74. Seb
SEB
Chant answered the door in jeans and a heathered quarter-zip. He held an open bottle of red wine by the neck.
“Sebastian?” His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”
Seb took in the wine, grimacing. “Sorry to bother you; are you expecting company?”
“Oh? This?” Chant glanced at the bottle, shrugging. “I suppose I am now. Come in.”
Seb kicked off his shoes and unwound his scarf. Chant’s apartment was warmly minimalist, all soft whites and old-fashioned bulbs. His fireplace was filled with books. It was one of the faculty apartments scattered near campus in renovated Victorians that the college owned.
“Take a seat,” Chant said from the kitchen peninsula, pulling down a second glass.
Seb sat in a surprisingly comfortable modernist armchair.
“What are you doing on campus over break? I assumed you’d be throwing yourself down a mountain like the rest of your classmates.” He handed Seb a glass.
He took a sip. “What do you know about curses?”
Chant adjusted his glasses. “Sebastian, I…”
“I know you’re not supposed to talk about them, that no one’s supposed to know anything, but it’s too important.”
“This is about Lily, I take it?”
Seb stared into his wine, trying not to cry. The aftertaste turned sharply acidic in his mouth. He nodded.
Chant sighed, leaning back in his chair and taking a contemplative sip of wine. “I only know a little, and much of that is unconfirmed. But I do know that the only person who can modify a curse is the caster. Do you know who that is?”
Seb’s heart dropped. “No.”
“It would have been someone on the Tribunal. I’d look at the records from twenty years ago. There’s at least one other thing you should know.” He fixed Seb with a look that was all pity around the edges. “Once the energy of a curse is released into the world, it cannot be erased.”
“What do you mean? They can’t actually be broken?”
“Not in the way you’re imagining. Energy can never be unmade; it can only be transferred or transmuted.”
If it were possible for his heart to break further, it would have then. “Oh.”
“But Sebastian—don’t forget, Magic is mutable. There’s always a loophole somewhere.”
They talked, emptily, for a few minutes longer, while Seb finished the wine he didn’t really want. He turned at the door as he shrugged into his coat.
“One more question, if you don’t mind.”
Chant held up his empty palms.
“What do you know about the Elumnara this year? It’s not an Elumnara at all—not really, is it?”
“I know nothing about it,” Chant said, his face passively cryptic.
Seb narrowed his eyes. “Are you lying?”
“Perhaps. Good night, Sebastian.”
He stood trembling on Lily’s doorstep for the second time in as many days.
Once he’d sobered up, staring out the steam-blurred window of the train as the Hudson slid by in icy placidity, once he’d cried so much that his head pounded and his face was a puffy ruin and there were no more tears left in him, he’d realized how right everyone else was.
Standing in Lily’s backyard, he’d confirmed her worst fear. She’d flayed herself open in front of him, after seeing all his own rawness, and he’d walked away. He was an asshole, the worst sort, because he’d worked so very hard to make her believe that the opposite was true.
Hands in his pockets, he felt conspicuously empty-handed. He thought he should have brought something, but flowers were banal, and nothing else seemed remotely appropriate. Lily didn’t want gestures; she wanted truth, absolutes.
She opened the door, her expression couched in blank suspicion.
She opened her mouth, but he wanted, needed, to get the first word in.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, voice barely more than a whisper. “I love you and I walked away. If you want me back, I’m here. For all of it, no matter how long.”
Lily looked at him. All he wanted was for her to say something. She remained quiet.
“You were right; I’m an asshole.”
An approximation of a smile, so faint it would be nothing on any other face, touched her lips.
“You’re not an asshole.”
“I am.”
“Maybe a little.” She actually smiled then—small and fleeting, but still. “Do you want to come in?”
He very much did.
She led him up the weird, wide staircase to her room.
The TV came in quietly through the floorboards of her hexagonal bedroom.
It was much pinker, her bed more filled with stuffed animals than he’d anticipated.
This room, with gauzy rose-colored curtains and a collage of dance photos that she’d made from magazines and posters, was where she hid all her softness.
Behind her armor of frowns and silence and avoidance, here was the open, fluttering heart of her.
Silently, from the doorway, she watched him explore.
The antimony wolves slumbered, curled together, on her bookcase, next to a volume of Dickinson.
He glanced over his shoulder, nervous that he was trespassing, but Lily only watched him with quiet, apprehensive eyes.
She sat on the bed, and he joined her, jostling a stuffed turtle out of the way, then picking it up and gazing at its friendly face.
“Who’s this?”
“Martin.” She flushed.
“I was worried you wouldn’t take me back,” he said to Martin.
“I was worried you wouldn’t come back.”
Lily looked at him, and he dropped Martin, taking her face in both hands as gently as if she were spun glass. She kissed him back forcefully, pressing him backward into the bed and stretching herself out along the length of his body.