He wanted to mate with me? He’d tear me apart, he’d break me. It would be like being with an animal.
“You have the wrong woman.”
I said it. My voice was small.
He arched an eyebrow, looked at me with the kind of mild amusement that was threatening to bring me, trembling, to me knees.
“You have the wrong woman.” I said it again, slightly louder, the same way you say a wrong number on a phone call, slightly louder the second time. “I—there’s been some kind of—I’m a skating coach. I’m a junior coach. At a rink in a strip mall in Spokane Valley, Washington. I coach four-to-seven-year-olds onSaturdays. I do the cone weave with them. I make sure they don’t fall on the rentals. I’m—“
I made my hands stay at my sides. They wanted to come up.
“Whatever you think the Veil pulled across into your—your hall, your—whatever this is—it isn’t—I’m not— “
My voice cracked.
“Please, Maria, it’s alright.”
I closed my mouth.
His face did not change. He stood, with the white-and-gold falling perfectly around him and he held my eyes.
He let me have my silence, just for a beat.
Then he spoke.
“I know exactly who you are, precious one. Rest assured.Exactlywho you are. I know how you spend your Saturdays. I know your dedication to those children. I have, in fact, watched you your whole life.”
I do not know what I had expected him to say. It was not that.
“I’ve seen you skate. Years ago.” He was very quiet. “Before your fall.”
His expression didn’t change. No pity.
“And during it, of course. I saw your fall. Saw your pain, your sadness. I watched,” he said with feeling, “the diminishment of your pride.”
He did not flinch. He did not soften. He said it as a fact about me, and the saying of it did not, in his mouth, belittle me.
“I have remembered your face since. Every inch of it.”
I believed him.
It sat in me like swallowed ice. The cold of it moved down the line of my throat and settled under my sternum next to the other low private thing that lived there, and the two of them met.
Pride did not move.
He stood three paces off, in his white and his gold and his deep wine red, and he watched my face.
“You do not believe you belong here,” he said.
It was not a question.
“I don’t,” I said, my voice small.
“And yet,” he said, “the Veil opened to you. The Veil does not open to women who do not belong. The Veil opens to my opposite, and you are mine.”
I bit the inside of my left cheek.
“I don’t know what that means.”
