87. Lily
LILY
On the second day of the tournament, Lily exhaled the breath she hadn’t quite realized she’d been holding for days.
The day before, in his single match, Seb had played atrociously.
Not atrociously, normally. He’d been all power and no finesse, and he wasn’t big enough to get away with that for long.
She hadn’t said anything, partly because she didn’t know what she could possibly say without sounding like an asshole, and partly because he hadn’t said anything, had barely seemed capable of speech.
He’d shambled zombielike out of the locker room, grabbing her hand on autopilot, a gesture that would have been touching in its thoughtlessness if it hadn’t been so robotic.
The skin under his eyes was bruised with sleeplessness, and she wondered what had been keeping him up.
He hadn’t even watched the rest of the matches.
Today, though, he was himself. He beat his opponent from M he was excited.
After the tournament was over for the day, the lesser players culled from the pack, they went to dinner at the Manuscript. The Méridas joined them, and Tori and Asher, and Liesl and Daphne.
They crossed the quad in a noisy flock, accents and languages and signing bouncing off each other, the lighted dorms winking at them merrily.
Seb was in high spirits, his anxiety gone, or largely diminished.
He took Lily’s chilly hand in his and twirled her, then dipped her, catching her low and kissing her deep.
Her cheeks flushed with cold and happy embarrassment.
She felt suddenly that raw pang, that knife-edged joy.
Another treasure found, just in time for her to know what it would be to lose it.
But even the future couldn’t diminish the warmth of belonging, of having found a pack to run with.
And what a pack they were. Tori, wearing sensible enough shoes, gave Liesl—tired from her bout—a piggyback ride, and then Adriana begged one off Sebastian.
He crouched gamely, and with a whoop, they were racing, Adriana kicking her heels in like Seb was a noble steed.
Lily linked arms with Daphne, and they signed sloppily together, an improbable pretzel.
“Is that Hawleyhurst? Who’s he with?” Asher mused to no one in particular.
“That’s Evan Danielson,” Rafael craned to follow Asher’s gaze. “Dunmoody.”
“What the hell are they doing together?”
Lily heard the frown in Asher’s voice. She looked, recognizing the young man she’d seen Hawleyhurst with at the ball, and her insides coiled sharply. Evan Danielson, she repeated to herself as a reminder to ask Seb, once he was back in earshot.
But then they were at the Manuscript, all of them cramming into the big circular booth at the back, ordering too much wine, a tableful of food, all of it out of her price range, but she didn’t care anymore. This close to the end, it didn’t matter; she couldn’t take it with her.
They were laughing and Asher was telling them about the sudden about-face in his thesis—about how he was combining his Metaphysics and music majors to work on something called an AEtheric Synth—a multimedia display that would allow music and lyrics to be translated into shape and color and feeling.
She became dizzy with Daphne’s blush, and the sight of her knee pressed against Asher’s, and she forgot all about Evan Danielson, as she took another sip of wine and leaned into Seb’s warmth and the deep woodsy scent of him.
* M&M— The New School of Mind and Metaphysics, founded in 1940 on the California coast by Winston Mott.
* So named for Ascalon, the legendary spear that St. George used to slay the dragon.