Like desire.
I tried to focus on breathing. “I… I should return to my quarters, Thom.”
He smiled at the nickname, bowing his head. He clasped his hands behind his back, as if forcing them to behave. “I would have to agree.”
“I’ll return your coat as soon as it dries.”
“I’m not worried about my coat.” His fiery gaze lingered on mine. I struggled to swallow and turned away. His scrutiny and emotions tangled with mine until I could no longer tell one from the other.
I pulled his coat closer around me, sneaking back into the palace and down the servants’ wing.
Even as the ribbon around my wrist tightened, my pulse thudding against the knot, as if my very body was trying to break free.
“What’s this?”
My body jerked awake, my chest heaving as I escaped a dream that lingered on my skin like a final breath, yet another replay of the events from last night.
Events I shouldn’t have let happen.
My hands flew to my hair, pushing down askew strands. I hesitated when I saw what Anna had in her arms.
Thomas’s coat.
Disappointment had seeped into every line of her face.
“Lyra?”
The tremble in her voice made my heart crumble. “I can explain.”
She sat next to me, the jacket folded in her grasp. Her fingers etched over the embroidery that lined the pockets. “You’d better.”
And so I did. I told her everything, things I never in my life expected to tell a girl like Anna, whose sneer had once seemed permanently fixed to her face. But ever since Ella left, my roommate’s features, her soul, had begun to thaw, and I had no one else to tell.
I revealed what Thomas had done for Asha. What I had done forStephen. I shared about the agreement I’d made with him, his three rules we’d followed. I demonstrated a few of my newest magical abilities, recounted the water I’d brought almost as high as Thomas had for his peers in the spring.
And I told her about David. All of it, even the stuff I had yet to admit to myself.
“You have to end things with David,” she said.
“But I love him.” The words floated from my mouth, and I pressed my lips together.
“Hmm,” she said, clutching Prince Thomas’s coat to her chest. She inhaled the coat, which now smelled more of algae and water lilies than it did of Thomas. “Did the prince really cradle you in his arms?”
My cheeks heated, even as my lips pulled up. “Yes.”
“Why can’t this sort of thing ever happen to me?”
I laughed, and after an eyeroll, Anna joined me.
Her eyes began to grow watery
I placed a hand on her arm. “Are you alright, Anna?”
She dabbed at a corner of her eye. “I’m fine. It’s simply… my life is not going the way it was supposed to.”
“Hey,” I said, raising my hands, “If anyone can relate to that, it’s me.”
And within the privacy of a budding friendship, she told me of the pain that simmered beneath her skin, of the ache of high expectations, of the stabbing wounds that bled inside her as rejections piled up. Of her desire to be a mother, floating further from her grasp as years passed without interest from suitors.
