135. Lily
LILY
“Hey! Windermere! Wait up!”
She turned, pocketing her keys, drinking in the scent of the jasmine training up the stone arch over the cottage door. Derek Ayers, a freshman and the youngest student in Chant’s Intro to Alchemy, loped toward her on his coltishly long legs, his amber curls flopping into his wire-rimmed glasses.
He grinned; she grinned back. He reminded her a lot of Sebastian, a lot of herself. She was still getting used to the fact that there were students at Windermere who didn’t know who she was before, who hadn’t known she’d been cursed, who knew her only as Lily Windermere, the founder’s heir.
She’d debated changing her name legally.
At first it felt like a betrayal, but as Tori pointed out, if anyone had known her father’s real bloodline, they would have been Windermeres all along.
And then there was the summer solstice. She hadn’t died then, but Lily Perkins had.
The young woman who walked into that theater wasn’t the same one who staggered out of it.
It was such a strange thing to suddenly need to plan for a future she hadn’t known she would have.
Her whole life had been about the present: this minute, this moment.
As much effort as her classmates had put toward planning, lining up the dominoes, she’d put into not thinking about it.
All summer, all that awful summer, swimming in her own sweat, she’d tried to figure out what she wanted.
Well, she knew what she wanted, at least in part. She wanted him.
“What’s up, Derek?”
He slowed his stride to match hers. He still looked like a kid. She wondered if she’d looked like that last year.
“I was just talking to Chant, and he mentioned that you have that dance class?” His brow wrinkled. She nodded. “Is there still room?” He bit his bottom lip. “Can…can guys do it?”
Something bright flared in her chest. Almost exactly a year ago, she’d caught Sebastian Allsaires spying on her through a mirror.
“Yeah, of course guys can do it. My—” She caught herself, a little too late. The grief struck. It came at the most inconvenient times. Whenever she thought about him, really, which was always. “Yeah. Come today. Four o’clock. Studio C.”
“Cool, thanks!” He gamboled off ahead of her, and she watched, somewhere between joy and sorrow. It was an emotion she knew well.
Above her, the equinox had dawned a glorious blue.
The leaves of the flowering trees around the cottage were just shot through with gold.
The cottage was stone, with a sloping roof like a ski jump.
She and Daphne had painted the window trim and the arched wooden door turquoise.
Around it, on it, all sorts of things bloomed and burst year-round.
It reminded her of the cottage she’d first grown up in, but it was better because it was hers and no one could make her leave.
It was filled with her books, and all of the comfortable things he’d bought for the tower room that hadn’t gotten ruined, their wolves on a shelf, a record player that Asher had given Daphne hooked up to an AEtheric amp that he’d made, prints that Tori had picked out.
It was a beautiful day. It was a beautiful life.
Sometimes, when she thought about where she was now—at a school she loved, at a school she owned, with friends who cherished her, studying a subject that ignited a fire in her heart over and over, with a cottage she shared with her best friend, and a future she didn’t know the ending to spread out in front of her—she wanted to cry.
Often, she actually did. She’d cried so much in the last year, but now her tears were filled with different salt.
She looked at her phone. His flight had just landed, and he’d be driving up to campus later that afternoon.
Tori and Asher would just be leaving their apartment for the train.
Daphne was picking them up while Lily taught dance, and then they were all getting dinner at the Manuscript before the bonfire.
Her pulse quickened at the thought of seeing him, at the thought of spending all the next day with him.
She’d agonized over what to plan. Everything with him was a delicate balance.
Veer too close to romance or try to conjure up the past, and he shut down.
Veer too close to normality—things that felt mundane—and she’d be lying to him.
In the end, she’d settled on something of a scavenger hunt. There was a ruined armory on a tiny island in the middle of the Hudson, and according to locals, it was haunted. According to the Windermere archives, there was very likely some sort of AEtheric anomaly, possibly a relic of some sort.
Trespassing was illegal, but trespassing was historically one of her strong suits, and riddles and anomalies were one of his.
She’d rented kayaks and had shopped for as non-romantic a picnic lunch as possible, which had proven surprisingly difficult.
She hoped he would love it. She knew he would love it.
The tone of his texting had been different the last few days, and she told herself not to, but she hoped, she hoped, with every shred of her that wasn’t eaten up by pragmatism.
As much as it had destroyed her, gutting her over and over until she thought there might be nothing left of her, she’d given him space. Whatever he needed, whatever he’d asked, she’d agreed. Most of her was terrified, but a small, blazing part of her was sure.
She needed to be patient. She was good at being patient. Time was the one thing she knew she could give him. She wasn’t worried. After all, they had their whole lives.