Chapter Fifty-Five Kiss and Break Up
Jude doesn’t answer.
He doesn’t move. He doesn’t blink. I’m not sure he even breathes.
He just stares straight ahead, with eyes that reflect a myriad of horrors that I can’t see and don’t know how to free him from.
His nightmares?I wonder as I stroke his wet hair back from his face. Or all of ours?
If it’s the latter, I can’t even imagine what he’s going through.
I’ve always wondered what it’s like to be an oneiroi. When we were little, I used to ask him if he remembered from his time before Calder Academy what it felt like to have access to people’s dreams and their nightmares. He never wanted to talk about it back then, and now I can see why.
This is awful. Beyond awful.
“Jude, please,” I whisper, leaning in even closer to him, until the chill of his body bleeds into the heat of mine.
“Please,” I plead again as the wild, unsteady beat of his heart has my own stuttering in my chest.
“Please,” I say one more time as if it’s a secret I’ve kept for years—even from myself—wells up inside of me.
It scorches the inside of my throat, batters against the walls I’ve kept in place for so long. But what do those walls matter if Jude gets lost in this abyss? I’ve already lost too many people—Carolina and Serena and now Eva. I’m not going to lose Jude, too—not if there’s anything I can do to save him.
And so I take a deep breath and say the only words I have left to reach him. The only words that actually matter. “I love you, Jude. I love you, and I need you, and I can’t lose you, not like this. I won’t lose you.”
He jerks back then, gasping as his whole body convulses like a wave of red-hot electricity is suddenly flowing through him.
“Jude?” Fear shakes my resolve. “Jude! What—”
“Don’t,” he tells me in a voice gone gravelly from I can’t even imagine what.
“Don’t what?” I ask, confused.
He blinks, and the black feathery things slowly slither out of his eyes until—finally—I’m looking at Jude again, the real Jude, and he is looking at me. “Don’t love me.”
The words hit me like a brick—like a million bricks—falling back into place as the wall I’ve worked so hard to tear down reconstructs between us. I reel under the pain of it, under the hurt of being pushed away by Jude yet again.
But I don’t back off, don’t run away like so much of me wants to. Partly because where would I go anyway? And partly because I refuse to give up so easily—not this time. Because Jude is worth it, and so am I.
“Too late,” I tell him with a cockiness I’m far from feeling. “It’s already happened. Besides, when have I ever listened to you?”
“For once, you need to listen,” he says hoarsely.
“Maybe I need to do something else.” I push back up on my tiptoes, as high as I can go this time. And then, as the rain and wind crash against us, I sink into him. Melt into him. And press my mouth to his.
At first Jude doesn’t move—not his lips, not his arms, not even his body. He just stands there like a statue.
I pull back, mortified. Traumatized. Hurt—so hurt—because I thought I mattered to him. I thought we mattered. And instead, I’ve made a fool of myself again.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble as I pray for one of the bolts of lightning to smite me. “I don’t know why I—”
And that’s when he strikes.
Jude reaches out and grabs my waist. I have one moment to wonder what’s happening and then he’s yanking me forward, his mouth slamming down on mine.
My brain short-circuits for one second, two, as he… There’s no word for what he does to me.
Devours me?
Consumes me?
Turns my world upside down with the need that pours off him in wild, storm-tossed waves that slam into me—that pull me under—in the best, most indescribable way?
Heat streaks through me, and my whole body—my whole soul—fades into him. I wrap my arms around his waist. Pull him closer. Take every piece of him that I can get—every tiny little molecule that he’s willing to give me.
And still, it’s not enough. Still, I want more of him. Need more of him.
I press closer until I can feel the shuddering of his breath and the wild, rampaging beat of his heart against my own.
Somewhere in the back of my head, there’s a voice telling me that this isn’t the time or the place for this, but I don’t care. I can’t care.
Because finally, finally, finally, this is Jude. And me. And for this one, so not perfect but somehow absolutely perfect moment, that’s all that matters.
He nips at my lip, and I open for him, offering him all the broken, battered, so not perfect pieces of me. Giving him everything that I have, everything that I am, and—
He wrenches himself away.
I whimper, clutching at him with greedy, desperate hands, but he’s already backing away. His cheeks are ruddy, his rain-slicked hair tousled from my fingers, and the black, feathery ropes fill the air around us.
He’s right here, right in front of me. But I can see it in his face. In his blown-out pupils. Jude is already gone in all the ways that matter.
“You can’t love me, Kumquat,” he tells me in a voice so deep and violent I barely recognize it. “No one can.”
“That’s not true,” I whisper from lips still swollen and stinging from his kiss. “I love you.”
He shakes his head. “If you knew—”
“But I don’t know.” I reach for him, but he backs away again. “Because you’ve never told me. If you want me to back off, if you want me to leave you alone, tell me whatever secret it is that has you locking yourself away from me. Tell me why you keep running away.”
He gestures to the air around us, to the swirling, black plumes that fill the air. And then he throws his arms out, and right in front of me, he pulls them back onto his body. One after the other after the other.
They disappear in moments, but he doesn’t stop there. He keeps his arms where they are, his fingers curling into fists as he grasps at the air over and over again. And keeps pulling more and more of the ropes through the air and onto his skin.
Not just the ones around us, but from everywhere. I turn to watch them float like black mist out of the students still milling on the center mall, one after the other. Then they glide through the rain-drenched air straight toward Jude, swirling themselves into tighter and tighter ropes until they finally reach Jude and slither straight onto his skin.
“I’m not just an oneiroi,” he tells me jaggedly. “I’m the Prince of Nightmares. And this”—he gestures to the broken, battered students all around us—“is all my fault.”