Momentarily, she stares as thoughI’mthe apparition, like she’s not the one split in three between girl, ghost and goddess.Short blades of grass scratch at my pants, moved by a soundless wind. Something is reaching, moving. I can’t explain it, and I’m done trying.
There’s no way I’ll risk going insane trying to understand this haunted patch of land.
The most delicate laugh leaves Francesca, soft as a whispered spell. “So much for unreliable narrator.” A long moment passes, in which I’m dissected with drunken reverence. “You’re far too present, writing yourself in each time you dig deeper. And maybe that’s the problem, isn’t it?” Her voice dips. “That my story won’t let you stand outside of it.”
If that isn’t the most accurate fucking assessment of us, I don’t know what is. Whatever version I pretend to tell myself, it doesn’t matter; her story already has its claws in me. This is participation, implication—the furthest thing from mere observation.
I don’t bother brushing the dirt from my clothes when I stand, and I heft the abandoned bottle in one hand. “You’re right, but if you think that makes me malleable, then you’re more tipsy than I thought.” Lights flicker in the distance where celebration churns on. “At the risk of sounding like a medieval general cosplaying as a poet: enemies are closing in. You know it. I know it, and I’ll shape this story however I fucking have to.”
The smile she gives me is too dopey, too blinding for tonight and its events. “You don’t even have a pen, kind sir,” she singsongs, giggling into the crook of her arm.
Utterly ridiculous.
I scoff, bending close enough until my shadow falls over her and my hand is outstretched. “You’re my pen. Now up, Baskerville. Before someone sees you grinning at me like that.”
That foolish, brilliant smile lingers, and her palm grazes mine, testing the temperature of something she’s learned to avoid. Warmth floods my hand as she takes it—too warm forsomeone who claims to be dead. I lift her carefully, easing her weight towards me, and the earth seems reluctant to give her up. The rest of her heat bleeds into me when she stumbles, forehead meeting my chest. I brush dry leaves from her hair and pull her neckline back into place.
She nestles closer, breath ghosting through my shirt. “Thought you said I don’t have a fixed font. That I keep changing every time you look. Called me a typeset nightmare and everything.”
“I did, but that doesn’t mean you’re completely illegible. Just that sometimes I have to squint.” My palm settles against the base of her spine, and I push her into step with me. “C’mon, let’s get you home.”
But she stumbles awkwardly, turns, grabs the bottle from me to place it on the ground—and suddenly she’s back against me. Chin propped on my chest, looking up from beneath heavy lashes. “No, wanna kiss.”
Those words from her cherry-stained lips nearly send me headfirst into cardiac arrest. “You’re swaying.”
“Not when you’re holding me.” Dimples pop, and the first crack of my composure is embarrassingly audible in the stillness of the night. “We’ve only kissed twice, y’know?”
“Terrible injustice, that is. And you don’t think twice was enough?” I probe because Francesca smiling at me like that makes me stupid. She shakes her head, tipping onto her toes, and I exhale a tired laugh. “You’re drunk.”
She pouts in response. “Twice. Then you became very princely and polite—didn’t even bring it up. Y’know, I literally thought I hallucinated it.” She laughs to herself at that, slipping her small hands beneath my suit jacket. “Like a fever dream or something. Like I wanted it so badly that I made it up.”
I’ve replayed those kisses more times than I’m willing to admit, but she’s looking at me like I’ve wronged her in someundeniable way. As though she’d done her piece and waited for my move, and I went and missed it. Always missing things.
I should’ve… I don’t even know what.
Girls at university, at all those events, didn’t give a damn if I never circled back. Maybe I’ve spent too long with those who didn’t care to dissect my bluntness. Maybe I just assumed Francesca would know, and I feel dumb for not realising that silence doesn’t have meaning to everyone.
That it can read like indifference.
“It happened,” I tell her. “But you almost died, and I wasn’t about to rank your life above a kiss. I’m sorry. I’m—well, I’m not good at this.”
Every word bleeds truth, and I’m hoping she believes me because the truth always manages to sound clinical when I say it.
She leans back just enough to look me in the eye. “Good at what?”
I test the words in my head first before attempting them. “At doing what’s expected. And…knowingwhat people expect, I guess.” I think of my mother and my brothers and then add with a frown, “End up hurting people because of it sometimes.”
The second I’ve said it, I decide I can’t look at her. And she—fuck, this girl—just slides her palm to my jaw. That gorgeous grin is back on her face when she says, “Oh, so you’re basically just an average man?”
A quiet laugh bursts from me, only fuelling her amusement. “That’s so fucking offensive?—”
“You didn’t let me finish,” she drags her words, poking my chest. “Difference is that you’re a good one. I can’t be mad when you chose my safety over yourself. Not a lot of men do that…” She leans in on a whisper. “Especially the hot ones.”
A good man.
Never been accused of that before. At least not by anyone who’s not my mother, and she’s inherently biased. Good is aperfect press release in my family. Good is the sort of reputation that my father buys. It’s not…me. Doesn’t even sound like it should belong to my name or fit on my shoulders. I can try, though—pretend even. Enough that it becomes practice, and practice turns me into something good.
Then I remember I’m willing to kill if my motivations reach their breaking point. If I unlocked that door. I would wrap my hands around the spine of my father’s cruelty and snap it. A husband. A father. The king. Three faces on the same pathetic man, and I would strip him of them all. I would personally staple Edmund’s hands to the Sheffolk family genealogy record, underline his name in red and add a warning to not resurrect him because he wanted to fuck his cousin. And pity the man who strangled her when I catch up to him.
