Chapter 16 In Which I Tell Jordan the Truth #4
“I like the purple stuff,” I said. I could see half of his face, lit by the crackling flames.
Gaheris looked up at us. “Dinner will be ready in a moment. Where is Lene?”
“She is in a tree.” Sahir pointed up.
I followed the line of his finger, letting myself lean into the flex of his biceps, and saw her reflective green eyes staring down at us.
“I hope we didn’t say anything rude.” I winked at Gaheris.
“We did not,” he said earnestly.
Sahir hadn’t moved, letting me stand in the half circle of his arm, my face nearly pressed to his shoulder.
“Is dinner ready?” Lene called to us, her voice thin in the night air.
“Yes,” Gaheris said.
She stood up on the branch, heedless of the way it wobbled, and walked back toward the trunk. I watched her sure steps until she was swallowed up by the darkness.
A few moments later, she appeared between two trees and joined us in the clearing.
Sahir stepped away from me. I tried not to have any feelings or opinions about his moving, but in his absence, I felt the cold even more acutely.
Instead, I went back to the packs and grabbed the four bowls and spoons they’d brought. We all sat around the fire, cross-legged on the ground.
Gaheris ladled each of us a bowl of stew, rich with purple potato-like chunks and silvery beads that tasted like peas. We topped it with the purple spread.
For the most part, we ate in silence. I watched Lene shift on the ground, searching for a more comfortable seat.
“Won’t the Queen’s soldiers see the light of our fire?” I asked.
“We would not light an unwarded fire,” Gaheris replied. “Unless they stumble upon us, they will not notice even the glimmer of our wards.”
“But maintaining silence will be safer,” Sahir said, a quiet reproach.
To entertain myself, I came up with a list of questions for Roman, ranging from Hi Roman, do you know a way for me to go back to New York? to Hi Roman, what are your top tips and tricks for magical mayhem?
I couldn’t maintain any level of fear or misery; I mostly felt hysterical.
It didn’t really matter, in the end, what Roman said.
I couldn’t let it matter. I knew that these faeries—my friends, I was forced to acknowledge—had only taken me on this wild-goose chase to bring me out of a depressive funk.
Maybe, at most, to give me some more clarity over the molecular changes wrought by faerie food that made my escape impossible.
They’d done as much as Thea and Jordan ever had—more, even, since Thea and Jordan only ever brought me candy and said mean things about exes, due to the fact that it’s passé to go on quests for wise old magic-wielding mentors in New York.
And I couldn’t stop the same miserable, loathsome thought that had squirreled its way into my head since the first time I touched magic.
Maybe my friends were putting themselves in danger, ferrying a human through the Queen’s territory, for absolutely no reason.
Maybe there was a world where I lived happily in Faerie, if I could only figure out how to articulate what I wanted.
After dinner, I helped Lene scrub out the bowls with dirt while Gaheris banked the fire. Sahir had disappeared into the tent. I kept glancing toward that tent flap, longing for a windbreak. The air had gotten colder, and I was shaking.
Gaheris went into the tent first; Lene and I followed after, bringing our packs in, too.
I didn’t have time to wonder where I would sleep, because she jerked her chin toward Sahir, who sat on one of the two middle bedrolls. Gaheris lay on the other middle bedroll, and Lene went to his other side.
Which put me next to Sahir.
I looked at him. His expression was implacable. I shivered again, still cold. Then I crawled onto the bedroll he’d set up for me and kicked off my shoes. I kept my socks on, slid under the thin top blanket in my clothes, and squeezed my eyes shut.
“Why don’t faeries have space heaters?” I whispered.
Sahir’s words were so quiet I might have imagined them. “Humans cannot endure inconvenience.”
“Hypothermic death isn’t inconvenient,” I hissed, warmed a bit by the force of my own irritation.
His brown eyes gleamed in the darkness. “I always find your offices too warm,” he said. “Perhaps faeries have warmer blood than humans.”
I wrapped my arms around myself. “That is very interesting scientific theory,” I said, gritting my teeth to keep them from chattering.
I’d expected some sort of magical warmth, but the blanket was apparently heated by my body and nothing else. I continued shaking and curled in on myself to conserve heat.
As my body had the same ambient temperature as a refrigerator, this did nothing.
I opened my eyes to find Sahir staring at me, his face inches from mine.
“Do you need me to warm you?” he whispered.
“You’re offering to be a bed warmer?” My voice stayed light, amused. My body vibrated beneath the thin blanket he’d laid out for me.
“You’re shaking.” He’d propped himself up on an elbow, a dim silhouette in the tent. I glanced past him, at Lene’s and Gaheris’s prone forms. And then another shiver racked my body, so hard I felt my stomach muscles clench.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said through my teeth.
“I am sworn to your health, Miriam,” he growled, eyes flashing. “So I ask again. Do you need me to warm you?”
I lay and looked at him for several long seconds.
“Yes, fine,” I hissed, after another shiver racked me so hard my neck cracked.
He sighed and levered himself up onto his hands and knees.
I started to roll to my side, but he caught my shoulder and pushed me onto my back—the same way the Gray Knight had, months before.
I sucked in a gasp, afraid to show him that I’d liked it.
He crawled over me, his knees outside my hips and his elbows caging my face.
I’ll get claustrophobic if he stays like that, I thought, in a stellar example of lying to oneself. I wrinkled my nose, and he raised an eyebrow. I wiggled my knee against his calf until he lifted it, then repeated the motion on the other side.
With a sigh, he lay down against me, sliding one arm beneath my back as he did. His cinnamon smell enveloped me, so thick it was almost suffocating.
I wrapped my arms around him and held him to my chest. He sank into me completely, pressing me against the bedroll.
My lips were dry, my tongue heavy and limp in my desert of a mouth, and I couldn’t breathe from his weight.
But he just nuzzled against my neck, apparently unaffected.
His hips fit into the cradle of my legs, his lips on my collarbone as he breathed in a steady rhythm.
Minutes passed, and I waited for my heart to slow.
But every shift of our bodies brought a new exquisite pain to the forefront: the curl of his hair on my cheek, the feeling of his forearm where he’d tucked it beneath me as it arched my chest up toward him, the unrelenting pressure of his hips against me.
He pushed up and propped himself on his forearms; I followed the slide of muscle in his right biceps, my eyes half-lidded. I could feel the desire written all over my own face but couldn’t hide it.
He looked down at me. “Are you any warmer?”
My shivering had stopped. I nodded. I knew my eyes were too wide, too unfocused as I stared up at him.
My lips parted. “Yes, thank you,” I whispered, hoarse. We stared at each other. He didn’t move any closer. I couldn’t stop my frantic heartbeat, couldn’t stop myself from feeling the way his body pressed into mine from my lowest rib down, the pressure delicious and suffocating.
The seconds ticked on, our faces inches apart. His thick lashes shaded his half-lidded eyes.
And then—I watched his brown eyes flick down to glance at my mouth. A question, or a temptation, or an involuntary response.
My heart stuttered, and instead of blood it pumped pain, a weltering agony inside me. I was frozen, torn between wanting his lips to brush mine and a terror that he would not like how I kissed.
He rolled himself off to the side, leaving my body cold and too light.
After a moment, he put his lips to my ear.
“Good night,” he whispered, the heat of his shoulder burning mine.
I lay awake and stared at the roof of the tent until my eyes ached, unable to stop replaying that flicker in his eyes.