Chapter 44 #2
He wipes his hands down the front of his pants, and I’m hit so hard with the fact that he’s about to stand up and walk away that I grow dizzy.
Any second now he’ll go back to Harker, contact the dean, and work with the Citadel to track down the High Thane.
We’ll spend winter break apart, and the world will keep on turning, and someone will execute their diabolical plot that we couldn’t prevent, and I’ll spend every night I’m left alive not looking into Reid’s storm-drenched eyes or hearing his dry wit or feeling seen and known and cared for.
“Wait,” I blurt.
He turns to me, brows pinched. “I wasn’t going anywhere.”
All this time, I’ve told Reid he’s stubborn, but I’m not sure anyone’s been stronger-willed than me. Maybe it’s like Fiona said earlier in her office—maybe I’ve got some consequences to accept and some growing up to do.
“Thank you,” I say. “For coming tonight.” The skylight above is closed tight to keep out the bitter chill, but I can still hear crickets chirping through the glass. “I know we weren’t really talking.”
“Viv…” He shakes his head like I’m missing something obvious. “We had an argument. I was giving you the space you asked for. But your safety…” He draws a hand over his mouth. “I’ll always come for you. No questions asked.”
“Thank you,” I say again. I put my hand on his knee for emphasis and then lift it just as quickly. Too intimate. Too familiar. Reid’s eyes linger on the spot where I touched him as if it were scalding.
It hits me like a mallet over the head how badly I wish things were different. It’s like we’re back in the planetarium, only this time I just want to pretend we’re still Viv and Reid—hunter and demon—not the Viv who’s fucked everything up between us.
“I was wrong. To push you away and…” I swallow my racing pulse.
“I was the one—”
“No, I never should have gone to Fever Dream without you. We’re better as a team. Remember the strzyga?”
His hand slips over mine, warm and strong. “Remember it?” Reid’s fingers tighten, his thumb brushing over the curves of my knuckles until I shiver. “That was the night I realized I was falling in love with you.”
The words still my mind. I open my mouth and close it again. Silence drowns the room, dotted only by the thud of my pulse.
“Relax,” he says softly, eyes on our interlaced fingers. “I don’t expect you to feel the same.” I swear I can hear his heart beating through the thin cotton of his shirt. “I just wanted you to know.”
I do feel the same, though. And it’s like a wave crashing over me. Knocking me down and dragging me out to sea. A force I can’t fight. One I don’t even want to. That undertow is too strong, too knowing, too powerful. It rolls out of me like the first breath after drowning.
“I’m the loneliest person I know.” It’s not what I was expecting to say, but somehow it feels right.
“I see movies and TV shows about loneliness and think, Those assholes have nothing on me. It’s the worst kind of loneliness too.
It’s self-imposed and self-pitying.” I shake my head.
“After my dad died, I didn’t think there was a soul on earth who knew what it felt like to be me.
And not just because of the hunting—I have hunter friends now.
” Reid’s grim expression softens, and I know images of Sophia and Peter and Elliot fill both our minds.
“But it’s not just them. It’s not just Harker.
For a while I was lonely even there, because everyone belonged, and I never did.
They’d been raised by hunters…In fact, when I got to Harker, I was certain I didn’t belong anywhere. ”
We’re the same, Reid and me. Even though we were born on opposing sides of an eternal battle between good and evil, I’ve found as much volatile evil within myself and as I have good within Reid.
Everything he wishes for, I do too. All the qualities that make him doubt and hate and judge himself, I have too.
We’re two puzzle pieces that never seem to fit.
“Viv—”
“But I belong with you, Reid.”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Only stares at me as if contemplating something weighty and wrecking.
I almost tell him I’m an aeon. How nobody knows the self-loathing he struggles with like I do.
But then Reid’s hand slinks across my cheek and cups my face, and all I can do is lean into his palm.
It’s like coming home. Like crawling between fresh sheets after a long, hard day. I close my eyes against his warmth.
“Who knew a demon and a huntress could have so much in common?” he says with a sorrowful grin. “When we’re together, Viv…I don’t know. I feel reborn—I see myself in your eyes, and I like the reflection.”
“You should always see yourself that way. You’re not a monster. You don’t take souls. You’ve been shunned by your own family…all to do what’s right. That’s heroic.”
Reid’s fingers graze the bruise around my eye. His face twists with regret. “You know I’d never hurt you, right?”
I study his pained face and nod with everything in me.
And I should tell him right now that I’m falling in love with him too.
Not only that—that I’ve never been in love before.
That meeting him and fighting with him and arguing and working together and kissing until my lips are raw has changed my brain chemistry so fundamentally that I have become capable of something I never thought was possible for me.
Now, where there was just a rotting core like an apple left in the Astera subway grates, there lies a ripe, plum-red beating heart.
He’s solved me, this demon, with his heroism and his goodness and his mouthwatering half grin.
And the world may be on the verge of ending, but I have just started to live, knowing him.
I should tell him exactly that. That he’s shown me how to fall in love.
And maybe more important, that I’ve developed feelings for someone with all my same afflictions—he’s self-loathing, stubborn, isolated.
He’d give anything to be someone else—and I’m falling for him just the same. He’s helped me accept myself.
I should tell him all of it.
But I can’t.
There’s a block where my brain meets my tongue. A synapse that just isn’t firing. It feels a lot like self-preservation. That hunter instinct to dodge when something’s careening right at you. To jump before you even know a creature’s at your feet.
In an effort to shut my brain up once and for all, I press my lips to Reid’s.