Page 122 of The Witch They Fear

"I'm really surprised you came," he admits, and it's so artless that I laugh, and something in his face lets go all at once, and we sit down before either of us can ruin it.

The beignets are the size of my head like the one he offered me a couple of days ago, and there is no dignified way to eat one. We establish this early. By the time we're two in there's powdered sugar on the table, on my hands, on the knee of his trousers, and a white handprint on his shoulder.

I decide not to tell him about it because it's funny.

"You said your family came in for the unveiling," I say. I've been wanting to ask since the note. "How'd that go?"

He huffs, not quite a laugh. "About how you'd expect, if you'd met my father." He turns his cup on the table. "He flew the whole house in—aunts, cousins, the lot—and spent three days showing me off to every old name at the unveiling like a horse he was thinking of selling. My son. Thirty-one. Vane blood, naturally."

"Thirty-one?" I'd had him pegged older—not in the face, in the way he carries himself. Although he blushes like he’s younger.

"Practically an infant." The smile's rueful. "Barely past the age they still expect you to turn into something. My father's two hundred and forty. To him I'm a draft he hasn't finished correcting." He picks at the wax paper. "He had a whole list of what I'd be by now. I'm not currently any of it, so the visit was three days of him being disappointed in flawless manners."

And the voice in my chest comes back.

It's been gone for days—since the afternoon it surfaced to ask, in its sideways way, whether I was healing, and didn't, that day, sound a thing like Emric. I'd half let the theory go.

Filed it under wanting something too much to trust it.

You don't have to perform, it says now. Soft. Pulled tight at the edges. You could just tell the truth.

I go still, because it's right—I'm not going to say the true thing. It's been sitting in my throat since he called himself a draft his father hasn't finished correcting, and already I can feel myself reaching for something lighter to set in its place. The voice knew I'd dodge before I did. And across the table, Emric is watching me like he knows it too—like he can see the exact sentence I'm swallowing. The same read, from inside my skull and from across a table, in the same breath.

Only him.

The theory I'd shelved comes straight back down, and I do the math, and land where I always land: the same impossible sum.

Then I do exactly the thing it said I would. I go sideways, into him.

"Can I tell you what I think your father actually is?"

He sets down his beignet. "Bold. But go on."

"I think he'd rather have a sharp son than a happy one. And the part that actually costs you isn't the showing-off." I turn my cup on the table. "It's that somewhere under all of it he probably does love you, in his own wrecked way—and that's so much harder to carry than if he didn't. You don't even get to hate him cleanly."

Emric goes quiet for a long moment. The easy expression slides off his face, and something bare shows under it. "Most people," he says, careful, "tell me I'm lucky. Old house, old name."

"Most people aren't the son."

"No." Barely a sound. "They're not." He looks at me like I've reached in and shifted something that's been stuck for years. "How do you know that?"

"Lucky guess." It's a lie, and we both feel it land as one.

"What about you?" he says—gentle now, like he caught the back half of the sentence I didn't say. "You've met my whole catastrophe. Where's yours from?"

I could give him a small one. I'm good at small catastrophes and lying to get out of the big hurt. Instead I hear myself say, "This is the first date I've ever been on."

He doesn't make it a thing. "Then I'm glad I picked somewhere with no dress code."

"It's not by choice." I turn my cup in my hands. The river keeps current. "They kept me sedated. Since I was thirteen. No school, no friends, no—" I gesture at the table, the sugar, him. "This. They basically woke me up a month ago and gave me a year to prove I can exist without breaking something." I make myself look at him. "I've broken things, Emric. People. I should say that out loud at least once to your face. So you know what you're sitting across from."

He doesn't pull back. He doesn't do the recalculation behind the eyes. He just sits with it, and I understand he already knew the shape of it—felt it the second I said broken—and let me say the words anyway because I needed to.

"I'm not sitting across from a list of things you've done," he says quietly. "I'm sitting across from you." A small, careful smile. "And for what it's worth, I can feel you right now, sitting there waiting for me to be afraid. You're a lot of things, Calypso Dellaby. Frightening isn't the one I'm getting."

The river goes blurry. I blink it clear and call it the wind.

Let yourself have it, the voice says—gentle, with something raw under the gentleness—and it lands the same second his words do, the two of them stacked so close I can't find the seam between them.