“I can’t go out in this!” I gasp in horror, looking at myself in thefull-length mirror. The dress is constructed mostly of a pale blush chiffon, transparent and close enough to my body that I look practically naked. The skirt and bodice of the dress are embroidered with beaded vines of jet-black, crawling over my breasts and hips, the only thing giving me even a semblance of modesty.
“You look almost good,” Faith says.
“Was that a compliment?” I ask in mock horror. The dress is borderline obscene. The mere sight of it might have killed Viscountess Bolingbroke.
“He’s going to faint when he sees you, how about that?”
She slides open a velvet-lined drawer, selects a matching tiara of black diamonds, and places it on my unbound curls. “There.” She smiles, then pulls out an aquamarine beauty and puts it on her own head. I raise my eyebrows at her, and she shrugs. “I’m not entirely altruistic. Let’s go.”
The revel tonight isn’t held in the ballroom, but under a massive tent in the gardens. The court magicians put it up today while I was napping, and I awoke to the sound of snapping sail flags outside my window.
Inside, the grass has been covered with a mosaic of carpets, and a rainbow chandelier illuminates the hedges and flower patches in long, crawling shadows.
I find my sister as soon as I walk in. She’s standing near the edges of the party, but people still orbit around her.
She adjusts a tiara made of teal-blue dragonfly wings and blinks twice at my dress. “Are you trying to kill the poor boy?”
“Only lightly maim,” I shout over the music.
For once, I let the faerie music take me away on its current. I’m floating in it, lost in the rhythmic drum, so unlike the stodgyquartets back home. All around me are writhing limbs and bodies, seeking nothing but friction and escape.
I used to judge humans who got swept away in this and danced their feet bloody, but I understand now how good it feels to remove your brain from your body.
Someone presses a drink in a delicate pink glass to me and I down it without thinking.
I might drink another. Time gets so fuzzy here.
The revel goes blurry, my head spinning, or maybe that’s my body. I’ve been dancing for so long.
There are flashes of clarity. Faith with her arms slung around my neck, grinning. Marion, asking if I’m ready to go yet, and me laughing in her face.
Someone’s hands are on my hips, I don’t know whose.
I come to, slouched on a silk love seat. It’s set against the edges of the tent, hidden from the chaos by a series of geometric hedges.
There’s a hand on my thigh. The gauzy layers of my dress are hiked up above my knee, so the palm covers an expanse of bare skin. I watch in fascination as the long fingers leave dimples on my skin. They press nearly hard enough to bruise, as if holding themselves back from trailing higher.
My mind is swimming, like I’ve been dunked in a glass of iridescent faerie wine. I am nothing, no one, just a bubble floating to the top of the glass.
I follow the line up from the fingers, to the wrist, to the tan forearm, flexing with veins and muscles, until I finally reach his face.
Emmett’s eyes are heavy, his full lips half-open, wine red, with a fleck of gold at the corner. The look on his face is absolutely desolate.An earring in the shape of a crystal flower pokes through the waves of his hair, curling gently around his flushed ears.
He lowers his mouth to my neck and I sigh.
“You’re touching me,” I say in awe.
“I am,” he replies, sounding just as surprised as I am.
“I thought you didn’t want me anymore.”
His lips brush over my sensitive pulse point and I moan shamelessly.
“I want nothing but you.” His voice is low, nearly a growl. “Every moment I am awake, there you are, in my head. Even in sleep, there is no relief. Visions of you torment me in dreams. It’s nothing butyou, you, you.”
The blood in my veins has been replaced with honey. My head swims with it, all sticky sweet and pulsating. I look deep into Emmett’s eyes and in them I find a desire identical to my own. My own dark mirror. I suppose in a way, that’s what he always has been to me—my most base desires, all my sins, reflected back to me in the shape of this brutally imperfect, beautiful boy.
His chest rises and falls like he’s been running; his face is so open, so wrecked. I can’t believe I was ever angry with him. Why was I angry with him? I don’t even remember.
