“If only they tasted as good. I suppose they do to bees.”
I’m still so dizzy, but it’s happy-dizzy, and not the cold, hard dizziness that comes when the Dark Legion marches in. Just thinking of them, I shiver. No. Not now.
“Daisy and I used to stand outside Huyler’s candy shop and fog up the windows with our little smashed noses until Mrs. Huyler ran us off.”
Someday we’ll be able to buy whole buckets of those candies, Stella!I recall Daisy saying. A memory. Not her voice here, now. Daisy never got that bucket of candy. My mood turns suddenly sad.
Pax seems to sense this. He snaps the head off a black-eyed Susan.
“Pax! You can’t just pick the flowers in Central Park!” I hiccup again.
He looks around frantically as if he’s searching for a copper. “Are they coming for me? The flower police? Tell them it was a crime of passion!”
I suppress a smile. “Pax.”
“Stella. Honestly. I believe no one in the city of New York appreciates these flowers more than you.” He reaches forward and gently tucks the black-eyed Susan behind my ear. My heart thunders. “Is it truly a crime if you love them so much?”
I find my breath again. “If that’s your argument, then if wedeeplylove the Hope Diamond, our thievery isn’t a crime, right?”
Wild-eyed, Pax grins at me. “Maybe I do love that diamond more than anyone does, Stella. That’s a whole lotta diamond to love!”
I laugh, and Pax continues, “Not guilty, your honor, on account of my deep and abiding adoration of that particular gem.” He clambers to the top of a large boulder and extends a hand down to me to help hoist me up. His hand in mine—snick!
“You have to feel that,” I blurt, looking at our hands as though they are two magnets clicked in place.
“Of course I do.”
Oh, merde. I said that out loud.
We sit on the cool rock and watch the stars spin awake. “It looks likeThe Starry Night,” he whispers. I don’t know what that is, so I don’t press the point.
I blow on my cold fingers. Pax grabs my hands and rubs them between his, warming them. He lifts his face into the night. I inhale deeply, grass and flowers and sheep in the meadow below. And a warm, adorable boy at my side.
But he’s only here because of my gift. If I didn’t have Sight, would his side of the magnetism exist?
“Fleeting, all of this,” I say. I look at his face, search for his shadows. They are always there.
“Fleeting?”
Crap. I can’t stop talking. Stupid whiskey. “Fleeting. It sounds much more romantic thantemporary, doesn’t it? What… this is?”
“Romantic, yes.” He gently squeezes my hands, now thawed from his touch.
“It could be more than temporary, though, couldn’t it?” I ask. And then I do it. I whisper, “I’d like it to be more than temporary.”
He shifts onto his side, props his head on his fist, and looks at me deeply. His silver eyes shine like the stars above. A thrill chases through me. “Here’s what I think is romantic: Do you ever think that maybe no other soul has ever been here, in thisexactspot?”
Does he mean metaphorically, like our partnership, or literally? This spot, on this boulder? Because if he means the latter, then no. Never. Why, all I have to do is open my hearing a little wider, and:
My tribe was called Lenape. We hunted wild turkeys here. Then the Dutch hunted us.
My church was here. A whole community of people from Africa, free and happy before the city took our homes to make a park.
I made one dollar for every day I worked building this park. Ten hours a day. Backbreaking work, chiseling that rock to make it look natural.
I wish I could be so audacious as to think I was the first person to step foot somewhere. That I was a pioneer. I’m wiser than that.
But he’s looking at me so intensely:us, here, now. Pax seems to need this, the idea that he’s a discoverer, a trailblazer. He needs to be seen. And itisa romantic notion. So I smile and say, “You are indeed the first Pax Princip to sit alongside a Stella Bohdan, right here on this spot.”
