9. Posy
— ? —
Posy
The exclamation points save us both.
Whatever was about to happen in that foyer, seventeen accidental exclamation points murder it dead, and I laugh until I have to lean on the banister, and Valerian stands there radiating wounded dignity, and by the time I recover we’re safely on opposite sides of the room again.
Probably for the best. Definitely for the best.
Except the tension doesn’t leave. It just changes registers, humming under everything while he watches me and I pretend not to notice him watching me, and when I finally catch his eye, his gaze drops to my mouth and stays there a beat too long.
“Valerian. Eyes up here.”
“Yes, Posy?”
“You’re doing it again.”
“I am trying very hard not to.” His jaw works. “You deserve courtship. Patience. Time to understand the bond before I…”
“Before you what?”
“Before I ruin you for anyone else.”
Heat floods through me and settles low, and I watch his nostrils flare, because of course he can smell exactly what that sentence did to me, which is mortifying, which somehow makes it worse, which makes it better.
“We should stop,” he says roughly.
“We should.”
Neither of us moves. One step forward and we fall. One step back and we’re safe, sensible, smart.
My stomach growls.
The sound is so loud and so profoundly unsexy that we both freeze. Then his lips twitch, and the laugh bubbles out of me, and the moment breaks into pieces neither of us tries to pick up.
“I suppose that settles it,” Valerian says, warm now. “You require sustenance.”
“I require a lot of things.” I press a hand to my growling stomach. “Food is just the most urgent. And that’s actually a problem, because I’ve been living on dry cereal and Gran’s canned goods. We need real supplies. Groceries. Things from the outside world.”
“Then we will go to the outside world.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Define ‘we.’”
“I will accompany you.”
“You sure you can leave?” The journal line surfaces in my head, the one about prisons and roads, the one he wouldn’t explain. “The curse keeps you here, right?”
“There is only one way to discover that.”
He says it casually, the way other people wonder whether the corner store is open, not whether a curse will let them off the property. I want to argue. But we need to know. If he can leave, everything changes. If he can’t, we find a workaround.
“Okay. Let’s find out.”
Except when he reaches for the front door, I get there first and plant myself in front of it.
“Wait. Wait wait wait.” I spread my arms across the doorframe. “Shouldn’t you stay inside? You can’t go out in the sun. Right?”
He looks at me. Then at the window, where he stood in a sunbeam yesterday while I braced for combustion. Then back at me, slowly, choosing his words the way kings choose epitaphs.
“Posy. You watched me stand in direct light.”
“That was filtered. Through a window. This is outdoor sun. Direct exposure. There’s a difference, I’ve read extensively on this.”
“You’ve read novels.”
“Novels based on folklore!”
“Folklore based on nothing.” He reaches past me, opens the door, and steps out into the full morning sun with his arms spread, face tipped back, obnoxiously luminous.
He stands there. He continues standing there.
He examines his own hand, front and back, with theatrical concern.
“Shall I burst into flame now, or would you prefer it closer to the gate? I want the timing to be dramatically satisfying for you.”
“Okay, you’ve made your point.”
“Perhaps a slow smolder. Building to a tasteful combustion.”
“Valerian.”
“You may write it up for your research. Academically.”
I shove past him down the steps, and he follows, still radiating smug immortal satisfaction, and I add sunlight to the growing list of things my paperbacks have lied to me about.
The walk to the front gate is longer than I remember.
Gravel crunches under my feet, and the gardens sprawl wild on either side, hedges swollen past their borders, roses climbing over each other in tangles of thorn and fading bloom.
Morning light drips through the overgrown trees and dapples the drive gold.
Valerian walks beside me in silence. He’s wearing clothes we found in one of the manor’s closets, dark trousers and a white shirt slightly loose across the shoulders, boots that survived a century in a box better than they had any right to.
He’s dressed straight out of a period drama, which is fair, because he basically is.
“You’re quiet,” I say.
“I am thinking.”
“About what?”
“About what happens if I cannot leave.” He doesn’t look at me. “What it means for you. For us.”
“Let’s not borrow trouble. Maybe the curse doesn’t work the way we think.”
“Perhaps so.”
He doesn’t sound convinced. Neither am I.
And somewhere on the walk between the front door and the gate, I catch myself bargaining with a curse I didn’t believe in a week ago.
Let him through. Let him carry my grocery bags and glare at the self-checkout and be appalled by gas prices.
Let him have one ordinary afternoon. It occurs to me, gravel crunching under my sneakers, that I want that ordinary afternoon more than I’ve wanted anything in a long time, and I file that realization in the overstuffed drawer of things I’m not examining.
The gates appear around a bend in the drive, massive iron things gone rusty with age, standing open, patient as everything else this house does. Beyond them: the road, the trees, the entire world that exists outside Thornwick Manor.
The world I’ll have to navigate alone if he can’t follow.
I step through without hesitation. Nothing happens. No resistance, no magic. Just gravel and open road.
I turn back.
He’s standing at the threshold, expression unreadable, morning light on his face. He has the stillness of a painting, beautiful and trapped behind glass.
“Your turn,” I say, keeping it light and fooling no one.
He nods once and steps forward.
The impact is instant. One moment he’s moving, hand extended toward me. The next he’s flying backward, hurled by nothing I can see, crashing to the gravel hard enough that I hear it in my teeth.
“Oh my god. Valerian!”
I lunge toward him, but he’s already up, already walking back to the gate with a set to his jaw that makes my chest hurt. Blood trickles from his nose. He doesn’t wipe it away.
“What are you doing? Stop!”
He doesn’t stop.
This time, instead of being thrown, he hits the boundary and pushes. I can see it now, a faint shimmer in the air marking the line between the manor and the world. He presses into it with both hands, jaw clenched, his whole body straining, and the boundary gives.
Inch by inch, it gives. His hands press through, then his wrists, then his forearms. He’s forcing his way to me by pure will, and it’s working, and the blood is running from his nose in a steady stream now, and the skin across his knuckles splits open with no visible cause.
The boundary is letting him through. It’s just charging him for every inch.
“Valerian, stop!” I grab his outstretched hand, slick and warm in mine. “Stop, you’re bleeding, it’s not worth it!”
“You are on the other side of it.” His voice comes out crushed flat with pain. “That makes it worth it.”
“No, you don’t!” I shove against his chest with both hands, pushing him back inside, and the boundary snaps closed so fast it nearly keeps his fingers. He stumbles, catches himself on the iron bars, and stands there breathing hard while blood drips off his ruined knuckles onto the gravel.
“You maniac,” I breathe. “You complete lunatic, what were you thinking?”
“I was thinking that you were leaving.” His grip on the gate is white where it isn’t red. “I could feel you walking away from me, and I could not… I cannot…”
He stops. Swallows hard.
“The blood,” he says quietly. “Your blood, in my veins. I can feel you, Posy. I can feel exactly where you are. And when you stepped through that gate and I could not follow…”
“It felt like I was leaving you.”
“It felt like dying.” He meets my eyes, and the rawness there isn’t for company. “I have died before. I remember the box closing. This was worse.”
My heart clenches.
“We’re bandaging your hands,” I say, because I can’t hold the weight of that sentence yet. “Come on. House. Now.”
The bandaging is its own quiet war.
He insists he doesn’t need it, that he’s endured far worse, and I inform him that in this house we treat wounds, and he goes silent and holds out his hands.
I clean the split knuckles at the kitchen table, close enough that his knee brackets mine, and he watches my face the entire time.
Never the wounds. Me. His hands rest in my palms, heavy and trusting, and when I press too hard on a cut he doesn’t flinch, and when I smooth the linen down with my thumb he inhales as if that, of all things, is the part that hurts.
“You’ve bled on the second-worst floor in this house,” I tell him, because the silence has weight and I can’t afford whatever it’s selling. “Congratulations. The worst is the upstairs bathroom.”
“I shall aim higher next time.”
“There’s no next time. That’s the entire point of the bandages.”
“You are aware,” he says, watching me work, “that you are currently violating your own five-foot rule almost in its entirety.”
“The rule has a medical exemption.”
“Does it. When was that amended?”
“Just now. Emergency session. The vote was unanimous.”
“Ah. Democracy.” His mouth curves. Neither of us mentions that the rule has been quietly dying since the boundary. Shrinking daily. A tide going out.