Chapter Thirty-Three Kion #3
She blinks. “It took twenty-four minutes and three seconds for us to get sick of each other. You know, after my whole beautiful speech about never getting sick of each other.”
“You…you timed it?” Hells, he doesn’t know whether to be concerned or impressed.
“Possibly.” Is that a glimmer of a smile? “I wanted to see how long it would take for us to get back at each other’s throats. Part of me hoped I’d be counting for months. Obviously not.”
There’s nothing he can say to that, except: “You’re so bloody weird.”
She smiles menacingly, teeth flashing in the dark. “We all have our hobbies.”
“Not all of us are human clocks.”
“Shut up,” Taissa says with a sigh, but there’s not the sharpness in it that he was expecting. Instead, there’s a raw vulnerability he’s not seen before. Her throat works. “I know…I know I’m not your usual type—”
“Taissa.” His laugh is pained. “You’re exactly my type.”
Her eyes are wide.
“You are,” he presses, “and, fuck, I’m so—”
“I know you’re sorry,” she says quietly, blinking.
“You’re terrified of losing James, one way or another.
I understand. And I-I’m sorry, too. It’s possible that I’m a wee bit hotheaded, especially when it comes to—when it comes to Sansa.
And it’s so easy, sometimes, to fall back into old patterns…
It’s just…” Her throat works. “I wish,” she continues after a moment, in a small voice that pains him as much as any blow, “that you had defended me during that match like you’ve defended him.
That you’d given me this much benefit of the doubt when you saw the Luck glyph.
I know it’s different, but I just—I can’t help but to wish that. ”
His stomach sinks like a leaden stone at the scraping hurt in her words.
At the envy there, the confusion and the quiet sadness.
Kion swallows hard. “I wish that, too,” he says gruffly.
He hadn’t known her then, Taissa: He’d only known her as his rival, the player who sabotaged him at every turn, who had made his blood boil and his teeth clench.
He’d been a prick. No, more than a prick.
A—what is it she calls him? A numpty. “If I could go back—I would. A thousand times over. I swear, sweetheart. On Merlin. On my life. I would do so many things differently.”
“I would, too.” Her eyes glitter as they glance away from him momentarily, as she draws herself up and takes a deep, shuddering breath.
“But you’re right: Turning in James right now won’t get anything done anyway, not while he’s unconscious.
And we might manage to break the curse anyway during the Wild Hunt.
There’s no harm in looking for other suspects, for James’s sake.
So as long as, in the meantime, you don’t destroy the evidence—”
Kion doesn’t even try to deny that he would ever do that. Instead he grimaces. He was going to, and she knows it.
“—we have a deal. One that I can accept, along with your apology, if you can accept mine.” She fixes him with a solemn look.
“But let’s get a few things straight.” Taissa draws back her shoulders and levels him with a look that could bring armies to their knees.
She holds her Pleasure Pop at his throat like it’s a sword.
“If you ever threaten to kick me off the team again, I’ll dump you.
And I really will follow through with the new caricature. That wasn’t an empty threat.”
“I never thought it was.”
Her lips twitch, but there’s worry in the gleam of her eyes.
Guilt flickers over her face, there and then gone.
She knows. He can see it. Taissa Cho knows what losing James would do to him: the scarred, beaten boy who had nothing until the NCL Stymphs.
Maybe it took her a couple days to fully understand. But now she does. And—
Hold on.
“Wait,” Kion says, blinking hard as her words fully settle into his mind. For one long, uncomprehending moment, he just stares at her. “You’ll…dump me?” Is that what she’d said?
Taissa stares right back at him with a shrug. Even in the dark, he can see those two spots of bright pink burning on her cheeks.
“ ‘Dump’?” he repeats.
“Dump,” she confirms.
“Wait. Does that mean we’re…?”
Dating? Together?
Real?
He trails off helplessly as Taissa breaks out into laughter.
The sort that makes his heavy, shackled heart feel as though it might burst free of its chains.
“Yeah,” she says, her freckled nose scrunching with her smile.
“I guess it does. And maybe this time we’ll make it for longer than twenty-four minutes. ”
“And three seconds,” adds Kion, voice gruff with all the emotions he once never knew he could feel. Kion Locke was a silent child, except when they made him scream. But Taissa makes him want to talk—smile and laugh and argue with her for hours.
“And three seconds,” Taissa agrees, giving him a sideways smile that takes the breath from his lungs. He’s still winded when she playfully reaches up to tap his chin with the heart-shaped lollipop. “Now, shall we find a way to break out of here?”