SIMON
Baz doesn’t say anything.
I meet his grey eyes. As hard as it is. As hard as they are. As much as I feel like I don’t have the right.
“I’ve just been waiting for you to get tired of me,” I say. “Since the day I lost my magic. Before that, even. I never thought—” I shake my head. “I never really thought this would work.”
Baz is shaking his head, too, just slightly, like he’s quietly rejecting every word. “I thought you’d go down fighting if you believed in something . . .”
He’s right, he’s always right. I look him in the eye. “I never believed in us.”
BAZ
I didn’t think there was anything left that Simon could say to hurt me . . .
I was wrong.
I laugh and wipe my eyes. “Seven snakes,” I say. “What a thing to hear. Fuck, Snow . . .” I bring my arm up and laugh into my elbow, sobbing.
Simon’s mouth is hanging open. “No,” he says. “I mean . . .” He reaches out a hand but doesn’t touch me. “What I mean is, as soon as I turned against the Mage, I leftthe map.It was like I walked right out of the story everyone had been telling about me. I started losing, and I didn’t stop. You felt like something I grabbed on my way down—but I never believed I’d get tokeepyou. I didn’t get to keep anything . . . What did I get tokeep,Baz?”
Simon is crying, too, but he doesn’t wipe his tears. Just licks away the ones that hit his lips.
“I didn’t try,” he says, “because I thought it would be worse if I tried. I told myself to enjoy it—you—while I could. But that didn’t work. It felt like eighth year again, waiting for the Humdrum to attack. The waiting . . . I’m not good at waiting.”
I rub my nose against my sleeve. I nod. I know.
“I just wanted to, like,make it happen,” he says. “To like, charge into it and get it over with. Whenever we were together, I just wanted to get it all over with.”
I laugh again. The hits keep coming.
Simon shoves his hand up into the front of his hair and pulls. “Stop,” he says. “I know how that sounds. That’s not how I mean it!”
“No.” I shake my head. “I know. I know how you mean it. It still hurts.”
He looks in my eyes. He’s hardly looked away. “Baz”—his voice is small—“do you think it would have been different if I’dtried?”
SIMON
He doesn’t answer me. I shouldn’t have come here. Nothing I’ve saidchangesanything, I was a berk to think it would—
But I haven’t been able to get it out of my head, what he said. That he was the first thing I ever gave up on.He’s right.I didn’t give up on Agatha—I waited until she gave up on me. I fought whatever the Humdrum threw at me. I did whatever the Mage asked of me. I gave myself wings because I couldn’t stop fighting.
Why haven’t I ever fought for Baz?
What would happen if I did?
Baz takes a step back, into the living room. His hand is on the door. And he’s looking at me the way he did in my flat last night, like I’ve got a knife in his heart, and I’m holding it there.
Then his head falls forward a bit, and he tilts it away from me. “Come on,” he says softly. “Come in.”
BAZ
Snow doesn’t move.
I back out of his way. “Come on. We don’t have to do this in the hall.”
He steps over the threshold and seems to wait for me to change my mind. I close the door behind him, so he has to come all the way in. (I still might change my mind, I don’t know.) Then I sit at one end of the sofa and wave my hand at the other end.
