12. Seb
SEB
Seb slicked his sweat-damp hair off his forehead as he closed the locker-room door and checked his watch.
It was late—late enough that the dining hall was closed and dinner would have to be scavenged.
He’d lost time practicing. Some days Cantrèa was the only thing that kept him from transforming into an incandescent ball of rage, and since the loss was still fresh, his training had a desperate air.
He and Adriana were texting more than usual, sending training videos back and forth, goading each other toward greatness.
The leaves on his tree were already dulling.
He could grab something at the library’s basement café. A scone wasn’t dinner, but it was good enough, and he could probably swipe some of whatever real food Asher had inevitably made for dinner. He frowned down the hall into the after-hours security lighting as he noticed it—music.
For a moment he stood torn between hunger and curiosity, and curiosity won, as it always did. He followed the music. Shortly, he found himself in the dance wing of the building.
Light spilled into the hallway from one of the high-ceilinged studios.
The music was contemporary, softly melancholy, nothing he knew—and he slowed, quieting his steps so as not to interrupt.
He stopped, letting long moments pass in the glowing womb of night as he waited for the feeling of reality slipping to fade.
He had spent so much time in this building and none of it in this wing, but there was a different reality, not so far off from this one—visible if he squinted—where this hallway might have been as familiar as a favorite sweater.
He paused as he reached the doorway. The studio was empty, and then it was not, as a girl, tangled up in herself, spun into view, bringing AEther with her.
It practically poured out of her—or maybe it was drawn to her—but in any case, it swirled thick in the air, leaving traces of a secret language that morphed and eddied into something new with each movement.
She wore a powder-blue leotard with a scoop back and capped sleeves, below capri leggings.
As she stilled momentarily, back to him, it was impossible not to be floored by the perfect curve of her ass inside the sheath of spandex.
His heart stopped in his chest as she suddenly fell.
It wasn’t until several seconds later, as she continued twisting and rolled up to standing, that he realized it had been purposeful.
He caught a glimpse of her face in the mirrors and saw her, eyes half-closed in the private bliss of effortless concentration.
For the second time that night, Seb lost track of himself as he watched her.
She was a lodestone and he was a pile of iron filings.
She had what his mother would call “a gift.” It wasn’t just in her technique—which was solid, if not professionally perfect—but she had that essence, that inherent understanding of movement and physics and gravity; the way you could slip between them like a stream between rocks, and become weightless, become enormous.
As she spun, rolling across the scuffed floor, Seb realized that he knew her, and that was the most shocking thing of all, because this—this glorious collection of lines and wild emotion and centripetal force—was Lily Perkins.
Leper Lily, though he had never called her that.
Suddenly he caught the thick oil-slick of her aura, rendering the outline of her buzzy as a mirage, unsure of how he’d missed it before.
Too late, he realized she was facing the mirrors, looking directly at him.
She pinned him with the force of her gaze, itself inscrutable.
A sheen of sweat shimmered on her face and chest, which heaved rapidly with the exertion.
If he weren’t so mortified that he wanted to die, he would have noticed how lovely the flush of exercise made her skin.
He cast around for something to say and found nothing.
“Can I help you?” she said eventually, once she’d collected her breath, once the silence had swelled to bursting.
“Should you be practicing alone this late?” He stepped into the spill of light, regretting the words as they fell out of his mouth. “What if you twist an ankle?”
She scoffed. “That’s a side effect of being me.” She turned her back to him in the mirror, ducking to grab her water bottle, and faced him properly, pushing damp bangs off her forehead.
“What’s a side effect of being you?”
“Being alone.”
Seb said nothing. Had he ever seen her with friends?
Ever really seen her at all? He had never teased her, but he’d also never stopped Conrad, always edged away.
He’d never exerted any effort in the face of her loneliness for the sheer fact that she did not concern him.
He was who he was, and she was who she was, and that meant they occupied completely separate orbits in the same small galaxy.
The difference, of course, was that Seb had his own gravity, pulling in innumerable other bodies, celestial and otherwise, while Lily was some small, dark planet that took generations to orbit the sun.
The fact that they both seemed to know who the other was, despite never having interacted, disturbed him greatly. It disturbed him that he knew she knew who he was, because he was someone presumed knowable.
“Why are you spying on me?”
He tripped backward. “I’m not,” he stammered, hoisting his Cantrèa duffel.
“I was just finishing. I heard the music…” He didn’t know what to say then.
Any true thing was far too intimate an admission, but he was incapable of lying to someone so baldly truthful, whose eyes had already taken the measure of him and found him wanting. “I used to dance.”
She’d been studying the ground and looked up then, sharply, scanning his face for subterfuge. Curses, her life must be a nightmare. “You. Used to dance.” She repeated the words flatly, her disbelief palpable.
“I swear.” He stepped fully into the studio, his sneakers squeaking on the floor. “You were lovely—” He cut himself off before he descended irreparably into stupidity. He couldn’t tell then if she flushed or was simply flushed. “I didn’t mean to bother you. I’m sorry.”
Lily smiled, or at least her mouth did something approximating a smile.
“Movement casts its own spell.” Her eyes sparked with something he thought might be mischief.
“What?” His brain was still on her cheeks and the dim constellation of freckles therein.
“A spell. The pattern of the movement is the transmission; the emotion of the audience, the intended effect.”
“Oh!” He couldn’t help grinning. “I know, right?”
She smiled at him fully then, the way a shark grins at a seal. “Prove it.”
“What?”
“Prove that you know how movement can be a spell.” He opened his mouth, but she cut him off. “And no, I don’t mean Cantrèa. I mean dance.”
“You want me to dance for you?” He swallowed, his pulse suddenly racing.
She shrugged. “It’s only fair. I danced for you.”
“You didn’t—”
“You’re sure?”
Shit.
He couldn’t even begin to process the potential implications of that statement. His only goal now was to get away without making a further fool of himself.
“I haven’t danced in years.”
“It’s just like riding a bike.”
He huffed. “You know it’s not.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, turning toward her portable speaker. “I’ll only judge you a little, if you’re telling the truth.”
“And if I’m not?”
“Then you remain the person I’ve always assumed you were, only a little shittier.”
Seb had an idea of who Lily Perkins might think he was, and it was exactly that shame that tipped the scale.
She gave him another sharp non-smile as he met her eyes, and he realized that she’d chosen her words very deliberately.
Whatever else she might be, she was clever.
Her aura, doubled in the mirrors, darkened the space.
All the AEther that had hung so heavily around her before had vanished.
He dropped his bag and kicked off his sneakers, scuffing his sock feet against the vinyl flooring to test the slip.
He shrugged off his track jacket. At least he was already warm and loose from practice.
The whole time he felt Lily’s eyes on him, and his heart burned with too many emotions to name. He crossed to the middle of the floor.
“Is this the song?”
“Do you want it to be?”
Honesty. Be honest. “No.”
“Well, then.”
Seb expected her to pick up her phone, but she didn’t.
Instead, she closed her eyes and brought the first two fingers of each hand to her lips.
She crossed them, murmuring something he couldn’t hear as she cast. The song skipped ahead, and a violin screeched quietly, followed by a double beat from a tom drum.
He closed his eyes, reaching for Magic—his Words whispering through his mind—just so he could know it was there.
He drew his arms up and began to move, jerkily self-conscious at first, following the beat of the drum, gradually expanding outward, his motion smoothing as the female vocalist began a shuddering croon. He looked anywhere but at Lily Perkins.
He told himself it was just like Cantrèa, and his mind, biddable for once, emptied itself.
The music pulled him across the floor. He rolled to his knees, his thighs, down across the bow of his torso, letting the momentum take him into a backbend and then back to standing.
It had been years since he’d done that, and the success of it, of something his body had been deprived of but secretly craved, made him forget that Lily Perkins was ten feet away, leaning against the barre before the mirror, “judging him a little bit.”
I’m sorry, he whispered to his body, how can I make it up to you?
He relinquished control fully then, letting his sinews and tendons and muscles think for him.
They pulled him into spins and into slides, once into an ever-tightening spiral he would never have escaped from had the verse not ended.
The singer rasped, and he followed her voice into the deep woods of his unconscious mind.
When the song ended suddenly, he staggered to a stop, nearly tripping from an excess of inertia.
He stared at the floor, lungs burning, terrified to look up.
After full seconds had ticked by in silence, he swallowed and lifted his head.
Lily was looking at him, her expression impenetrable.
He pushed a hand through his now-dripping hair and gazed back.
“It makes sense now.” She peeled herself off the barre and took a step toward him. He discovered, as she stepped forward, that he was terrified.
“What does?” His voice shook from nerves and lack of oxygen.
“The way you play Cantrèa.”
“Ah.” He blinked. So far nothing she’d said in this night-couched moment had been remotely what he’d expected. “Thanks,” he said, before he realized it might not be a compliment.
He crossed to his bag and snagged his water bottle, only to find it empty. Lily threw hers at him, her aim either very good or very bad. Only his Cantrèa reflexes kept him from getting smashed in the face. He caught it and squeezed some into his mouth, careful not to touch the spout.
“I don’t actually have leprosy, you know.” Her voice was light, but he heard the snag underneath.
“I was just trying to be polite. Maybe I have a dirty mouth.”
She uttered a short laugh. Finally, he thought, then found himself taken aback at the realization that he’d been trying to keep up this whole time, looking for something that could crack her. He tossed the water bottle back. It landed neatly in her hands.
“So,” she said, as he sat down to put his shoes back on. “Why did you stop dancing?”
Seb froze, shoe halfway on. He spoke to the floor, to his untethered laces, the words tumbling out before he could stop them. “I was informed that it was gay.”
He waited for a response that didn’t come and spoke through the panic tightening around his chest, just for something to push him forward.
“Which would have been fine. If I wasn’t also.” His face was a thousand degrees—no, hotter, blazing like the surface of the sun. “Well, queer, anyway.”
Lily did not rescue him from his discomfort. Why should she?
“Cantrèa is a fine substitute.” He stood, shoes on, bag and jacket slung over his shoulder.
“Is it?” Lily went around, tidying the detritus of her practice, not looking at him.
“I thought it was.”
She nodded thoughtfully as she turned off her speaker. Seb dropped his bag and rolled up her yoga mat, then brought it to the bin with total concentration.
“Thanks.”
He stood still, waiting, weighing. The worst she can say is no. “Do you practice a lot?” He bit his lip. “Maybe I could join you? If you wouldn’t mind?”
She took her time making a decision. “I wouldn’t mind. Thursday evening?”
He nodded, with what felt like far too much eagerness.
She gathered her things, and he followed her to the door.
“Do you want to head to the library, grab a scone? The dining hall is closed.”
“No.”
For a moment, he thought she was disagreeing with his assertion about the dining hall before he realized she was turning him down. It stung more than it should have, and for a brief, terrible second, he understood why people treated her the way they did. Here he was, trying to be nice—
Common sense took over. What, really, had he done for her, other than interrupt her practice and ask to interrupt it again? Maybe I should treat it like a lesson? Offer to pay her for her time? But somehow that seemed like it would go over even less well.
They walked in silence, and he waited while she unlocked her bike.
“See you Thursday?” he said finally, when it became apparent that she was going to ride off without any sort of closure.
“Sure.” She pedaled away without looking back.
Seb turned and walked for his dorm, trying and failing to make sense of it all.