
“Did I touch you in some way that—”
“No,” he said again, desperately emphatic, and still a lie. She thought of his last desperateNo, the honest one, the one he’d said with his mouth against her. Her mind unspooled with a thousand images of the two of them together. Not just kissing now. Naked and no reason to stop, hisNos an education for her. She would listen, learn what was okay.
“We could—” she began.
“Layla,” he said, his voice different than any way she’d ever heard it. No leaning in to that first syllable this time. He sounded so defeated that she couldn’t help but take a step toward him.
He backed away, his eyes flashing a warning.
“I am begging you,” he said, his mouth hardly moving as he spoke. Gritted it out. “Get in the car. Please.”
It was thePleasethat did it. The tacked-on, broken sound of it. He was somewhere else now, remote and inaccessible to her. Not in the world he’d brought her into for a while, not in the world they’d made together. She could see it in the way he stepped back again as she passed, more distance. He let her open the door herself, his hands never leaving his pockets. He let her close it, too, when she was settled in the black-leather back seat.
He spoke to the driver, and not to her.
“I’ll watch the route,” he said, flat and menacing, and the driver nodded in understanding.
She thought,Do you speak fae prince?which was a very mind-under-matter thing to have in her head.
So when the driver pulled away from the curb, leaving Griffin behind, she brought herself back into the world of real things. Real words. She took out her phone, and opened the translation app.
To hurt, she typed, and got back the must-be-wrongblesser.
To starve, she tried, and gotaffamer.
To kiss, she put in, with shaky fingers, and didn’t much appreciate the irony of gettingembrasser.
Embarrassed, she retaliated, and got a boring-soundinggênée.
Pain, she wrote, and mouthed the answer to herself:douleur.
Friend, she lied, watching it return what looked to her like a little fragment of something horrible:ami.
Word after worthless word, all the way back to the hotel.
And not once did she land on one that described how it felt to have had, and then lost, the touch of Griffin Testa.
Chapter Eighteen
Day four dawned too much like day two.
