“Then you probably shouldn’t give it to me. It looks valuable.” I hold it out through the open window, toward him.
But he doesn’t blink; he looks straight into the beating heart of my chest. “He won’t even know it’s gone.”
The warm spring wind plays against the tall grass behind him, and I watch his eyes, looking for any sign of love, for any hint that he’s starting to tumble down a dark rabbit hole into madness. But his gaze is flat, unfettered, and I don’t know how to feel. I’ve never experienced anything like it. Should I fear him… his lack of emotion when he looks at me?
How can the tulips have no effect on him? How canIhave no effect on him?
“You came here just to give me a book?” I ask.
A wisp of hair strays across his eyes. “Is that okay?”
I love the way words slide carefully between his lips, how his skin reminds me of an autumn rainstorm, dark and cloying. Maybe it’s him who’s cast the spell on me?
“Did you come for a tulip?” I ask, the mistrust and doubt creeping into my thoughts. Maybe the book is simply a ploy to get close to me, to the house and the garden, so that he can ask for a tulip, like everyone else.
But his shoulders stiffen a little, an eyebrow lifts. “I don’t care about your tulips.”
“Everyone else in town does.”
He runs a hand along his forearm, glancing up to the few stars visible in the heat-drenched sky. “They’re just afraid they won’t find love without them,” he says, before lowering his green eyes back to me. “They’re afraid of being alone.” He slows his breathing, watchingme like he’s trying to make sense of what I am. “Isn’t that what we’re all afraid of?”
A pressure forms in my throat. He’s talking about love, about loneliness, as if these are two ordinary things to be discussed by strangers in the middle of the night through an open window. But the way he says the word “love,” it’s as if it were nothing at all. A thin measure of air, a single grain of sand. Something that can be breathed in and let go just as easily. Dropped or forgotten. Meaningless.
“Not everyone,” I reply, because I’m afraid of something else…. I’m afraid I’ll only ever be lovedbecauseof the tulips.
Oak takes a step closer to the window, unfathomable green eyes piercing into mine, but his body is now tensed, like he’s ready to turn and run if he needs to—if he starts to feel something for me that isn’t natural, a deep obsession rising up from his gut. The curse spreading along his veins.
But it’s me who feels something I don’t like, a coiling need that I’ve never felt before.
“What areyouafraid of?” he asks.
I bite down against the heat in my cheeks, because I can’t tell him the truth: That I’m afraid the love others feel for me will always be entwined with the Goode family curse, that love will always be a lie for me. That it’s something I can never trust.
And that now I’m also afraid ofhim. He scares me: The way my head thumps when he’s only a few feet away. How I imagine him inching closer, how I daydream about what it might be like to feel his hand again—like when he pulled me away from the crowd at school. How I would like to know what he smells like when rain toucheshis skin, what his heartbeat sounds like in my ear, listening to the rhythm that keeps him alive.
But these treacherous thoughts can’t be real, can’t be allowed to cement in my mind, so I grip the book tighter in my hands. “I’m afraid I’ll end up like every other Goode who’s ever lived in this house,” I answer. Plainly. Truthfully.
I feel him observing every flick of my eyelashes, every twitch of unease at the corners of my mouth. He looks at me as if I am a memory—like he can recall something in my eyes. Two moments in time. Two pools of darkness and light. As if I am something he has lost but found again. A girl from one of his books.
He takes another step toward the window, and my treasonous heart claws up into my throat. He nods to the book he’s given me, my fingertips pressing deeply into the cover, holding on to it like a tether. Like it’s the only thing keeping me from drifting away into the stars. “It’s about a girl who leaves her ordinary life for an unexpected one,” he says.
“What if I want to leave this world for one thatisordinary?” I pose.
“Most people are bored with ordinary.”
“I crave it.”
He smiles, a shiver in his eyes. “?‘Second to the right, and straight on till morning,’?” he says, quoting the book I hold. “Maybe that’s your way out of here, just like Wendy.”
My heart pulses in my ears. “It’s easier for fictional characters to run away from home than it is in the real world.” I think of my packed suitcase, lying behind me on the floor, in the dark of my room. I’m almost gone. I’m almost free of this place.
“That’s exactly what someone would say in a book just before they kill the villain and flee the castle and find true love.”
I let out a tiny laugh, but it’s mostly just air. “If only I knew who the villain was.”
He smiles a little.Only a little.“I’m trying to figure that out too. And finding it harder and harder.”
My mouth falls back into place, uncertain what he means.Who is the villain of his story? Who is the villain of mine?
