Chapter 36
CHAPTER 36
JOHN
“ T ALK.”
I stare down at the tile Tink just pushed across the floor of the cave toward me and blink, wondering if my glasses really are getting so warped that it’s changing the meaning of letters now. It’s silly, I know, but I can’t bring myself to take them off in front of Tink. Can’t help but want her to take me seriously.
“We’ve been talking for hours,” I say, confused. I’ve been questioning her about Peter for at least an hour, to no avail, and was helping her create new tiles for at least two hours before that.
When Tink first confirmed Peter’s story about Wendy being taken by Astor—adding the part that Peter gave her away—I’d been skeptical.
Well, I’m still skeptical. That’s why I’ve been questioning her. She came to Neverland in love with Peter, after all. Attacked my sister out of jealousy. If she’s still in love with Peter, it stands to reason that she would perceive whatever happened to Wendy as Peter giving her away. Our minds have a nasty habit of warping reality into a more palatable version of itself. And as little as I trust Peter, it’s difficult for me to imagine someone so possessive handing Wendy over to another man.
Still. I can’t make sense of someone like Tink, someone so bold and independent, letting Peter have that kind of control over her.
Wendy letting him control her—that makes sense. She’s been letting others guide her path for years, as much as it grieves me to see it. But there’s something about Peter having such a hold over Tink that doesn’t line up. The last puzzle piece that won’t quite fit into place, no matter how hard you try to jam it.
Tink taps her long fingernails against two tiles, whisking me out of my thoughts. “JOHN TALK.” When I open my hands in a questioning gesture, she rolls her eyes. “TINK BORED. JOHN TALK.”
“About what?”
“JOHN.”
“You really must be bored if you think me talking about myself is going to help.”
Tink just stares at me, taking a sip of water from the cup I snuck her from the Den, and waits.
I run my hand through my hair. It’s getting much too long, falling in my face and scratching at my eyes half the time, my glasses too loose to protect them as they slide down the bridge of my nose.
“Okay, then. I’m the second child of a nobleman. I prefer people in books to most of the people I’ve met in the real world.” My gaze lingers on Tink’s face. “Only excepting a select few,” I say, clearing my throat. “I don’t think my father ever loved my affinity for the library. Not that he opposed it. I just think he hoped to have someone to spar with in the courtyard, but…well, look at me,” I say, gesturing to my narrow frame. “Still, he didn’t mind so long as I kept watch over Wendy and Michael. Kept them safe. I know you’re thinking that a more brawny son would have been better equipped for that. You’d be right.”
I glance back at Tink. I’m not sure what I’m hoping for from her. She just blinks.
“I tried,” I say. “I really did. It was my responsibility. Wendy had her curse, Michael his condition. I was the only one of the three of us who didn’t need safeguarding. That left the protecting up to me. But I wasn’t built for it, I guess. I tried to make up for it by learning as much as I could about Wendy’s curse, by reading all the books I could about Michael’s language and learning patterns. A whole lot of good all the knowledge did for them. Wendy’s lost, and Michael…” I shake my head, squinting my eyes like that will somehow expel the headache that’s coming on. “He keeps asking for our mother. I can’t even explain what happened to her. He’s just stuck in a nightmare where his mother and sister are gone, and I can’t convince him that he’s awake. Don’t know that I’d be brave enough to, even if I thought he’d understand. You know, I spent all those years educating myself about the Shadow Keeper, when I should have been digging through my father’s books, taking note of who his enemies might be. If I’d been looking at the appropriate data, I would have seen Captain Astor coming.”
Tink scoots closer. My heart races.
“I told Wendy I wanted to kill him—the captain. I was so angry with him. Thought I’d accounted for every last variable, and there he went, stealing in through a blind spot and ripping my life apart. And now he has Wendy, and I can’t keep my mind from traveling down the logical path of what he must have been doing to her all this time she’s been gone.”
I shake my head, feeling sick as the truth of the matter spills out. Why I’ve been so hesitant to believe Tink’s and Peter’s accounts of what happened to Wendy. It hits me in the gut—the realization that it’s easier for me to believe my sister dead, murdered for witnessing something she shouldn’t have, than alive and tortured, abused by the ruthless captain.
I’m not sure what that makes me.
“I love my sister,” I say, though I’m not sure who I’m trying to convince. “She’s smart, intelligent, but that’s not always enough. She sees the best in people, and she lets that seep into her evaluation of them, warping her perception. It’s like her mind erases the evidence against them. So the conclusions she draws make sense, but only because she’s omitted much of the truth. I walked in on her and Peter one time. It was after she’d freaked out and attacked Michael—some stress response to killing that man on the beach. Peter had drugged her to calm her down. I thought he was just sedating her so she wouldn’t hurt herself or anyone else. But when I came to check on her…”
My mouth goes dry, and I glance at Tink. She’s no longer looking at me. I’d forgotten for a moment why she ended up on this island. Because she loved, possibly still loves, Peter.
“He said she was alert. That the drugs had already worked their way out of her system.” The question lingers on my tongue. It’s harder than it should be to push it out. The truth just is . It’s not something we should fear; it remains immovable regardless of our knowledge of it. Our knowing it doesn’t change it. “You know him better than I do. Should I believe him?” I ask.
Tink watches me carefully, then pushes tiles forward. “YOU FRIEND HOME?”
I grimace. “Not really. I had friends when I was young, before Wendy got sick. Before her curse. After that, my parents didn’t let many people near us. Even when they did, it was for Wendy to snatch herself a husband. I tried to befriend some of the suitors. But it’s hard to make friends when you don’t share similar interests. Besides. I don’t really need friends.”
Tink cocks a brow. “MY FRIEND?”
My heart stops in my chest. “Well, if you’re looking at the strict definition of friend…”
Tink smiles and shoves me, quite hard, on the shoulder.
“I don’t think you want to be my friend,” I say, though this must warrant further explanation, because she presses on the question mark tile. “I’m not very likable.”
Tink makes a conceding expression and shrugs, which isn’t exactly comforting. “YOU SAY…” She bites her lip, searching for the correct word. Eventually, she puts “RIGHT” forward but appears less than pleased with it.
“I say…correct?” I squint, trying to interpret her meaning. “I say…the truth? Oh, I tell the truth.”
She nods.
I laugh, and it’s the dry sort. “Yeah, well, people don’t like the truth all that much.”
Instead of responding, Tink looks into the distance, outside the cave where the overhanging pines jitter in the wind.
“What?” I ask.
She picks up a tile. “PENSIVE.”
I let out a surprised laugh. This one’s not so dry.
The smile she offers me would knock me off my feet if I weren’t already on the ground. She’s beautiful. When I first met Tink, I’d thought her feral, crazed. But maybe she’d meant for me to think that. Staring at her now, her soft cheeks and intelligent eyes, it’s wild to think I ever thought her duller than me.
I thought she was insane. But maybe she was simply choosing to be exactly what everyone already expected of her. Perhaps it’s simpler that way.
A question forms on my tongue, but as I’m a rotten coward, I mold it into something else. “Do you like the truth, Tink?”
Her pretty eyelashes flitter in surprise. When she presses her tile into my palm, she lets her hand linger there.
I open my palm to find the word “NO” glaring back at me.
The laugh I let out this time is somewhat strained.
Tink holds up a finger, indicating for me to wait. Then she fishes another set of tiles from the board. “BUT I NEED.”
For reasons I can’t explain, something feels like it’s lodged itself in my throat. “You need the truth.”
She nods, her expression earnest. “WENDY NEED TRUTH TOO.”
I squint, the island salt air burning my eyes. “I think I hurt her without meaning to. Said some cruel things. About her and Peter.”
She shakes her head, then points emphatically at the tiles. “WENDY NEED TRUTH TOO.” She searches the rest of the tiles until she finds what she’s looking for. “IF HURT?” Tink shrugs, then flits her hand as if to say, “ So what? ” “JOHN LOVE WENDY.”
“I wish I could talk to her again,” I say, the bulge in my throat expanding. I imagine it pressing against the base of my tongue. “Be gentler this time. I think my message got a little lost in my bluntness.”
“YOU FIND WENDY.”
I raise my brow. “You think I can? Now I think maybe you’re not being honest with me. You know lies don’t make me feel any better.”
She shrugs as if to say, “ Worth a try. ”
“You know, I wish I could hear your voice.” The words are out before I even realize I’ve said them, my tone deeper, more gravelly than usual.
Tink offers me a sly smile. “IT UGLY.”
“I don’t believe that for a second.”
“HOW YOU THINK?”
When I offer her a confused look, she slaps a rather regretful finger on “HEAR.”
How you think hear? I run over it in my mind. “Oh, how do I think your voice sounds?”
She nods, and then tosses me a tile for me to carve “SOUND” onto.
I let out a nervous chuckle as I’m working. “I dunno. I guess I imagine it deeper than most women’s.”
As Tink looks as if she’s once again contemplating eating me alive, I wave my hands. “No, I mean in the sultry sort of way. Like a stage singer. The kind of voice that sounds like you smoke pipe tobacco, but somehow still young sounding.”
Tink stares at me.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” I say, my heart racing. Her stunning blue eyes glint with challenge, but she doesn’t pluck the “WRONG” tile from the board.
I offer her the smuggest attempt at a smirk I can manage with my heart pounding out of my chest. Man, I bet she can hear my reaction to her with those pointed ears of hers.
“That’s what I thought,” I say. “I’m not often wrong.” Then, something oddly bold comes over me. “Besides. I’ve had too much time to think about it to be wrong.”
Tink cocks her head to the side. “THAT ALL?”
My throat goes dry. I could pretend I don’t understand her meaning. Avoid the question altogether. But that doesn’t seem fair to her. Not when she’s been deprived of communication for so long. “You’re asking if your voice is all I’ve thought about when it comes to you?”
She nods.
My breath quickens. “You did say you like the truth, didn’t you?”
She shakes her head, and as my stomach drops, she pushes a tile into my hand. I don’t have to look at it to know which one it is. “NEED.”
If this were one of the adventure novels in my parents’ library, if I were the hero and she the heroine, I’d tell her all the things I love about her body. Maybe that is what Tink wants from me, but I’m not exactly one of the macho men in those romance books either, so I figure I have to work with what I’ve got.
“Sometimes I think about what it would sound like listening to you read poetry. The gentle cadence of it, the lilt of your tone. I think about your mouth forming the words. But even then, sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t be dreaming about that. Maybe I should think about you as you are now. So then I let my mind wander to learning this beautiful language,” I say, pointing to the notebook I brought her last week. She’s already filled it with a graceful script that it kills me not to be able to read. “I dream about you teaching me this language. Then I could finally have the key to what’s inside your mind.” My hands are shaking, but I take a chance and reach for her, run my fingers through her cropped hair, at the nape of her neck. At my touch, she goes utterly still, except for her eyelashes fluttering. Emboldened, I add, “I mostly wonder…I wonder about where you came from and what your favorite sound is, which food you miss the most from your home. What your phrase is, the one that everyone else associates with you even though you hardly notice how often you use it. Last night, I couldn’t sleep because I was imagining being able to ask you the most frightening bedtime story you could remember from your childhood. Whether you like your eggs fried or scrambled. Stupid, meaningless things like that. I think about introducing you to Michael and how I won’t have to explain to you how just because he communicates differently doesn’t make it any less valid. I…ummm…”
Tink is much too close now. Well, too close depends on one’s reasoning. Too close for me to maintain my thought process? Yes. Objectively too close? For all possible purposes?
I wouldn’t say that.
It hits me then with the way her pretty blue eyes flick up to mine that she expects me to kiss her. That’s what all the signs would point to, at least. But I am a man, and my sex has been known to misinterpret such signs for our own benefit, allowing the truth to be warped by our own desires.
My mind rifles through all the possible scenarios of why Tink might have gotten this close to me. So close I can see the tiny flecks of black in her blue irises, little onyx crystals I think I could make a pastime out of counting. I could have a smudge of dirt on my cheek, one she’s just about to wipe away. Perhaps she’s noticed the way my glasses have slipped down my nose.
Even if Tink does want me to kiss her, it would be foolish to do so. Wrong, even. Wendy is missing, and I shouldn’t be dallying with a woman, neglecting my responsibility.
My mind goes back to how I felt the night Michael scratched my arms up as I tried to keep him from clawing at himself, then found Wendy kissing Peter in his room. I’d been livid. And now, with Wendy kidnapped by Captain Astor…
“Excuse me,” I say, guilt making my voice constrict as I scramble away from Tink.
Hurt—obvious enough even I can detect it—flashes across her expression. It stings at my conscience, knowing I’ve made her feel that way. Rejected.
It’s an injustice that a woman like her should ever feel that.
“It’s not…” I go to explain.
But Tink is already gone.