Chapter 9
This Coffee Is to Die For
TIA
Just to be clear, I might hate both the sin (being an asshole) and the sinner (the asshole herself) – but I’m not morally corrupt enough to think throwing Harper Leong out of a window was an acceptable thing to do.
Even my reparations – throwing myself out of the window after her, and spending the witching hours with apologies surging through my head – don’t feel remotely close to making up for it.
However.
When Harper barrels into the lift at nine a.m. the next morning and drowns me in what has to be the stickiest iced coffee known to mankind, it’s very difficult to hold on to my guilt.
My assailant stands before me with a quarter-empty cup and an open mouth, late as always and somehow impossibly more hazardous than usual.
I’d grabbed Harper’s wrist to stop her from toppling after our collision, and now I let go as the lift doors close. ‘You have three seconds to explain.’
Silence reigns the lift’s whirring ascent.
‘Coffee,’ Harper says slowly.
‘I see that.’ It’s hard to keep calm when I’m also trying not to shiver.
A thought occurs as the lift doors ding open at the lab level.
‘You don’t drink coffee.’ The labs are straight down the hallway, but I make an executive decision to head for the toilets, what with the coffee spilled down my front.
Behind, I hear Harper’s tiny legs struggling to match my pace.
‘I do not,’ Harper says. ‘It’s for you.’
What? I slow for both my brain and Harper to catch up. If anything, I should be buying Harper a five-course meal.
I turn to look Harper in the eye. ‘For me?’
Harper shoves the cup towards me, and the liquid sloshes in protest. ‘For saving my life. I’m a Fox. We repay kindness and debts.’
It’s so out of character that, for a second, I just stare.
Given our relationship, there’s a negative chance this should be happening.
Not like Harper’s never had moments of kindness, but she’s never actively worked to prove that kindness, least of all to me.
There’s probably even a seventy per cent chance it’s poisoned.
When I take the cup from Harper, our hands brush.
Her fingers are cold.
‘I don’t know what you drink,’ Harper says as I appraise the ribbed cup. ‘So I added every sweet thing I could. Felt like you were a coffee with sugar person.’
The sticky tracks down the side of the cup suddenly make sense. ‘I only drink black coffee.’
A strange mix of emotion crosses Harper’s face, stained with a shade of surprise and a series of flutter-blinking as she looks away, either miffed, embarrassed, or both.
I clear my throat and move into the bathroom. ‘But thanks. I needed something to keep me awake this morning, anyway.’
The toilet’s harsh fluorescents scour off the shadows on her face to reveal that the darkness under her eyes and dimness of her skin is something even lighting cannot save. A grimness pinches her lips and brows. I watch it in the mirror as Harper evaluates the coffee damage on her own shirt.
‘Not to be rude—’
‘That’s exactly what people say when they’re asking for a punch.’
‘But you kind of look like shit,’ I say quietly.
Harper ducks down to wash her face in the sink. It doesn’t hide her exhaustion. ‘None of your business.’
Before I can counter, she strips her shirt off to run it under the tap. All my vision becomes bare shoulders, a black bra strap carving across skin, a chain tracing collarbone.
Look away! My eyes refuse to comply, and my brain rattles in my skull, all shrunken and marble-smooth and expired with embarrassment.
Weirdest of all, though, is that when my gaze wanders away from the lines of muscle and expanse of tan skin, I find dark scars billowed across Harper’s body – storm clouds blooming over chest, spine, abdomen.
Gashes of white tissue lash across her chest like lightning, some thin and faded, others broiling and angry.
A distinct, overwhelming worry seizes me. I reach out to touch a scar on Harper’s chest, as if I could push it back into Harper’s skin and smooth it over.
Her hand snaps over my wrist, slippery with soap but nonetheless brutal. ‘What are you doing?’
I finally find my voice. ‘How did you get those?’
Harper lets go, returns to washing her shirt. ‘They’re just birthmarks.’ Her tone clips with threat, holding the response high above my head and daring me to grab it.
I’m taller than Harper. And I need to know. ‘Did your parents—?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘That’s why you don’t talk about them?’ I almost reach out again, but I busy my hands with scrubbing the coffee off my chest. The casualness of the act is the only reason I can ask, ‘Did they hit you?’
Harper’s face shuts down. That’s the easiest way to describe it, every muscle slackened, her gaze turning distant. Then her brows scrunch, her lips part, and she turns a burning stare on to me. ‘Are you serious?’
I blink. You’ve hit a nerve. ‘I . . . sorry?’ My mind skips back to the day at the university, when I’d oh-so-casually mentioned Harper’s parents, and she’d shut down in almost the exact same way.
I recognize trauma like one senses a tremor from a faraway earthquake. Dread drenches me cold, and I fail to figure out its harshness, range or epicentre.
But I witness the fallout – Harper scrubbing her shirt, more brutally than before, wet fabric, friction and anger painting her hands pink.
‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ I say. A futile rescue effort. My voice barely carries over the sloshing of water. ‘I thought—’
‘Stay in your lane,’ Harper grits out. ‘Leave me alone.’
No emotion in her voice. The dreaded stillness between aftershocks.
Harper wrings her shirt dry and stalks over to the hand dryer.
With most of my own coffee stain gone and a bigger problem on my hands, I join her side. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’ Talk to me.
‘Drop it.’ Harper tugs her shirt on and leaves the toilet, shoving the door behind her like she wants it to slam.
I swipe the iced coffee off the counter and catch the door before it hits the frame, but it doesn’t seem to deter Harper, who keeps walking without glancing back.
As I stride to catch up, my chest shifts, my ribs like tectonic plates grinding, and in the very epicentre of disaster, my heart lurches from its cage and lodges in my throat, soiling every word with its ruinous history.
The words leave my mouth quietly. ‘My parents were awful.’
It works. Harper slows, stops. Still doesn’t turn. My words lie broken between us, fractured at their edges and begging her to understand.
Part of me resists suddenly, my heart swelling in my throat to cut me off, reminding me that Harper isn’t a friend, and the fragile porcelain of my past will not survive her brutal judgement.
In the end, it’s the memory of Harper’s glare that gives me courage.
Her defensiveness was too explosive to be anything but compensation for a wound.
‘Look, I asked because my mom always controlled me, and my dad was never around. I didn’t assume you have bad parents because I thought you were raised badly.
I just assumed what I . . .’ It hurts now.
I push on. ‘What I wished people would have assumed for me. If people could have seen.’
I’ve wondered, before, if Harper already knows this.
I always thought the pieces made sense if put together and held at a distance.
There’s my crippling aversion to failure, the walls I’ve placed around myself because receiving love and care has only ever been a currency I must earn, and most of all the fact I’d moved out of my house at sixteen.
It was in the news – but they framed it like I left to become a Sentinel, like I was moving towards and not away from.
Still, Harper had witnessed all of that.
She turns halfway. ‘They didn’t like that you were a Sentinel?’
I ground myself with a thumbnail pressed into a fingertip, but my voice still shakes when I speak.
Saying it aloud relapses me into the pain, like pressing an old scar and feeling, somehow, that the scar tissue grates against the flesh underneath, and it hurts even if it’s supposed to be all healed.
‘They didn’t want me doing anything with my magic.
My dad was the head of a company and had a reputation to uphold.
He wanted me to go to university, get a degree like everyone else.
He was terrified of my magic and my mother was terrified of him.
So they kept me medicated to suppress my magic until I was fifteen. ’
Harper runs a hand through her hair, her brows furrowed. ‘Do you still talk to them?’
‘No.’ I shift my weight. ‘Niko was furious when they found out, and basically cut them off for me. Which is good, because I could never have done it myself.’
‘And that’s how you became so close to Niko and Kiran.’
‘Yes.’ I take a step closer. In apology? Supplication? ‘I didn’t mean to offend you. I asked because I was worried you were like me.’
‘Well, I’m not.’ Harper turns, her expression unreadable. I clench and unclench my fist, hoping it’ll shake the anxiety from my body.
‘Good to hear.’ I offer Harper an awkward attempt of a smile. Then, because now my mind won’t move off it, I add, ‘And, hey, I’m sure your parents are great . . . ?’
Her head tilts imperceptibly, a cat trying to size its prey. She stalks right up to me, and I look down at her. ‘I don’t owe you my life story.’
Fair.
She gestures to the coffee in my hand. ‘Take that as my consolation. Don’t drop news like that on me again. I hate having to be nice to you.’
My heartbeat thumps in my throat, but I swallow it. ‘Okay.’ To counter the meekness in my voice, I down the coffee in one teeth-destroyingly sweet gulp.
I toss the cup into the bin beside us, doing my best to keep a straight face. ‘Are we okay now?’
Harper stares at the cup perched on the tower of trash inside the bin. ‘I don’t know what you think is between us, bunny, but we’re not friends.’
She drags her gaze to meet mine. ‘Don’t forget that, okay? It’s annoying when you do.’