Chapter Forty-Five Jordan
Forty-Five
Jordan
A jolt slides against my ribs like a sharpened knife. I sit up, blinking. I check the time. I was out for an hour or two—it couldn’t have been more. Yagrin’s sack hasn’t moved. The tent, however, is unzipped, and I don’t have to peer inside to know Quell’s gone.
Then my heart pangs with a deep ache of sadness, with a heaviness like I’ve never felt. The trace knocks in my chest, wedging deeper, then twisting so hard that it urges me to my feet. I inhale, pushing breath to all my heightened senses. But there isn’t a whiff of lilac or jasmine. Quell is nowhere near here. The trace jabs my heart again, and the grief is so strong I can feel the weight pressing on my shoulders.
Only one place would make her feel like this.
I find Quell staring out at the water, hugging around herself. Her skin bathes in the moonlight, and breath sticks in my chest. I shouldn’t be here. Not when my head is this cloudy. Not when I feel her pain so strongly. My hands find their way into my pockets, and every urge to back away from the sand, from the crash of the waves, from her, abandons me.
“Quell.” The word falls out of my mouth.
Her chin slides over her shoulder.
“Do you prefer to be alone?” My pulse picks up and whatever else I was going to say blows away with the wind.
“Stay if you want, I don’t care.” Her gaze moves back out to the water. A knot in my chest tugs down sharply like an anchor. The same knot that brought me here: the enormity of her grief. It sits on me and I cannot breathe. I close the distance between us despite my best judgment—hoping, wanting, wishing I could ease this writhing discomfort that’s hers and somehow also mine.
I reach for her, and to my relief and surprise she doesn’t move.
My next breath is a stutter. I’d almost forgotten how it feels when we’re not fighting. I freeze, waiting for her to tense or give me the slightest indication that she doesn’t want me touching her this way. But she doesn’t move. So I don’t either. We stay like that, with my hand gently cupped around her arm, until my feet are buried in the sand from the tide rolling in.
Something violent rears up inside me. This is wrong.
I begin to pull my hand away. But her fingers find mine.
And the whole world seems to still.
She turns, lifting her chin, and meets my stare. Her fingers work their way between mine and we stand there. Tears stream down her freckled cheeks, and the next one that falls does something confusing to my insides. It rolls down her face, streaming across her parted lips before dangling from her chin. I tighten my free hand into a fist, resisting the urge to catch it.
But then I can’t resist anymore, and I smooth my thumb across the tear before it falls. I should have said something before about her mother. She leans into the palm of my hand. First her head, then her entire body folds into my chest. I wrap around her, holding on to her tightly, and the pain billowing inside us both eases like the calming of a raging storm. I bury my face in her hair and inhale, and it’s like taking my first breath in a long time.
She is darkness.
But somehow she warms me like the sun.
My senses abandon me, and I pull her chin up so that we can see each other fully. I start to speak but her hand rises to my face, pressing my mouth closed gently. She leans back on my chest. She doesn’t have to speak. The minute we shatter this silence, this moment will sift through our fingers quicker than sand. Stealing it is the only way it can exist.
I hold on to her tighter.
She cries a bit more, off and on, but after a long while, the tangle of her sadness unravels and she lets out a long exhale. She wriggles in my grip, and for a second I consider refusing to let her go. Holding her is the only thing that feels right in all this chaos. But I release her and she puts more distance between us.
“Thank you.”
Her words carve a chasm the size of the Sphere inside me.
What have I done?