13 #3
‘Aren’t they wonderful?’ Asta spoke in a whisper. ‘They’re so free.’
‘They don’t live as long, you know,’ Felix answered. ‘Wild dragons. It’s a hard life. They don’t have the benefit of regular feeding and medical care.’
‘I didn’t ask for a lecture about dragon husbandry, Felix.
’ This was good. It was easier to hide her real feelings when he was being a know-it-all.
‘I just said that they’re beautiful.’ She shook her head.
‘You know, some of us would trade in the easy life if it meant there wasn’t someone tying strings to us. ’
‘Is that why you came up here? To become a wild dragon?’
The image of herself sunbathing on the rocks below made Asta laugh. ‘Maybe.’
He fiddled with the string of magic in his hands. ‘Not all connections are bad, you know.’
‘I didn’t say that,’ Asta said quickly. She imagined Felix tying that string to her instead of to Carmine.
She thought about it stretching between them, no matter where they were.
She thought about him winding it around his hands and coming closer and closer.
She felt dizzy. ‘I just want to do something on my own.’ She let out a groan of frustration. ‘I want to get into Pillar so bad.’
‘You will.’ He said it simply, as if it was settled fact.
Asta’s hope turned to rock and sank to the bottom of her stomach. He was just being nice. There would be no letter. One tear, then another, dropped down her cheek, and she rushed to wipe them away.
Felix put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed her. She could smell the Felix-smell of him. He smelled like the earth in the meadow, she thought. Like sunshine on grass. She wanted to breathe him in and hold that breath forever.
Get it together, Asta, she thought. Friends do not sniff friends.
‘You have to get into Pillar,’ Felix said. ‘What would I do without you?’
Asta’s heart beat hard in her chest. ‘You’re just saying that. It’ll be so amazing, and you’ll be like, “Asta who?”’
‘Is that what I’m going to say?’ Felix laughed. With a sudden movement, he wrestled her into a headlock. She laughed and struggled, but he had her pressed against his chest now, and her attempts to get free were futile.
‘Oh, look!’ Felix let her go, his hand sliding to the small of her back.
His touch was the only thing that Asta could think about.
It felt like all the cells of her body were conspiring to heighten the sensations of the exact spot where his hand sat.
She could feel it in her eyebrows, her kneecaps. He pointed down into the valley.
Their roughhousing had startled the wild dragons, and they were disappearing into the forest on the far side of the creek, as swift as deer. Several of them let out bugling calls of alarm as they fled. Carmine reared his head and bellowed back.
Felix did not move his hand from Asta’s back. Mustering all the courage she possessed, Asta leaned against his body. He did not pull away but instead readjusted so that his arm circled her waist. The warmth of his body on her shoulder, the back of her arm, buzzed in her like whiskey.
With a wash of horror, Asta realized what she was doing, all that she was revealing to him. ‘We should go,’ she whispered.
His voice, when he spoke, was as thin and fragile as a dragonfly’s wing. ‘I want to hold you, Asta.’
She felt her body start to shake. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Had he just said what she thought he said? Did he mean what she thought he meant?
‘What?’ she rasped, her voice strained and dry.
‘Oh, no,’ Felix said, and he let go of her. He stepped away, and Asta turned to look at him. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. I’m so stupid.’ His face was too beautiful to bear.
Finding her tongue thick and clumsy, Asta shook her head at his words. ‘Not stupid,’ she choked out. She laughed desperately. Her brain seemed to have completely disconnected, and she felt like a calf trying to take its first steps. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m being like this.’
‘Being like what?’
Asta held out her hand to show him. It was shaking.
‘If it makes you feel any better . . .’ Felix held out his own hand, and it was shaking too. They both burst into nervous laughter.
Felix ran his hands through his hair, one after the other. ‘I’m really sorry for saying that. I didn’t mean to make it weird. It’s just that I think about you literally all the time. But that’s weird, right? I made it weird. Just forget I—’
‘I do, too,’ she blurted. ‘I think about you all the time, too.’
They stood still, anchored in place by some invisible force.
‘What do you think about?’ Felix ventured. There was an impish spark in his eye.
Asta hid her face in her hands, but he stepped to her and pulled them down.
‘When you think about me.’ He kept hold of her left hand, lacing his fingers between hers. ‘Is it just, like, how much better I am at math than you? Or . . .’
Asta punched his shoulder with her free hand. ‘You’re such a jerk.’
He looked at his shoulder, unimpressed, then back at Asta. ‘No? Then is it something else?’
‘Yeah, it’s something else.’
‘I bet you think about my incredible fencework. You’re just lying there in bed thinking, “Damn, that guy jumped the crap out of those fences today.” I’m right, aren’t I?’
‘Yeah, that’s it. I lie in my bed, and I think about your jumps.’ Felix was in her thoughts every night as she lay there in the dark, but it wasn’t Felix on a dragon that she thought about. It was Felix next to her, touching her, kissing her.
‘Liar.’
Asta lifted one shoulder in a coquettish half admission.
‘Then what? What do you think about?’ He had drawn so close that the hairs all down Asta’s arms stood on end.
‘This.’ Asta leaned forward and put her lips on his. They were soft and sweet. Every particle of her came alive with light and warmth.
He kissed her back, slowly and deliberately. It was like the ground fell away beneath their feet, like they had leapt right off the edge of the cliff together and they were soaring through open air.
But a movement beside them caused them both to turn.
Carmine’s face was inches from theirs, his silver eyes locked on them in stunned fascination. Essie came over and joined him. They traded a churring trill back and forth.
‘This is not a spectator sport, guys,’ Felix said. ‘If you don’t mind.’ He moved in for another kiss, and it felt like gravity drawing her down, down, down.
She wanted so desperately to let herself fall into that open space with him, but the moment Felix had stopped kissing her, all her doubts and fears had roared back to life and filled the void, shouting at her so that she couldn’t think straight. Asta pulled back.
Felix stopped. ‘What is it?’
‘What about Pillar?’
‘What about it?’
‘I’m not going to get in, Felix.’
‘You are.’ He smiled at her, and his smile threatened to burst Asta’s heart open.
‘I don’t know . . . maybe . . . maybe we shouldn’t.’
Felix’s smile faded.
Asta shifted her weight from one leg to another, searching for the right words. ‘You’re my best friend.’
‘I know,’ Felix said, tugging on her arm to bring her close to him again. ‘And you’re mine. My best friend who I really want to kiss again.’
She backed away from him, and it felt like swimming against a current.
‘Just give me a second to think.’ Carmine had wandered around behind her and now intruded his head between her and Felix, nudging her for a pet.
She obliged him as she spoke, grateful for the physical separation that he afforded.
‘It’s just that my parents, they think that not getting into Pillar means I’m going to forget all about racing dragons. But they don’t understand. Pillar or not, I have to ride.’
‘Okay, so ride. Kiss me first, obviously. But then ride.’ He tried to get around Carmine, but the dragon raised his neck frills, and Felix halted.
How could she say this without hurting him?
‘If I don’t get into Pillar – and don’t say I’m going to – then I’ll have to – I don’t know – get a job at a stable and work my way up.
Whatever. You’ll be at Pillar, and I’ll be god knows where.
’ She looked at him, waiting for him to understand.
This was why she didn’t want to be in love.
She couldn’t always be thinking about him and calculating around him.
She wished that he hadn’t kissed her. It was making this a million times harder.
Felix looked thoughtful. ‘Work your way up to what, exactly?’
‘Silverscale. I’m going to race in the Grand Prix, and I’m going to win.’
Felix snorted a laugh. ‘Okay, bigshot. Easier said than done.’
Asta’s temper flared. ‘I know that, Felix! I’m going to make it happen.
’ If there was one thing about Felix that bothered her, it was this.
He always treated her like she was still that little neighbor kid who didn’t know the first thing about riding.
Even when she outperformed him during practice, it was always that he was having a bad day – never that she might be better than him.
Asta took hold of Carmine’s iridescent horns and held them as he gently rocked his head back and forth in a slow-motion play fight.
Felix ducked under Carmine’s neck and planted himself directly in front of her. Carmine, unhappy about the competition for Asta’s attention, moaned softly.
‘I still don’t understand, though. Why does any of this mean I shouldn’t kiss you again right now?’
Asta struggled to keep her voice steady. ‘We’ll barely see each other.’
‘Then there’s no time to waste,’ Felix answered, drawing her to him.
Would it be too awful to tell him that she didn’t want to end up like Sofia Seraphin, prim and proper, watching the races from the stands? His family would never let Asta race for them – even if she married Felix. She wasn’t born a Seraphin, and only Seraphins raced under the family crest.
‘It’s too hard,’ Asta said.
Felix tried for a playful tack. ‘No, it’s not. It’s easy. Wherever you go, I’ll come with you. We can be stable hands together. I don’t care.’