Ares is asleep on the floor beside me, his head resting againstthe edge of my mattress. The ache in my chest sharpens. I don’t know how long he’s been there.
“Hey,” I say softly.
He wakes with a start, his eyes focusing on me, the intensity of his features almost too bright to look at. “Chanel?” He makes a movement as if to hug me, then thinks better of it. “I... I’ll go call the nurse. Does anything hurt? How do you feel? Do you need water? Fruit?”
“I want... lip gloss,” I say.
I don’t expect him to have any, but he produces a tube of lip gloss from his pocket. It’s the same cherry one I always use. “Here,” he says immediately.
“You remember how to apply it for me, right?”
He nods. I thought he was gentle last time, but now he’s so careful with his movements that I’m tempted to laugh at him. Then, staring down at the IV strip on the back of my hand, he says, very quiet, “I didn’t realize what Long Ge was planning, with the fire. I was so scared. By the time I found you, I thought it was too late.”
Long Ge.So it hadn’t been Ares who’d started the fire; it had been Ares who had rescued me from the burning house. I hadn’t bet wrong, after all. “You came for me,” I say aloud, just to confirm it, to prove it wasn’t a dream.
“Of course I did,” he says.
The TV is turned on behind him, the news playing at a just-audible volume, more background noise than anything. But familiar images flash over the screen: my childhood house in its former glory, contrasted against a smoldering pile of ruins,the walls of the nearby buildings stained black, the dead lawn littered with shattered glass.
My throat tightens.
Then the scene changes to Long Ge in handcuffs, being dragged away by the police. He looks like he’s lost his mind, or maybe his soul; his eyes are wild, his teeth bared as he shouts something inaudible.
“He’s in prison now,” Ares tells me quietly. “He’ll be there for some time; he did a bunch of illegal shit on top of making minors work for him and burning houses down. They’ve freed all of them now, the minors.”
“Okay. Okay, thank god,” I say.
His expression darkens. “But he deserves worse than prison.” He’s staring down at my collarbones, and only when I follow his gaze do I see the burn mark peeking out from under the gauze.
I inhale. “Oh.” It’s about the size of my palm, too high to be covered up unless I wear turtlenecks for the rest of my life.
“I asked the doctors about it,” he says. “It’ll get better, but... it’ll leave a scar.”
“Okay,” I repeat in a daze, my head buzzing. A scar. A permanent mark. My perfect image, irrevocably changed. I should be freaking out about it, speed-dialing the top surgeons in China right this second, and yet... maybe it’s the fact that I almost actually died, but it doesn’t feel like life-and-death, the way it would have a month ago. “Well,” I say weakly. “At least prom is already over. I don’t have to worry about how it’ll look in prom photos.”
“For what it’s worth, you won,” he says.
“What?”
“Prom. I saw the results. Even though you weren’t there, you had the most votes. You were crowned prom queen—as you deserve,” he adds, his voice soft. “But I’m really sorry you had to miss it. I know how much it meant to you.”
It does. Or it did. But prom feels like such a small thing now, so silly and frivolous and insignificant. Even the news of my win doesn’t give me the rush of validation I’d always imagined. It’s just something that happened, a past life, the concerns of a girl who hadn’t almost been burned alive.
“They also voted for me for prom king,” Ares says.
I bite back a small smile. “Congratulations? I mean, not that it matters to you.”
“Anything that matters to you matters to me,” he tells me simply, and he’s about to say something else when the door bursts open.
“Chanel?” My mom rushes in, still wearing the same clothes I last saw her in, which is so rare that it’s all I can focus on for a moment. My mom refuses to even wear the same pajamas two nights in a row.
Ares stands up and steps back from me with what seems like a superhuman level of self-restraint, letting my mom take his place by my hospital bed. Then he excuses himself quietly from the room, glancing over his shoulder at me with every step on his way out.
“Thankgodyou’re okay,” my mom says, her face ashen. “I still can’t believe it—”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I whisper. Because even underneath theoverwhelming relief that she’s alive, that I was the one caught in the fire instead of her, there’s the guilt gnawing at my insides. I should’ve been more strategic, more careful. I should’ve prevented the fire from happening at all.
“What are you talking about?”
