Twelfth Knight

16. Last Chance Hit Point

I remember the first time Cesario and I took a hit from some other players in the game. He’d explained it before, that we had relics people wanted, that they would attack us and it wouldn’t be part of the quest, and in fact this was part of what made the quest so impossible. I told him I know, I know, I get it, I’m not stupid, and Cesario said okay prove it, and for a few days I was arrogant; I thought it was obvious that he was just trying to scare me. After all, what was a game? Just that, a game.

I hadn’t realized until then that there were massive leagues of people who play this game by policing it internally, carving out their own little social networks within the constraints of an imaginary world. I didn’t realize, either, that Cesario had encountered them before. That first time we were attacked, Cesario had recognized the usernames of our attackers. They’re bullies, he said. I was busy trying not to die, but Cesario was doing something else. We beat them soundly, mercilessly, with Cesario claiming their points and currency as prizes even when we didn’t need them. He was teaching them a lesson, though at first I didn’t really understand why.

Later, I asked him how he knew they were bullies. He explained, briskly, that he had a friend who liked the game but didn’t feel comfortable in the world anymore. Not the world of the game, but the world of its players. They had harassed her and flooded her chat with derogatory comments and were the same kind of people who’d attacked her on fandom blogs, who left mean comments on her fan fiction, who trashed her blog by sending anonymous hate day after day until she stopped writing, stopped even wanting to write. I said, I think: holy shit, geek-on-geek violence is so intense these days.

yeahwas all he said back to me.

Why do I think of this now? Because something felt off when I was watching Bash play. Not just because he was confusingly, unrecognizably awful—which he was, and I was bewildered—but it was also something like an itch. A sneeze. A moment out of place that needed cosmic rearranging, because something about it just… wasn’t right.

I want to say it’s a shock when Vi Reyes sits across from me in the seat marked for Cesario. I want to say it stuns me, sends my world spinning, throws me for a loop. Which isn’t to say that doesn’t happen to some extent—I do feel like a pincushion, suddenly stuck through with jabs of something brutal. But I don’t think it’s shock, or at least not as much of a shock as it should be.

I guess when the avatar of an enormous male knight stood in front of me and was decisive and good with a sword, it was easy for me to believe they were exactly who they said they were. I never really asked questions; never wondered why the stranger I’ve been spending half my time with over the last few months seemed so instantly, intuitively familiar to me.

I think what I feel isn’t shock—it’s the pieces fitting together.

How could I not have recognized her? No matter what forms she and I take, I know her. I know her because of what she makes me know about myself. I know how it feels to have her in my life.

But I didn’t see it before, and now I feel blindsided. Angry.

There’s no way it’s not her. I’m busy with my own combat rounds, the din of the gym a mix of cheering, booing, and people chatting over the silly computer game filling the screen. From afar, though, I recognize all of Cesario’s signature moves. The way he approaches the offensive, the opening moves. The way he controls the center, forcing his opponent to the outside.

Not his opponents. Hers.

Vi’s the only girl on the platform. I realize that’s probably my fault; the way I sold this tournament to other people, like Kayla and Mackenzie, made it seem like two separate events. There was going to be a movie after this—a “girl movie,” I promised—since we were starting off with this rowdy tournament filled with testosterone. I nudged girls into buying tickets because even if they weren’t interested, which I assumed they weren’t, there’d be lots of other stuff to do. Not once did I wonder if the girls themselves should have been invited to play the way I tried to coax my male friends into it; I never bothered to sell them on how fun it was, how satisfying, how easy to learn, and now I’m sitting very uncomfortably with the idea that maybe I didn’t even stop to think it would be.

Did I leave space for Vi to feel like the tournament was as much hers as it was mine? No, I didn’t. I wanted her to be there, of course, but I just assumed there was no way she’d pick it up. It just didn’t seem like her thing.

She should have told me.

Shame and irritation meet up like conjoined twins in my angry, smarting chest. She’s so direct about everything, but she couldn’t just tell me?

And in the meantime, how much have I told her?

My pulse convulses. God, I told her everything. I told her how I felt about her, how I felt about Olivia. Everything I thought I was confessing to a friend, I was really telling some shadow on the internet. In my frustration I take out Volio, who curses next to me, and feel the increasing heat of my temper. I don’t get angry. I can’t get angry. She knows this about me. She should know.

I try to focus on the screen. Cesario—Vi—takes down Curio. She’s methodical, placid, expression unchanging, exactly the way I thought Cesario would look when he played the game, only I never actually knew who Cesario was. I got close to Vi without knowing she had a window into me that I’ve never had with her.

I kept saying I knew her. What the hell did I know?

Matt Das is knocked out by Tom Murphy. Murph faces Vi and loses, then she takes out that kid Leon, who talks a big game and complains loudly when he gets knocked out. She doesn’t look like it matters much.

Ah. Because she’s not here for them. I get it.

Some sophomore who looks like he’s never seen the sun is my last victim before Vi and I are the only two players left on the platform. People are interested now; not in the game, but in the way Vi and I aren’t looking at each other, aren’t speaking. There’s an awkwardness radiating from us and I can practically feel the whispers. First Olivia Hadid, now Vi Reyes? I’m sure they think I’m getting somehow unmanned by the entirety of this brutal semester, but I’m glad, I’m glad it’s her. She’s the only one here worth beating.

She and I face each other on the screen. Cesario versus The Duke. I don’t ask if she’s ready, because I don’t need to. She launches forward and so do I.

A bunch of Coach-isms come to me, like always. See it, make it happen. Do I want to beat her? Yes, yes I do, and not for my ego. Okay, kind of for my ego. I like winning and I’m not going to pretend I don’t. But do I feel like she owes me something? Yeah, right now I do, I definitely do. I don’t want her to walk away from this like it was easy. I want to put her through her paces and I want her to see the look on my face, the proof that she broke this. That it ends here, with one of us walking away a champion and the other just walking away.

“You lied to me,” I say in a low voice. It’s the first time we’ve spoken aloud since she sat down, and it might very well be the last time.

“I know,” she says, and pulls out a sword to stab me in the chest.

Cesario—Vi—has always been handy with combo moves. He—she—moves quickly, easily, dexterously. She feints, sprints, conceals moves with stealth, takes blind shots she knows by instinct. But she taught me how to do all those things, so I do them, too.

Not everyone has the efficiency of her calculation; Cesario, the avatar she built, is a tactician with assassin-level skills. I remember suddenly that her ConQuest character is an assassin, too, and how did I not see it? Was I blind? Yes, I was blind. She made sure I was.

I position myself for attack and she takes a hit, albeit not critically, because she never stays still for very long. She knows how to defend herself, to make sure she never gets hurt. I never learned that. I never learned to protect myself, to keep things close, to play them safe, so I feint and attack, which she parries and counters. There’s a whoop from the crowd, and I realize people are rooting for me. They think I’m the better player, and there it is again, the stab to my chest—the little fissure of understanding why she had to hide the truth. But why from me?

She shouldn’t have hid from me.

Someone riles up the Duke Orsino chant when I manage a stealth combo that normally wouldn’t work on Cesario, but she must be rattled. We’ve only ever played alone, staying up too late, escaping into the game. The only audience we’ve ever had has been the game’s environment; the battlefields, ruins and castles, razed-down villages; the enchanted forests and monster-filled seas. She’s not like me, comfortable with an audience, and since she’s not Bash, she’s not like him, either. I can see on her face that she isn’t having fun, and I feel it again, another wash of too-much feeling: anger, that she took this simple little joy from us. Sadness that now I’m taking it from her.

I resolve to get this over with. Be brutal. I gear up for another combo, this one with a finishing move that’s almost impossible to defend. I gauge how much life she has left and time it precisely, expending close to what’s left of my own health bar, and then I—

Get killed.

I blink.

The entire room starts booing.

DUKEORSINO12 IS ELIMINATED!says my screen.

“I’m sorry,” Vi breathes.

Ah. So she was never really rattled. I thought I knew her, but I don’t. She told me that, you don’t know me, a thousand times, but I never actually listened, did I? She showed me the truth and I chose the lie.

I try to relive the last ten seconds, maybe twenty by now. What did she do, how did she do it so quickly? She took advantage of my miscalculation; I thought she had less in her. I made a mistake because I underestimated her and she knew it, she knew I would, because she has known me this whole time, but I have never really known her.

Shame, pain, fury. She always, always turns my world upside down.

“You should be sorry,” I tell her.

Then I step away from the platform and walk out.

Olivia and Bash are sympathetic. Even Antonia gives me a small half grimace from afar, like she’s apologizing all over again, even though this has nothing to do with her. Ultimately, though, I don’t want to be comforted.

I find Jack on the field, standing on the track like he plans to take off running.

“It’s freezing,” I point out.

He glances at me and looks away. “I’m fine.”

I try to be… I don’t know. Light, I guess. “I thought you were going to take care of your knee?”

“Do you see me doing anything?” he snaps.

Normally it’s my job to say things in a mean voice. I find I really don’t want to be mean to him, though. Clearly I’ve already been mean enough.

“Jack,” I start to say, but he looks up at the sky, kicking something on the ground.

“We should finish the quest.” His voice is perfunctory. “I don’t want all that work to go to waste.”

“I… sure, yeah.” I was actually wondering if he’d want to. “Does that mean—?”

“When we’re done, we’re done,” he says. “I’m done.”

“Right.” I shiver unintentionally. It’s cold. “Well, there’s the laptops we used for the tournament. Could do it right now.”

“Yeah, let’s do it.” He turns sharply and walks past me, so quickly he clips my shoulder, and okay, I get it. I amble after him, reminding myself: I get it. He doesn’t want to talk to me. This is… not news to me. I’m not surprised.

I’m fine.

I’m fine.

I’m—

“Here.” He hands me the laptop while I’m still following numbly after him, not realizing he outpaced me by what seems like eons. He already went into the gym, grabbed two laptops, and came back out. Inside there’s the sound of laughter from some comedy that Kayla and Mackenzie picked. Everyone else is cozied up in there, too cold outside by California standards for even the most anarchistic teens to revolt out here in the courtyard.

Jack kicks the door shut behind him and sits on top of one of the planters. I follow his lead, hissing a little at how chilly the cement is beneath my woefully thin jeans.

Wordlessly, he takes off his jacket and hands it to me.

I hesitate. “Jack, I don’t—”

“Just take it.”

“Won’t you be cold?”

“I’m fine.” Sounds familiar.

He’s already signed in. I accept the jacket because it’s freezing (I’ve got island blood, I’m not built for this) and wrap it around my shoulders. I shiver a little at the way it smells like him, like a different cold night—a sharp laugh, a shared kiss.

I sign in as Cesario, resuming our quest. “So, listen, as far as—”

“Vi,” Jack says, looking up from his screen briefly. “Whatever reason you had for lying to me, whatever it is you want to say now—”

I grimace. “I just want to tell you I’m sorry—”

“Yeah, I heard you.” He fidgets, tapping his thumb against the keyboard. “It’s fine. Whatever your reasons are, I don’t care. I just want to be done with this, okay? Let’s just be done.”

For a second there’s a part of me that wants to argue. It’s the exact part of me that I couldn’t conjure up before when I was fighting with Antonia. The part of me that Bash has always said was missing; the piece that wants to stay and fight.

I never want to do that. I always want to cut people out of my life, suck the poison out, feel nothing. I want to stop feeling squishy and small as soon as possible—immediately, or even sooner than that. And even though another part of me is saying in a tiny, hopeful voice that Jack isn’t like me, that he doesn’t do that and he doesn’t have to, because if he wants me to, I’ll stay, I’ll stay, I’ll stay…

It’s small. So it’s easy to squash.

“Right. Yeah.” I focus on my screen. “Let’s do this.”

The very last realm is Avalon. According to legend, this is the fairy isle where Arthur was taken after he was killed, and where he’s now being preserved to return at some future time. The whole point of the game is to get Arthur back, so now that we’ve revived the magic of eleven knights in eleven realms, we’re supposed to make ourselves the twelfth knight. The final piece in the puzzle before we can resurrect Arthur.

The thing is: nobody actually knows what happens from here. People pass around theories or make fan videos about it all the time, but because this is one of the areas of the game that can only be unlocked by reaching this point in the Camelot Quest, not many people have done it. We’re near the end, but also, we have no idea exactly how to reach it.

It’s dark here, full of mist, so that we can only see what’s directly in front of us. We can hear the sounds of our avatars breathing, but that’s it. It’s easy to imagine being there while we’re sitting out here alone, the dull roar from the gym accounting for almost nothing. My breath escapes me and it’s like the Avalonian fog, drifting outward in translucent mists. I can see myself as Cesario walking in silence beside Duke Orsino, who has decisively taken the lead.

Rather than speak aloud, I type into the chat.

we have to find excalibur. that has to be the last relic, the one that brings arthur back.

He types back without looking up. how?

I pause to consider what I know of the legend. I guess we have t

But before I can finish typing, the screen goes dark. Eerily black.

I blink, then tap my keyboard. “Is your—?”

“Yeah.” He does the same. “Could the school network have shut down, or…?”

Then the screen lights up again in a burst that’s almost blinding. From over the top of my screen, I watch the sudden illumination reflect on Jack’s frowning face.

The full island of Avalon is in view now, as if someone simply turned on the lights. There’s a forest, distant mountains, a palace, all of it beautiful and ancient and still as the dead. The fog that was obscuring our view is lifted now while the rest of the island stretches up around us, enveloping us in a valley of mountain peaks and open sky.

Within sight—but not within reach—an inlet of sea stretches into a glassy, placid lake, and I know instantly what’s inside it.

Excalibur.

Standing between us and the relic, though, is a knight. Not a normal knight; not another player. This knight is an NPC generated by the game. He’s wearing full black armor, head to toe, and beneath the visor of his helmet is a glint of red eyes.

Across the screen, the game flashes with a message:

THE BLACK KNIGHT HAS CHALLENGED YOU TO A DUEL.

“Oh,” I say dully, putting it together aloud. “I guess in order to reach the lake, we’re supposed—”

“To kill the Black Knight, yeah.” Jack’s shoulder twitches with an unspoken duh.

“Right, well—”

Before I can try to figure out a strategy, the game has launched into a full-scale environmental war. There are bursts of sorcery, a line of enchantresses, all of whom stand behind the Black Knight, and there’s almost nothing I can say before it’s time for one of the biggest battle sequences we’ve seen in the game so far.

Scratch that, the biggest. An enchantress comes my way, and judging by the appearance of a variety of creatures, there are mages here as well. I pull out Tristan’s Fail-Not Bow and aim as much as I can overhead, trying to control the upper levels while the Duke—Jack—takes the valley floor, dousing a fire and taking on the Black Knight alone.

“Wait, Jack—”

He ignores me. Not that he’s not good at combat, but this can’t be a normal fight, right? I dispatch an enchantress, knock a flying dragon out of the sky, and then replace the bow in my hand with my usual sword instead. Jack, I notice, is using Galahad’s red sword, which requires more lifeline points to operate than a normal one. But it’s worth it if he can land a lethal hit.

I try to work my way in, triangulating so that I can land a hit on the Black Knight from somewhere behind. I could use a render like the one Jack used on me earlier, but they’re tricky.

“A little help?” mutters Jack, who gets struck in the chest so hard he knocks from orange-yellow to pulsing, troubling red.

“Sorry.” I target the Black Knight and attack.

“You keep saying that,” Jack mutters.

My attack does very little. “I actually mean it.”

“As opposed to the first time? Or the second?”

Another attack. Unsurprisingly, the Black Knight does not have a lot of weaknesses.

“I’m sorry for all of it.”

“Sorry doesn’t do much for me, though, does it?”

Exasperated, I give up on the Black Knight and select the Holy Grail. Let’s see if it has any healing power… and ah, look at that. It does. With my help, Jack reverts back to yellow just in time to land a critical hit on the Black Knight, who swipes in a blind arc that narrowly misses me.

Irritated, I point out, “If I could do something about it—”

“Like what? Undo it?” The Black Knight aims for Duke, but he slips it, which pins me in a bad position I have to scramble to get out of.

“Yeah.” Wait, did he ask me if I’d undo it? “No—no, not that—”

“No? You’re cool with what you did?”

“What? No, I’m—” I slam down on the Black Knight with one of my better assassin skills, which successfully… dents him. Great. “Of course not. I wish it had been different, but like… how?”

“How could you not have lied to me?” he answers gruffly.

“No, I—” I take a hit that knocks me down to a very pale yellow. “I never planned to lie to you, Jack—this was never about tricking you—”

“But you did.”

“I know, I know.” I swallow, trying to fight and survive the fight at the same time. “I was already too far in to come clean, and eventually I just couldn’t do it, I couldn’t, because I was—”

I stop.

“You were what?” he says blandly.

“Happy” comes out of my mouth in a weird, disemboweling blurt. My eyes are stinging suddenly, and for a second, it’s hard to see where exactly I’m aiming. I pivot behind the Black Knight, striking from the back while Duke attacks from the front.

“Is that an excuse?” he asks.

“No, it’s an explanation. I never thought you’d…” I swallow around a knot in my throat. “I just didn’t think—”

“You didn’t think I’d fall for you?”

It ruptures me to hear it that way. So plainly.

“Or,” he continues, “did you not think you’d fall for me?”

“Who says I did?” I rumble in frustration.

“Right.” Jack’s voice is hard-edged again, and honestly, what is wrong with me?

The Black Knight knocks me down to red. I have to step back and heal myself.

“I didn’t mean that. Jack, I—”

“What.” It’s lifeless, not even a question. Totally uninterested.

But he deserves to hear it, even if he no longer wants it. Even if it no longer counts.

“Of course I fell for you, I’m…” I sound ridiculous. “Honestly, I’m sorry—”

“There it is again,” he mutters.

“I can’t help it!” I growl. “I just got to be someone different, someone else, and—”

“It was you I wanted. The real you, not the mask. I thought you understood that.”

The use of past tense hurts. “Of course I know that now, but at the time—”

Jack manages another critical hit.

He barely needs me. If he even does.

“You were my friend,” I say in a small voice. “You were my friend when I needed one, when I had no one, and maybe if I were a better person—”

“Stop saying you’re a bad person, Viola.” He sounds annoyed.

“Well, obviously I’m—”

“You’re not a bad person. You’re just a weirdly difficult one.”

“Okay—”

“And you’re scared, Vi. You’re so scared of everything.”

I want to argue.

I should argue.

“I know,” I exhale. “I’m terrified. It’s hard.”

“I would have made it easy for you.” Jack’s voice sounds more strained than angry. “I would have at least tried.”

You did, I think. You did. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m hurt. I’m embarrassed, I’m exposed and upset—”

“I know—”

“No. No, you don’t know.” He gives the Black Knight another critical hit, and I think, Jack can win this. I think he can win, and soon. I think he’ll be gone from my life in a matter of minutes.

“I was more myself with you than I’ve ever been with anyone,” Jack says tonelessly. “And I wish that it had been the same for you. I hate that I felt something you didn’t.”

“But I did.” My eyes feel swollen. My throat aches. “I do, Jack—”

He doesn’t say anything. The Black Knight swings and Jack blocks. He has the warrior skillset, all precision and direct hits. He goes and goes and goes and I think of all the things I’d never known that he could do until he did them, the yards I never cared that he could run until he ran them, the pressures I’d never understood he carried around until he chose to share them. All the parts of himself that he gave to me, and I couldn’t even give him back the smallest fraction of myself.

“I think that I’m just lonely,” I say. “I’m not tough, I’m just fragile, and every time anyone hurts me, it stays with me like a bruise that never fully heals.” I inhale shakily, cutting it with a swallow. “I don’t know how to change, how to be an easier person. I don’t know how to be nice to anyone, not even me. And you trusted me and I didn’t know how to trust you back, I didn’t know how t—”

“Viola,” Jack says.

“I just—”

“A little help, please?” he cuts in bluntly.

I refocus on the game, shaking myself to realize he has the Black Knight in a final, combat-ending blow. The Black Knight should be in pieces by now, but he isn’t. Why not?

“Oh.” Because one person can’t win this quest alone.

I take my sword and slice it through the Black Knight’s chest, his lifeline flashing bright like a bolt of lightning before dropping perilously to red.

The view shifts. The fog lifts.

The Black Knight plummets to the ground, bleeding out, and suddenly we’re closer to the lake than we imagined, as if this battle was always going to lead us here. The surface of the water parts, and an enchantress comes out of the lake carrying a sword.

Excalibur.

THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING AWAITS YOU, the game screen says.

I exhale. “Is that… is this it?”

Jack doesn’t say anything, and from the lake, a man in a crown appears.

It’s obvious that these are the end titles. This is the animation meant to end the quest and therefore the game, but it’s… not over. Not yet. Rather than come toward us, King Arthur takes the sword Excalibur from the enchantress and bends over the Black Knight.

He leans down and removes the knight’s helmet, and—

I can’t help it. I inhale sharply.

IT IS QUEEN GUINEVERE,says the screen.

She is dying,says Arthur to the enchantress. Help me heal her.

She betrayed you,says the enchantress. She deserves her fate.

She has been cursed. This is not the woman I love.

She betrayed you,the enchantress repeats. For that she must pay.

I know this is probably very cheesy, but I for one am riveted. So there’s a twist? This whole time the actual twelfth knight wasn’t us. It was always Guinevere.

No,says Arthur. Love and loyalty are what rules this kingdom. If I am to return, I will only do so with her at my side.

But Your Majesty—

It is not Camelot without her,Arthur says.

He bends his head toward hers. A tear falls from his cheek and into her wounds.

Then, slowly, what remains of the fog is gone.

The island vanishes. The lake disappears. The enchantress fades. The armor of the Black Knight falls away, revealing the truth of the woman beneath, and now we’ve returned to Camelot, the castle gleaming brightly from the sun shining overhead. The market is filled with colors and noise, and the heraldic Pendragon flag waves once again from the parapets.

King Arthur stands and holds out a hand to a now-conscious Guinevere, which she takes, slowly and with confusion.

It is time to take back Camelot,Arthur says. Will you stand by me again?

She stares at him searchingly, in wonder.

I will.

The castle gates burst open, and King Arthur and Queen Guinevere return. The Round Table is filled, one by one, with the knights from every realm of the game.

Then the credits roll, starting with two names.

Narrative DirectorNayeli Brown

Art DirectorSara Chan

“They’re women,” I say aloud, a little flabbergasted. I never thought for even a second that they would be, but of course. I always felt like I especially enjoyed the way the game was designed, the way the story was so cohesive, almost exactly what I would have done if I’d written it—

“I could forgive you if you asked me to,” Jack says.

It’s so out of the blue that I have no idea what he’s talking about. “What?”

“We could fight, you know.” He shuts his laptop and looks at me squarely. “We could argue about it. We’ve got time,” he says, gesturing to the gym full of our peers, all of whom prefer him to me except for… well, him. “You could tell me I’m being harsh,” he says, “and I could tell you I’m really pissed off, and eventually we can acknowledge that we both have a point. And then we can get over it.”

It’s a lot. It’s so much my chest fills up with it.

Hope, that damn deadly thing.

“Wow.” I clear my throat, trying to cling to some sense of the familiar. “This game really got to you, huh, Orsino?”

He takes the laptop from my hands.

Closes it. Sets it aside.

“I will forgive you if you ask me to,” he says. “I don’t need you to say you’re sorry. I know you are. What I want to know is if you can ask me to stay instead of letting me leave.”

I swallow. “You’re way too perceptive for a sportzboi.”

“Whereas you’re just a marshmallow with spikes.”

I look down at my hands. “What if you can’t forgive me?”

“You haven’t asked.”

“Yeah, but what if—?”

“You haven’t even tried.”

“I just—”

“You lied to me. It sucked.” He lifts my chin with one hand. “That’s enough to make me pissed at you. Not enough to make me hate you.”

I fidget beneath his touch. “I don’t want you to hate me.”

“Good. That’s a good start.”

“I want you to like me.”

“Like you?”

“Yes.” I can feel my cheeks burn. “I want you to… want me.”

“You need me to need you?” he quotes smirkily.

“Stop.” I turn away and he lets me go, but he doesn’t let me off the hook.

“Because…?” he prompts.

“Because what?”

“You want me to want you because…?”

“Because—”

All right, Mom. Okay, Pastor Ike. Let’s try it your way.

“BecauseIwanttobewithyou,” I exhale in a burst, looking pitifully up at him.

“What’s that?” Jack cups one hand around his ear.

“Because,” I mutter, “I want… tobewithyou.”

He leans in. “Sorry, one more time?”

“I want you, okay?” I burst out in annoyance. “I want you to confide in me, I want you to wink at me, I want your dumb smirks and your stupid jokes, I want you to love me, and I—”

He cuts me off with a real mindblower of a kiss. Honestly, I hesitate to even call it a kiss, because it’s about ten things rolled into one—you’re an idiot and oh my god and also some fireworks, plus the victory of winning a fake quest for fake knights. His teeth bump into mine and I laugh and he grins and kisses me again and his hands are freezing, so I pull them inside of his jacket, winding his arms around my waist.

“I couldn’t even hate you enough to let you keep shivering,” he admits in my ear.

I groan. “I told you you’d be cold—”

“Oh, I’m absolutely freezing,” he says in his usual I’m A Beloved Football Star voice.

In response, I hold him tightly, gratefully, and so, so painfully fond that it feels like my poor aching heart is bursting from my chest.

But I give in to it, this feeling, soft as it is. As tender and as terrifying.

“You’re a menace, Viola,” Jack says, tucking his face into my neck and burying the words there.

“Are we still going to fight about it?”

I’m not really afraid of it, the fight, like I was before. I kind of look forward to it, actually.

“Um, yeah? Definitely.” He kisses my cheek, then my lips, then comes back for another tight bear hug. “Just as soon as I get warm.”