Intermission Scene IX #2
I roll my eyes at him, but my pulse still skitters when he raises an eyebrow at me. Out of stitches and bandages, I drop my hands, twisting them in my lap, grateful for the small distraction when the lamp seems to burn through its last traces of oil, hissing and dimming.
“Come now, Alistaire, where’ve you gone? Surely you have a very clever comeback. This is our dance, yes? I try to lead and you step on my feet.”
I watch the curling trail of smoke from the oil lamp, opening my mouth to offer a retort—and am mortified to discover I am, in fact, out of them. So I settle for, “Are you always this insufferable?”
“Yes,” he states with a sly grin and leans forward, elbows on his knees. “Are you always this hardheaded?”
My shoulders rise with a laugh. “Probably.”
Jude nods. “Good. I think I’d get dreadfully bored otherwise.” He goes back to examining my messy stitchwork, leaving me to sit with the thought, harmonizing with his earlier words. You can be a great many things, dear heart. But you cannot be fewer.
I almost wish he would say something unkind. Jude never flinches away from the jagged edges I can’t seem to saw down, certainly doesn’t bother trying to soften them himself. Half the time, he seems outright entertained by them.
But I haven’t been as kind, slicing at him with my words without hesitation, like I have to put up a shield before the blow comes. Jude has plenty of sharp edges, too. And I don’t think I’d change any of them, either.
“You know, I’m still miffed at you for all this.
” He twirls a finger broadly at our surroundings, breaking me from the thought.
“My clothes are in damned ruin”—they are—“my hair is a mess”—it is—“you’ve turned my arm into your personal quilting project”—I snort, ignoring him and getting to my feet—“and frankly, I’m not sure why this room bothered with walls for how cold it is in here. ”
“Done complaining?”
“Almost.” He says it all like a joke, but sincerity creeps into the punch line as he blurts, “I just wish we were home.”
For a moment, it’s dead quiet. The words linger like a third party to our conversation, demanding to be addressed. My throat goes dry. And when I can’t take the silence any longer, I mutter, “The Playhouse is not my—”
“Please.” And Jude, for once in his life, seems short on words. “Please, Alistaire.”
I pause. “What is it?” It’s something else that’s bothering him. Something other than the cold room, beyond the dangers trailing us, beyond the ones we left behind. And whatever it is, even Jude isn’t a good enough actor to hide it.
“Can we just pretend—just this once?” There’s a note of weakness in his tone that catches me off guard, his teasing comments gone and forgotten. “Just pretend this ends happily.”
This.
My chest tightens. He knows something I don’t. “The Great Dionysia.”
“I can’t stop what’s coming,” he utters in a breath, too quick, like he didn’t mean to say it. “I would.” He looks up, and there’s something I’ve never seen in Jude’s eyes before, alight but dimmer than usual.
Fear.
“So can we please—” A hand in the dark reaches for mine but stills in the air like he’s thought better of it. I think he tries to smile, but it looks more like a wince as his eyes dart back to the floor. “Can we just laugh and argue and pretend everything will be fine.”
Pretend. I almost laugh at the idea. If there’s one thing we’re both good at, I suppose it’s pretending.
But before he can drop the hand between us, I reach for it as if a string on my wrist has been pulled.
The brush of his skin is warm in contrast to the brittle draft of the room, but it seems to send a shiver up my arms anyway.
And I think I’m past pretending to myself about Jude.
My fingers wrap around his, and he watches me closely as I step into the space between his knees where he’s seated on the mattress, bend slightly to study the gilded edges of his eyes, like I’ll be able to retrieve every secret he’s buried within them. I don’t see any secrets, though.
However, the mischief has certainly returned by the time he reaches his other hand to my jaw. I’m not sure it’s a question in his eyes so much as a brazen dare as his gaze flickers to my lips, but I do know a smarter woman would run for the door right about now at that look.
Unfortunately, I am not her.
“We can pretend,” I agree, and press my mouth to his.
My hesitations are, apparently, not shared.
As if this is all the permission he’s been waiting for, the hand at my jaw slides readily into my hair, cupping the back of my neck, tugging me closer so abruptly, he almost throws me off-balance.
I laugh softly against his lips, steady myself with a hand to his chest and, at the touch, almost think Jude seems to pull his next breath like he’s been underwater until now, deepening the kiss.
In spite of all our time away from the Playhouse and the absurd collection of perfume bottles on his vanity, the scent of hyacinth still lingers on his skin.
It wraps around me, lingers in my hair as he drops my hand to loop an arm around my hips and reel me closer to him, until I can feel the heat of his skin, the race of his pulse.
Half of me is horrified at my reckless self.
The other half declares this isn’t enough.
I lean into his hands, allowing the invisible current that whirs around Jude to draw me in, probably the same current his countless obsessive fans feel.
The thought makes me tense.
“Get out of your head.” His words are a brush against my ear as he pauses, pulls back to look at me, searching my face like he can read the thought written across it and chase it away before it can take root. “Whatever it is.”
I glare back. “I’m not—” I search for words. “I’m not one of your mindless adoring worshippers,” I say, insistent. Before he gets any wild ideas.
“Heart, I know,” he answers with a laugh and reaches for my chin to angle his gaze back on mine. “But I’m starting to think I may be one of yours.”
Whatever doubt was still lingering in the air splinters, then is crushed entirely, the space where it hovered closed by the ravenous kiss he pulls me into.
Everything blurs to the heat of the hand dragging through my hair, to the soft laugh between us when his rings get tangled in it.
I let the tips of my fingers play at the thin chain clasped at his neck, noticing him shiver under the touch as his hands drift down my hips, pausing at my thighs, before he uses them to pull me into his lap.
All I can hear is the beat of my heart quickening when he drags me onto the bed with him and flips me onto my back, the low laugh he lets out when I snap at him not to hurt the stitches I worked very hard on, thank you very much.
He thinks I don’t catch the wince of pain on his face when he moves over me, though he just mutters something about a scratch on his leg and that it isn’t anything to worry about.
I don’t believe him for a minute but am all too distracted by the way he busies his mouth trailing kisses down my neck instead, which magically erases whatever thoughts were circling my mind a moment ago, savoring the weight of him, the warmth.
Something about the dark makes it easier to ignore how we got here. What both of us have done. Makes me forget all about what Jude is and think only about who he is, who he is to me.
I’m still trying to figure that out—if it’s a friend whose tousled hair I run my fingers through.
A rival who laces my fingers with his. An enemy whose waist I wrap my legs around and cling to.
Maybe someone else entirely who murmurs a question into my ear before working at the buttons there at my collar.
Whatever he is, they all seem to weave into Jude, whose heart beats a steady rhythm I feel like I’ve known all my life. A laugh I would recognize in a crowd. A touch that consumes me and starts to simmer, to burn, to demand more.
Until my fingers brush along his shoulder, accidentally over that strange gash that—
Jude gasps and rears back, blinking like he’s confused. “I’m sorry.” He blinks some more, looking around, one hand clutched to the gash at his shoulder.
A gash that has just spread farther down his chest.
I sit up, concerned. “Jude?”
“I’m not supposed to—” He winces, but the moment I try to move for him, he raises a hand between us. “Just stay—please, stay over there.”
I don’t know if I’m more concerned about the injury or about the fact that he’s looking at me like he doesn’t recognize me or where we are. I swallow, finding my throat dry. “Is something wrong—”
Muffled voices from a passing exchange in the hall startle us both into silence.
Gods. Right. There’s a manhunt with Jude’s name on it in Syrene.
For all we know, we could be sharing a hall with more hunters.
Reality seems to cut between us, all the warmth gone.
My face heats as I fold my arms in, unsure what’s just happened and whether or not it was my fault, if the confusion on his face is just masked regret.
“I’ll take first watch,” I say abruptly, on my feet and scurrying for the space by the window when the voices vanish down the hall. Anything to fill the silence.
Jude clears his throat. “If you insist.” He wanders across the room, whatever startled trance he was in breaking.
We step back into our roles like nothing has changed.
“Let me know if anything exciting happens,” he says, sauntering to the bed and trying to hide that he has, in fact, torn a stitch.
“Exciting?” I curl myself onto the windowsill, Jude’s dagger (or someone’s, I don’t know where he got it) clutched between my fingers. “There’s a bounty on your head large enough to fund a small city.”
Jude scoffs as he collapses back onto the mattress. “I do think I’m worth at least a medium-size city.”
I roll my eyes and do my best to forget whatever happened a moment ago. Through the window, stars are growing visible beyond the thin clouds over Syrene, marking the second night of our absence from the Playhouse.
The moon shines through our window like a spotlight, like it can sense a Player out of his bed and far away from home. The blue-white beam reaches across the tattered white blankets Jude is strewn over, sparkling where it meets gold at his fingertips.
The cut on his arm will heal. But that other injury—whatever it is—that spreads along his skin and leaves sharp lines of gold in its wake…I’m not so sure about that one. I’m reminded of Gene again, her skin peeling away from her flesh. “Gene Hunt wasn’t a ghost, was she,” I say.
It’s silent. For a moment, I think he’s already asleep.
Then he answers. “No. She wasn’t.”
“She didn’t take her life onstage, either, did she?”
Another moment passes. “That’s the way of the theatre,” he says, quiet. “You give your life, your blood, your morals to the stage. And after that, it demands more.”
Apparently, we’re done with blunt honesty for the night and have reverted back to theatrically dodging questions with riddles.
Then he asks, “How did you do it?”
I raise an eyebrow. “What?”
Jude shifts, pulls a blanket over his shoulders, though it does little to conceal the light humming around his skin. “The cold. It’s cold out here all the time.”
I shrug. “I dealt with it. Always bothered me more than my brother growing up.” My voice strains at the mention of Galen, eyes sliding to the window again, wondering if he’s out here somewhere, after Dorian turned him down.
“Your brother,” Jude repeats, resting his head back on the pillow. “What would he do to get you back?”
I think of Galen urging my mother out of my bedroom and shouting at her to stay downstairs when I first fell violently ill.
For days, weeks maybe, the illness filled my head with delusions.
I screamed at the shadows that floated over my room, thinking I was probably going to die.
And I remember my brother’s voice: You’re strong enough, Riv.
Maybe Galen did think me capable, to some extent, trusting I would pull through when the poison took hold and turned my skin sickly gray, when ice began to crust in my veins.
I raise my hand and turn it over in the moonlight. The veins glitter now, a golden hue hanging softly over my skin. “Anything,” I say, even though it’s a suspicious thing of Jude to ask. “My brother would do anything.”
It’s quiet again.
“Alistaire?” says Jude’s voice one more time from the darkness of the room.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.”
A laugh jumps from my throat. “What, for ruining my life and throwing me into the casting call? It’s a bit late for that.” My breath stills. “Or if you mean what happened a moment ago, I think that was just as much my fault.”
“No, I’m not sorry for either of those things, actually,” he says. “For something else.”
I look at him—half asleep, bathed in moonlight, gold flickering under his skin—and realize I might not want to know what he means.
For once, I don’t ask.