Chapter Twenty-Five
Pax sees me wobble through the door, and he smiles, but his forehead is wrinkled, and I’m so confused: Is that concern? Relief? Happiness?
“Your face!” I say, and I pat him twice on the cheek. “See? We were careful. So much care.” I hiccup.
Pax arches an eyebrow at Kiyoko, who shrugs. I dig the blueprints out of my skivvies, stumbling and hopping and spinning. “Ah! Oh! There—ta-da!” I toss the blueprints on a table and bow deeply, and my head spins when I stand.
Pax grins, and whew, lawdy, that grin. Salty and sweet. “Let’s go for a walk, Stella.” Kiyoko, William, and Nirav crowd around the blueprints, and Pax coaxes me out the front door.
“Coaxes,” I mumble, thinking what a glorious word that is.
“Pardon?” He tilts his head, and my tongue betrays me:
“Oh my God, you’re adorable.”
Pax suppresses a grin. I shake my head because I can’t say that.
“No,” I say. “I take that back.”
“I’m not adorable?”
“Stop.” But I’m laughing, so Pax just bites his pouty pink lip and extends his elbow. I hesitate—oleander—but I link my hand into its crook.
We walk for several blocks under lit streetlamps. We’re quiet, but I steal glances sidewise at him. Pax walks with confidence, borderline cockiness, his sharp jawline like a rudder navigating him through the world.
He’s clean and his shirt is pressed. “How many dress shirts do you own?”
“You notice my shirts?”
My cheeks flush. “I don’t—I mean. I notice they’re different. Day to day.”
“I suppose that’s the answer, then. I have enough to make people take notice.”
“You need to be noticed.”
Pax chuckles, but it’s got a sad undertone. “Ah, you know my secrets, Stella Bodhan.”
We wander toward Central Park. Central Park is the one place in New York where people are not scurrying to go somewhere else. We stroll past the gates of the Menagerie Zoological Gardens, locked at this evening hour.
“The animals are asleep,” Pax whispers. “Shhhhh.” He’s trying for adorable. I narrow my eyes at him, my eyesight still a bit off-kilter.
“I enjoyed our time together yesterday,” Pax says. He’s looking ahead, up the walking path, as he says it. But then he stops, looks at me. In me. My lower belly clenches.
He means our time in that small train vestibule, does he not?
“Me too.”
The scent of vanilla is sharp and sudden. Oleander. Darkness stirs nearby, making my ears ring. Dizzy. I need a moment of support. I hook my fingers around Pax’s suspenders. I tilt my head up and his face is angled toward mine, angled perfectly for… I stand on tiptoes…
Kids squeal on the walking path behind us, and we part quickly. Two boys run past, tossing a doll to and fro, while a third kid, a young girl, shouts, “Give it baaack!”
Pax beams, but his face immediately shifts, watching the siblings. “Me and my brother used to tease Julia like that.”
“You have a brother?” The moment I ask, Spirit jolts me with that annoying shock that means Pay attention, Stella. Pax shrugs.
What just happened? I shake my head. It feels loose.
It’s early May, and the park is bursting with blooms. My drunken haze settles into a humid, perfume-laden haze.
Irises and tulips and dandelions—so many flowers, my heart sings.
The park smells powdery, earthy, even in this thick night sky.
I find myself trailing my fingertips across their delicate faces.
“They remind me of rows of watercolors,” Pax says, lifting his chin at the blooms. “But prettier. Brighter.”
“I think they look like candy.”
“If only they tasted as good. I suppose they do to bees.”
I’m still so dizzy, but it’s happy-dizzy, and not the cold, hard dizziness that comes when the Dark Legion marches in. Just thinking of them, I shiver. No. Not now.
“Daisy and I used to stand outside Huyler’s candy shop and fog up the windows with our little smashed noses until Mrs. Huyler ran us off.”
Someday we’ll be able to buy whole buckets of those candies, Stella! I recall Daisy saying. A memory. Not her voice here, now. Daisy never got that bucket of candy. My mood turns suddenly sad.
Pax seems to sense this. He snaps the head off a black-eyed Susan.
“Pax! You can’t just pick the flowers in Central Park!” I hiccup again.
He looks around frantically as if he’s searching for a copper. “Are they coming for me? The flower police? Tell them it was a crime of passion!”
I suppress a smile. “Pax.”
“Stella. Honestly. I believe no one in the city of New York appreciates these flowers more than you.” He reaches forward and gently tucks the black-eyed Susan behind my ear. My heart thunders. “Is it truly a crime if you love them so much?”
I find my breath again. “If that’s your argument, then if we deeply love the Hope Diamond, our thievery isn’t a crime, right?”
Wild-eyed, Pax grins at me. “Maybe I do love that diamond more than anyone does, Stella. That’s a whole lotta diamond to love!”
I laugh, and Pax continues, “Not guilty, your honor, on account of my deep and abiding adoration of that particular gem.” He clambers to the top of a large boulder and extends a hand down to me to help hoist me up. His hand in mine—snick!
“You have to feel that,” I blurt, looking at our hands as though they are two magnets clicked in place.
“Of course I do.”
Oh, merde. I said that out loud.
We sit on the cool rock and watch the stars spin awake. “It looks like The Starry Night,” he whispers. I don’t know what that is, so I don’t press the point.
I blow on my cold fingers. Pax grabs my hands and rubs them between his, warming them. He lifts his face into the night. I inhale deeply, grass and flowers and sheep in the meadow below. And a warm, adorable boy at my side.
But he’s only here because of my gift. If I didn’t have Sight, would his side of the magnetism exist?
“Fleeting, all of this,” I say. I look at his face, search for his shadows. They are always there.
“Fleeting?”
Crap. I can’t stop talking. Stupid whiskey. “Fleeting. It sounds much more romantic than temporary, doesn’t it? What… this is?”
“Romantic, yes.” He gently squeezes my hands, now thawed from his touch.
“It could be more than temporary, though, couldn’t it?” I ask. And then I do it. I whisper, “I’d like it to be more than temporary.”
He shifts onto his side, props his head on his fist, and looks at me deeply. His silver eyes shine like the stars above. A thrill chases through me. “Here’s what I think is romantic: Do you ever think that maybe no other soul has ever been here, in this exact spot?”
Does he mean metaphorically, like our partnership, or literally? This spot, on this boulder? Because if he means the latter, then no. Never. Why, all I have to do is open my hearing a little wider, and:
My tribe was called Lenape. We hunted wild turkeys here. Then the Dutch hunted us.
My church was here. A whole community of people from Africa, free and happy before the city took our homes to make a park.
I made one dollar for every day I worked building this park. Ten hours a day. Backbreaking work, chiseling that rock to make it look natural.
I wish I could be so audacious as to think I was the first person to step foot somewhere. That I was a pioneer. I’m wiser than that.
But he’s looking at me so intensely: us, here, now. Pax seems to need this, the idea that he’s a discoverer, a trailblazer. He needs to be seen. And it is a romantic notion. So I smile and say, “You are indeed the first Pax Princip to sit alongside a Stella Bohdan, right here on this spot.”
And the night wind rustles through the budding trees and it finds us, swirls around us there on that cold rock. “Exactly. The first us.”
Us.
How utterly terrifying. How utterly thrilling.
Such a small word for such a big concept. Us means my identity and his are one. A team, tethered together. But the thing about a tether: When one topples, the other is pulled into the chaos as well. Both fall.
And he never answered my question, about whether this could be more. A question. I never get answers to those. I should know better than to even ask.
I’m suddenly overwhelmingly cold, and shivers rock my body, and I lean over the side of the boulder, and I vomit.
Pax rubs my back, which is nice. Beyond nice; it’s electrifying.
“You had a lot to drink,” Pax says. Is he judging me? I can’t tell. I’m so dizzy and overwhelmed with a swirl of murky emotions.
His touch so intense, it’s almost painful, and I shrug away. “All part of the plan. Right, partner?”