5 Months Earlier
Andrew had bitten his pen until ink had bled across the corner of his mouth. Thomas kept looking at Andrew’s lips, and this had to be why. What other reason was there?
They lay on the grass in the Wickwood rose gardens, books strewn around them in a fruitless display of studying.
Sun warmed their heads in a dangerously comfortable way.
It would be so easy to fall asleep, cheeks cushioned on arms, the echoes of a busy afternoon at Wickwood humming around them.
From the sports field, whistles blew as the soccer team did drills, and students chattered along the garden paths as they wound in and out of the library.
Exams would be over soon. Then summer would be here, glorious and long and free.
“Come home with us for the holidays.” Andrew lay on his stomach on the grass, notebook open and half a story fallen from his pen.
Thomas sat cross-legged, his brow furrowed in furious concentration as he drew a crown of hollyhock and blueberry vines onto a wicked fairy king. “Sure, let me whip out a couple of thousand dollars for a plane ticket.”
“My dad would pay.” Andrew bit his pen again. “It’s not like your parents would miss you, right?”
“They won’t even remember to pick me up.” Thomas sounded unconcerned, but his shoulders had tightened. “Maybe I’ll just nest in the forest like a goblin child and eat summer berries and go entirely feral.”
He was halfway there already, his frowns always a little too sharp and chaos spilling out of his pockets all through classes. He’d stood atop the garden shed when they stargazed last night and howled to the moon while stardust brushed his cheeks.
“What are you writing?” Thomas tossed aside his drawing and leaned in, but Andrew covered his page with an elbow.
“It’s not done yet,” he said.
“I want an exclusive preview.”
“When it’s done.” Andrew slapped the notebook shut and stuffed it beneath him.
He had yet to decide if he was embarrassed about this one.
In it, two dryads kissed and tangled their wooden arms together as a woodcutter split them apart for firewood.
It was beautiful and anguished. And he’d written them both as boys.
It felt thrilling but strange to write. He’d never looked at a boy and wanted him.
Except one.
A wicked gleam caught in Thomas’s eyes. “I challenge the bastard prince to a duel with birchwood swords for the right of constant access to his stories.”
Andrew gave him a skeptical look. “You’re the prince, not me. I’d be the poet or something.”
“Fine, the prince demands it from his loyal poet. Disobey and feel a bone blade at your throat.”
Andrew started to argue against this poor storytelling, but Thomas pounced.
He flung himself onto Andrew’s back and hooked arms under his shoulders to send them both rolling across the grass.
They knocked into their textbooks and pages fluttered everywhere.
Andrew drove his elbow into Thomas’s stomach and got a solid oof in reward.
But then he was laughing too hard to do anything but lose.
He ended up on his back, Thomas straddling him. When he dug fingers into Thomas’s ribs to tickle, Thomas pinned his wrists to the grass.
They were both breathing hard.
Thomas stared down at him with eyes bright as the forest after rain. He was so real right then, so alive.
The world smelled violently of roses.
“Now what.” Andrew tried to look unimpressed. “You’ll have to let go of me to reach my notebook and I know exactly how ticklish you are. I’ll murder you.”
Thomas leaned forward, his whole weight pressing Andrew thin as paper. But he’d forgotten he’d wanted to struggle.
“Can I ask you something?” The mischief had gone from Thomas’s eyes and he sounded unsure.
“Denied,” Andrew said easily. “Get off before I headbutt you and there ends your perfect nose.”
“You think my nose is perfect?”
“Well, it’s straight,” Andrew said.
Thomas’s mouth quirked a little. “At least one part of me is.”
Andrew frowned and started to contest this, because Thomas also had straight teeth, but someone cleared their throat with dramatic annoyance, and he peered over Thomas’s shoulder to see Dove.
Thomas flung himself off Andrew and somehow put a thousand miles between them in the space of a heartbeat. He had his sketchbook in his lap. Grass in his hair. His eyes looked electrified as if he’d been caught breaking all the rules.
Despite a long day of classes and a rigorous English exam, Dove looked pressed and composed, as if she meant to give a presentation or head to a formal dinner. Not a wisp of hair out of place. Not a smudge on her uniform. She folded her arms as she surveyed them with narrowed eyes.
“We were studying,” Andrew said. “I’ve got your flash cards … um, somewhere.”
“There are twenty-seven,” Dove said. “You have to memorize twenty-seven before tomorrow, Andrew. Why do you two need supervision to get anything done?”
“You could study with us?” Thomas said.
Dove gave him a cool look. “Pretty sure I’m not studying the same things you are, Thomas Rye.”
He shot her a frown, but Dove ignored him and smoothed out the pages of one of the textbooks they’d messed up while wrestling.
She collected the scattered flash cards and smacked them over Andrew’s head, which he grumbled about without any heat.
Without her organizing his exam prep, he’d have flunked out of Wickwood long ago.
What he wanted, though, was to lie among the roses and sleep away the warm afternoon. Maybe with Thomas’s head on his chest.
“I want to talk,” Dove said.
It sounded like Talk with a capital T, and Andrew immediately folded into avoidance mode.
At home, if their father tried to have a discussion, Andrew would bury his face under pillows in the sofa or block his ears and sit in the linen closet until everyone gave up and left him alone.
It was childish, sure, but he had panic attacks that felt like willow switches against his bare back.
They all knew this. They knew he couldn’t cope.
He could only handle life if he looked at it carefully from the corner of his eye. It was easier this way.
Thomas scrambled to his feet. “Let’s go to the forest. To the Wildwood tree. Then you can talk.”
“Aren’t we getting too old to climb trees?” Dove said.
“Never.” Thomas snatched up his sketchbook.
“It’s out of bounds…” But Dove sighed and flung her hands in the air as if she didn’t have time to fight Thomas today about rules. “Fine. I guess we can sneak past the soccer field while everyone’s distracted by practice. But we have to be quick, all right? I have a study session with Lana.”
Andrew hadn’t moved and they didn’t notice yet.
When Thomas and Dove were together, this happened every time.
Private conversations with their eyes. Their bodies both magnetizing and yet repelled.
Their words thorny and sweet as their bickering turned to jokes and back again with such swift speed Andrew always felt left behind.
He watched how close they stood, how Dove’s finger brushed the back of Thomas’s hand as he argued about if one could grow out of loving a tree.
“I don’t want to.” Andrew collected his homework as he stood. He skin felt itchy from the grass, his chest tight.
“Please?” Dove had on her softest, wheedling voice. “We need to talk, all three of us. About us.”
“I’m too tired.” Not a lie. His cottony weariness of earlier had turned to a sludgy sort of ache against his bones. Too many late nights studying. Too much holding his breath during exams.
Annoyance edged onto Dove’s face. “I’m literally begging here.”
But Andrew’s jaw had gone tight and he turned away. “You two can go.”
“I need all three of us—” Dove started.
“And I don’t want to go with you.” He said it too sharp, and Dove wilted.
She liked to corral them, her boys, her two best friends, and usually he was relieved to follow dutifully in her wake, to feel safe knowing she made all the decisions and he wouldn’t have to. But right now he was too scared of what she might ask.
Maybe she would ask for Thomas, and maybe Thomas would say yes.
He was a hurricane and she the whole sky, and even now they were having a vehement conversation with their eyes as Andrew walked away. Neither went after him.
As he vanished behind the hedges, he heard Thomas say:
“You have to give him warning. You know he hates confrontation.”
“He could do something for me for once.” Dove sounded tired.
“… come on, let’s just go.”
Andrew felt sick, his stomach full of stones, as he trailed to the dorms alone, wincing at the two boys who bumped shoulders with him on purpose so he’d slam against the wall.
This had been his whole year, everything from snide remarks and casual shoves to his books being wrecked and disembodied hands shaking the shower stall while he was in there, shivering and terrified.
Always, it was Bryce Kane behind it. Andrew wanted to tell someone, but Dove would report them and the bullying would for sure get worse because rich kids didn’t get more than a slap on the wrist at Wickwood.
And Thomas would—well, he would start a war and beat someone into the ground for Andrew’s honor. And then he’d get expelled.
So Andrew kept his mouth shut.
At least his dorm room remained a luxurious, quiet sanctuary.
The sun flung golden afternoon rays over Thomas’s bed and Andrew couldn’t resist. He could steal an hour, Thomas and Dove would be at least that long, and he could study the flash cards after dining hall to win back Dove’s favor.
No one would catch him caving to this indulgence—dumping his books on his messy desk, toeing off his shoes, unbuttoning his shirt so that when he slipped into Thomas’s bed, his skin lay against where Thomas had been.
It was an easy way to sate the craving of something he could never ask for.