Hope flares inside me, wild and hot.
“But how can I? Before now…before today, it was easy to think, to pretend, it was just us.” He gestures between us. “The games we played, that they were just that; two people, irrespective of the rest of the world. It was foolish of me to think, to forget, that it wouldn’t last, it couldn’t.”
“Itisjust us, right now,” I say.
He shifts, glances around, then back at me. “Do you know what you’re asking?” he says, a little hoarsely.
“Yes,” I say, stepping forward. “I’m asking you to stay because I want you here. I want to kiss you, and I want to fall asleep with you, and I want to wake up with you still there. You, that’s all; I want you.” And then, tomorrow, my shop will fill with my parents and Honey and the sorcerer and the hundred curious folk who always seem to appear at catastrophic moments, and the sorcerer will break the curse, and I’ll leave and never know what it was thatIcould have done to break the curse. I’ll get to live the rest of my life, wondering what my heart’s desire really was, and whether I’d have found it eventually.
“If you don’t want to stay,” I say, “of course that’s fine. But if you do…”
“If I do,” he says, very quietly, “and I stay, and you leave tomorrow, then I lose even more than I am already going to.”
I close my eyes. Of course, he’s right. If he cares, if he has so much as a single warm feeling for me, then staying with me one last night will only make it hurt more when I leave. He doesn’t have to be in love with me to be unhappy to see me go.
I sit down on the stairs, the step I think of ashisspot, where he’s lounged a hundred times, where we almost kissed, and put my face in my hands. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t even think…I just wanted you to be here with me, and I didn’t think about how it would affect you.”
I hear him move, feel him sit beside me and put his arm around my shoulders. I lean into him and try to calm myself; this is enough, isn’t it? This is enough to take away tomorrow. I’ll enter into some sort of courtship eventually, marry someone somewhere, have a whole life outside of this bookstore, this moment, someday. But the memory of the way it feels right now is at least something I’ll be able to carry around. It’s not an entirely nice feeling, but some of it is.
“It’s not the worst thing in the world for you to practice telling people what you want, you know,” he says, lightly. “You’re very good at accommodating yourself to everyone else’s needs. Even here, where you haven’t got anyone’s needs to accommodate yourself to, and you certainly don’t need to, you put everyone else first anyway. I don’t think those fools over at the inn have the first clue, really. It’s probably quite revolutionary of me to admit that I include your parents among their number.”
Despite myself, I snort a little. How can one feel like the lowest worm in the eight kingdoms and still be able to laugh?
“And I’m awfully glad they brought a sorcerer,” he continues. “Though I’ll be fairly put out if they turn out to be young and attractive. I was hoping they’d arrive with something unexpected and deeply strange. Isn’t there meant to be some fellow who was cursed to be a dragon two hundred years ago? The one who sits on top of a mountain and dispenses advice?”
“He doesn’t practice magic or divination,” I say, although myhead is still in my arms, crossed over my knees, and my voice is a little muffled. “Just tells people what they want to hear.”
“He wouldn’t fit in here, even if he could be tempted off his mountain. And what if kissing you brokehiscurse? By all accounts, he’s quite happy being a sage old lizard on top of a mountain. Then you’d still be stuck here, the wise old dragon would be back to being a boring old nobody, and your mother would still be furious.”
I smile into my arms and will myself to sit up. If he’s teasing me, perhaps everything is fine and we can pretend I’m not the world’s biggest ass for one last night, and he can talk nonsense for a while longer and then sneak out with a pocketful of dust bunnies.
He still has his arm around me; we’re very close, close enough now that I can smell his faint, human scents under the smell of seawater. “Bash,” I say, sitting up to look him in the eyes, taking a deep breath.
“Tandy,” he says, taking my chin gently between his fingers so I can’t turn away, “I can tell you’re about to apologize to me for something absolutely ridiculous and I’m going to warn you, if the words ‘I’m sorry’ come out of your mouth, I will leave.”
“I, uh,” I say, and stop. The heat from his fingers is scalding. I wonder if he’ll leave fingerprints.
“Go if you have to. Don’t go if you don’t want to,” I finally say. “I understand if staying is too hard, but”—I swallow—“I want you to stay. If you want to.”
He smiles, a little wanly. “Have you enjoyed a single one of those kisses you’ve had planted on you?” he says.
“I, uh,” I say, a little taken aback. “No.” I pause. “Maybe one of them, a little.”
“I think we all enjoyed that one. But my point is: I would like to kiss you,” he says, and I feel heat creep into my cheeks. “But Iwon’t, because you deserve to kiss someone you actually want to kiss.”
“I pretended it was you,” I say, and that, I realize for the first time, is the truth. “When Calla kissed me.”
“She’s probably a better kisser than I am,” he says.
“But I’d rather kiss you,” I say, my heart beating so wildly in my chest I can hear it roaring in my ears. I’m shaking.
“Kiss me and I’ll stay,” he says, very softly.
I kiss him.
Chapter 45
Seven kisses, each one of which was memorable in some way, although only one resulted in bodily harm. But the eighth kiss is somehow, also, my first kiss; not only because it’s one that I initiated rather than one that I endured, but because it’s the first one I’vewanted. As far as first kisses go—and this is now my eighth first kiss, after all—it’s not much. And yet, I know I’ll remember it long after the memories of all the others are but shadow and dust in the dim corners of my mind. I lean forward and close my eyes, inhale, and press my lips against his, and for a long moment we’re still; his hand is still holding my chin, and I’m still sitting beside him on the stairs. And the moment I start to worry that I’m supposed to be doing something, he moves his hand to cup my cheek, and I tilt my head, and I press my lips a little harder into his. I don’t have the first idea what I should do next, but I very much want to be closer; I lift my hands and slidethem up his arms, dimly aware that it would be a tragedy not to be touching him.
