Chapter 9 #5
I sat beside her, close but not touching, and pulled my shirt over my head.
The air was cool against my sweat-damp skin, carrying the green scent of the island and the mineral clarity of the lake.
Sabrina glanced at me, at the expanse of scarred chest and shoulders now on display, and her mouth curved into a grin that carried thirty percent appreciation and seventy percent mischief.
“Now that’s a view,” she said. “The twins would have combusted. We should have done this earlier. Saved everyone a lot of furniture-related small talk.”
I laughed despite myself, and for a moment things felt normal. Just Sabrina and me on a rock by a lake, the way we’d been a hundred times before the war, before anything got complicated.
The normal didn’t last. Sabrina’s laughter faded, and she grew quiet in a way that was unusual for her. Sabrina was many things, but quiet was rarely one of them. She sat with her knees drawn up, her arms wrapped around them, her wings folded tightly behind her, and stared at the water.
“I’ve always had this dream,” she said. “Stupid, probably.” She picked up a smooth stone from the bank, turned it over in her fingers.
“Someone handsome and strong. Someone who… appears. At the right moment. When everything’s falling apart, or when you’ve given up hoping, and he just…
arrives. And takes care of you. Not because he has to.
Because he wants to. Because he sees you, and decides you’re worth the trouble. ”
She looked at me then, and the look in her eyes made the meaning clear. Specific, personal, and directed at the man sitting beside her with his shirt off and her confession still warm in his ears from twenty-four hours ago.
“I’ve been frustrated,” she said. The word came out blunt, honest, without the playful wrap she usually placed around difficult admissions.
“For a long time. You know what it’s like out there.
After the war. The numbers. The… scarcity.
” She tossed the stone into the water, watched the ripples spread.
“And the ones who are left… they look at me and they see the pageant girl. The pretty one. The one who’s supposed to be easy because she smiles a lot and wears her dresses tight.
They don’t see… me. Whatever that is. Whoever that is.
They see the wings and the hair and the smile, and they want that, but they don’t want…
the rest. The complicated part. The part that’s scared, sometimes.
The part that waited six years for me to come home and then watched you look at someone else the way she’d always hoped someone would look at her. ”
The admission hung between us. I could feel the weight of it, raw and unguarded in a way Sabrina rarely allowed herself to be.
“Did you?” she asked. “During the war. Feel it. The… frustration. The need. Or did the fighting take that too?”
I thought about it, beyond the easy deflection, beyond the soldier’s instinct to simplify complex emotions into something manageable.
“The war took everything,” I said. “Not just the frustration. Everything. Joy, fear, desire… it all got compressed into something smaller. Something that fit inside the space between one order and the next, between sleeping and waking, between living and not living. There wasn’t room for…
wanting. Not the kind you’re talking about.
Wanting became a luxury, and luxuries get you killed.
” I picked up a stone of my own, and skipped it across the water.
Three bounces. Not my best work. “It comes back, though. After, slowly and in pieces. You start noticing things again. The way light hits water. The way someone laughs. The way…” I stopped.
The way her body felt beneath mine on crushed wildflowers.
The way her voice broke when she said my name.
Those were not details I could share with Sabrina, not without consequences I wasn’t ready to face.
But Sabrina had always been better at reading me than I gave her credit for. Her eyes narrowed, just slightly, and I watched the calculation happening behind them, pieces connecting, a picture forming that I had been very carefully not painting.
“Gabriel,” she said. Her voice was quiet now, stripped of its usual brightness, and she turned to face me fully on the rock. “Did you sleep with Gabriella?”
I could have lied. I should have lied. The part of my brain that had kept me alive through six years of war was shouting very clear, very profane instructions about self-preservation and acceptable casualties.
But Sabrina was looking at me with those beautiful eyes, and they were doing that thing, the puppy-eyed thing, soft and pleading and utterly without defense, and I had never been able to lie to her when she looked at me like that.
Not when we were children and she wanted the last apple.
Not when she was sixteen and needed someone to cover for her after curfew.
Not now, sitting on a rock by a lake with the truth already written across my face in letters too large to disguise.
“Yes,” I said.
The word left my mouth and the world did not end. The lake continued lapping at the shore. The wildflowers continued nodding in the breeze. Sabrina continued breathing, and her expression did not collapse into the anger or disgust I had braced for.
Instead, she nodded slowly, like someone confirming a theory they’d held for some time and were finally getting around to verifying.
“Tell me,” she said.
So I told her the parts I’d left out. About the lake and the crushed wildflowers.
About how the potion had opened the door, but not created what was already there.
About realizing we’d been in love long before either of us had found the courage to name it, buried beneath years of friendship, war, and the blindness that comes from standing too close to someone for too long.
I told her about holding Gabriella in the dark while she slept. About the dream that woke me hard and mortified. About reading her diary and the words that had burned themselves into my brain: I’ve been in love with him since I was thirteen.