Chapter Forty-One
By the time I reach the top of the hill in Rock Creek Park, I’ve lost count of how many errant branches have snagged the hem of my dress.
One of the holes at my knees has widened so much, I can fit my entire leg through it, and the straps are one wrong move from ripping off, but I don’t really care; a thousand runs through Sam’s mom’s sewing machine wouldn’t make me want to wear this dress again, not after tonight.
At the sound of my shoes on the cave floor, Max looks up at me, dirt streaked across his face and leaves poking out of his curls.
Small cuts mark his forehead and neck, but I can’t see the rest of his skin, because he’s wearing the long-sleeved black shirt and baggy sweatpants we left for Tyler as a spare change of clothes.
The lantern is lit in the centre of the cave, washing the rock walls in an artificial yellow.
‘Hey,’ I say, giving a tiny wave. ‘I thought you might be here.’
Even though I saw the magic leaking out of his ID card, it’s still a relief, seeing him as a person with me so close. The curse really, truly is broken.
‘Yeah, well, apparently monster-Tyler isn’t the only one that likes to hang out in caves,’ Max says.
I gesture to the ground beside him. ‘Can I sit?’
He purses his lips but nods.
I lower myself to the ground, the cave floor like ice under the fabric of my dress. A shiver zigzags up my spine, but I know it’s not just from the cold.
The whole Uber ride here, in between playing back the fight with Elliott in my head, I tried to figure out what to say to Max, how to make this better. How to make one of the few people I’ve let myself trust in the last couple months see how sorry I am for lying. But sorry doesn’t feel like enough.
The two of us stare at the lantern, silent. I know it makes me a coward, but I can’t bring myself to look at him up close, cut and bruised and bleeding because of me. Now that I’m here, next to him, all the courage I felt hearing Max’s voice in my head in Elliott’s closet is gone.
Eventually Max clears his throat. ‘I’m guessing by the fact that I’m not currently some horned beast that you broke the curse?’
‘It’s broken,’ I confirm, nodding slowly. ‘Sam and I burned the spell book in a trash can, too, just to make sure he can’t do it again.’
She’d looked way too gleeful, dropping the spell book in the trash can in my backyard, dousing it with red wine and lighting it on fire.
‘He?’ Max asks.
‘My fr …’ I stop myself. Elliott isn’t my friend. Maybe he never was. ‘My neighbour. Sam knocked him out with his own spell book.’
Max whistles. ‘Nice.’
‘His mom is my mom’s best friend, so he’s always just …
been there,’ I say. ‘We grew up together. I had no idea he even liked me – I mean, Sam told me a bunch of times, but I never believed her. He was always, just … Elliott.’ Elliott, who was there celebrating nearly every important moment in my life.
Elliott was family. He and Laura are part of my family.
‘God, this is gonna ruin everything,’ I say, my breath speeding up.
But the air can’t reach my lungs fast enough.
My chest heaves with the effort. ‘My mom is gonna be devastated. His mom is gonna be devastated. I should’ve just—’
‘Indie,’ Max interjects. ‘You’re right, this is probably going to make things mega awkward between your families. But it’s not your fault.’
‘He – he was trying to punish me,’ I sputter.
I squeeze my eyes tight at the memory of his face, discoloured with anger.
‘He wanted to keep me away from everyone he thought was distracting me from him. There was one time – one time – I considered kissing him, and he knew it.’ I know I told Elliott I wasn’t sorry, but maybe I should be.
‘Nothing even happened, but still, I shouldn’t have let things get so—’
‘Indie.’ This time, Max’s voice is firm. It startles me out of my spiral and I stare at him, momentarily speechless. ‘Repeat after me: Not. Your. Fault.’
‘Not my fault, I know,’ I murmur. ‘But if—’
‘No.’ Max fixes me with a stern look. ‘No buts. You don’t owe him your attention or your time or your affection. Nothing could justify what he did, not if you were nice to him once, or if you ever even thought about going out with him. He’s the bad guy, not you.’
Tears prickle at the back of my eyes. ‘Do – do you—’ I say hoarsely. ‘Do you remember anything? From when you turned?’
Max stares straight ahead at the cave walls, his jaw tight. ‘Just flashes, mostly,’ he says. ‘The lights in the window at the gala. Trees. I think I punched a bush, at one point. I didn’t …’ He turns nervous eyes to mine. ‘Did I hurt anybody?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m pretty sure you ran straight here.’
He lets out a long breath. ‘Thank God.’ Max swipes a hand over his hair and finds a leaf. He plucks it out and lets it twirl to the floor. ‘Is my dad really pissed?’
‘No, just worried,’ I say. ‘I told him I’d find you, but you should probably call him.’ I set his dad’s cell phone down in front of him. ‘I left him dealing with the gala. Sam checked the news; they’re saying some guest probably had an allergic reaction, got all puffy and went berserk.’
Max tips his head back and groans. ‘God, the gala,’ he says to the ceiling.
‘I spent two months planning that stupid thing and then I’m the one that ruins it.
We’re gonna have to spend so much money on repairing the Amazonia.
’ I open my mouth to apologise, but Max shoots me another look. ‘Don’t say it’s your fault.’
I bite down on the words. ‘The damage wasn’t actually that bad,’ I say eventually. ‘You mostly smashed up the rental stuff and DJ Stevie Steve’s sound equipment. You did rip a door off the front of the building, but it wasn’t a big deal.’
He drops his head to his chest. ‘DJ Stevie Steve is the worst,’ he says, groaning again. ‘Was I at least a cool monster?’
I smile tightly, remembering Max’s chunky fangs, his bald head. ‘I think you were an ogre or something.’
‘What?’ he exclaims. ‘Avery got to be Godzilla and I was killer Shrek?’
‘I mean, it meant you didn’t rip anyone apart with your teeth,’ I point out.
Max rolls his eyes and grumbles, ‘I guess.’
‘What about,’ I reach over and untangle another leaf from his hair, busying my hands so that my voice remains steady, ‘before you turned. Do you remember anything about that?’
His tongue runs along his top teeth before he says slowly, ‘You mean the part where I found out my dad is a secret magician who cursed your mom, and you used me to get to him?’ Max blows out a long breath. ‘Thank God I’m already in therapy. I’m gonna be unpacking this stuff for months.’
My stomach drops all the way to my feet. ‘Yeah,’ I say softly. ‘That.’
Silence envelops us again as I grope around for the right words to say, the thing that will fix this. But the only thing that really fits, that Max deserves, is the truth.
‘For the last year in my house, for the last seventeen years, if you’re my mom – Austin Taylor has been the bogeyman,’ I say.
‘He put the curse on my mom after she broke up with him, and it turned my dad into a monster every time they got close to each other. My dad moved away because of it. I grew up thinking he was dead, and watching my mom miss him so much. All because of Austin, and I hated him for it.’
A moth flits around the lantern in a circle, casting shadows through the pale light. I watch as it hurtles its tiny body against the glass, desperate to touch the bulb.
‘When I saw that article about the gala, it was like a dream. I could get close to you and find a way into your dad’s world, break this stupid curse once and for all.
For my mom, and for me. But then you were …
’ I bite my lip. Shrug. ‘I don’t know. You.
I tried to hate you, I really did. And I succeeded, at least at first. I thought there was no way you weren’t just a younger version of your dad.
But when I got to know you, I saw how funny and smart and kind you were.
Like, so disgustingly kind, I wanted to scream at you. ’
Max snorts a soft laugh.
‘And then one day I realised that, somehow, I didn’t actually hate you at all.
I actually liked you. It was like you’d charmed my subconscious against my will.
It was infuriating.’ I knot my fingers in the hole at my knees, poke the tender skin underneath.
‘But no matter how much I liked you, nothing outweighed how much I hated your dad. I’d spent my whole life watching my mom mourn my dad, resigned to being alone.
I couldn’t risk telling you about the real reason for the curse, or at least what I thought was the real reason.
Not before I broke it. I know lying to you was wrong, and I’m so sorry.
’ I side-eye him, in case he’s going to tell me off again for taking the blame.
But this time, it’s warranted. ‘I shouldn’t have used you to get close to your dad, or let you help with Tyler. ’
‘To be fair,’ Max says. ‘It was my idea, me helping with Tyler.’
‘I mean, yeah, it was,’ I concede. ‘But that’s because you’re you.
It’s like you physically can’t help being the good guy.
It’s both irritating and part of why I like being around you.
’ I draw in a deep breath. ‘And I’m not just hanging around you because I need something from you.
Not any more. I genuinely love being with you.
But part of it was because I knew you could help me, at least at the beginning. And I’m sorry for that too.
‘Tonight, when I found out your dad broke the curse fourteen years ago – it was confusing, but it also made a lot of sense. When you and me first met, I couldn’t understand how someone like you could have so much respect for someone like him.
But it was clear in that green room that the Austin Taylor in my head wasn’t the same as the one standing in front of me.
’ When I look over at Max, he’s already staring back at me.
A curl slashes across his forehead and I have to entwine my fingers against the urge to brush it away.
‘If there’s anything I learned tonight, it’s that all monsters look different.
And some monsters can change, which means maybe they were never totally monsters to begin with – just …
lost.’ Two of my nails have broken down to the quick, probably from wrestling the spell book away from Elliott.
‘Elliott didn’t use to be like that, so …
angry. And bitter. Which makes me think, maybe – hopefully – he can go back to how he used to be. ’
‘Maybe,’ Max says. ‘Maybe not. But either way, that’s not on you.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I’m starting to see that.’
‘Good.’ He adjusts his legs underneath him and inadvertently inches closer to me so we’re mostly side by side.
‘Look, I get why you did what you did. And if someone had tortured my mom like that, I probably would’ve done the same thing.
My dad has talked in MENtal seminars about doing some bad stuff when he was younger, but this – this was next level.
I’m really sorry you guys had to deal with that. ’
I nudge him with my shoulder. ‘Now who’s taking the blame for stuff they didn’t do?’
Max smirks. ‘Yeah, well, maybe I’m starting to see it’s not as easy as it sounds.’
‘You don’t have anything to be sorry about, though,’ I say. ‘It was dumb of me to assume you were anything like your dad, like you were bad just by an association you didn’t even choose. I mean, the second I said I wanted to be friends, you were like, instantly cool with it.’
Max barks a laugh. ‘I was not instantly cool with it,’ he says.
My forehead crinkles with a frown. ‘But you said—’
‘I respected it,’ he clarifies. ‘But I still wanted to kiss you basically any time we were in a room together. Even when we weren’t.’ He squints in thought. ‘Actually, it was pretty much all the time.’
I blink at this information. ‘All – all the time?’
‘Why do you think I asked you to reconsider tonight?’ he says. ‘Make no mistake, that was strictly to ease my own suffering. I am not the good guy here.’
‘What about now?’ The words drop out of me on their own. At the sound of them, my head suddenly goes so hollow with anxiety, I can practically hear the wind whistling through my ears. But I’m halfway there. I can’t stop now. ‘Do you – you don’t still want to, right?’
‘Kiss you?’ Max says, his eyebrows rising. Then, so plainly it’s like I asked if he knew air existed, he adds, ‘Yes. Obviously.’
My mouth falls open. ‘But – but –’ I say. ‘Why?’
He laughs. ‘Why? Because it’s like you said. You’re …’ He gestures towards me. ‘You. I know you didn’t do what you did to hurt me.’
‘But I don’t see how you could ever trust me again,’ I say. ‘I could never trust me again, if someone did what I did.’
‘Indie.’ He twists enough so our faces are parallel.
‘You fooled me into thinking you actually wanted to toss overpriced organic salads for a living, okay? That was convincing. You fooled me about the curse, and Tyler, and my dad, but you can’t fake the way you look at me.
’ His eyes sparkle playfully. ‘I know you like me. For real.’
Warmth pools in my stomach, a flush of embarrassment heating my cheeks.
‘I’ve known way before tonight,’ he continues. ‘Before you called me after prom, before you jumped me on my couch—’
‘I did not jump you—’
‘—that you feel the exact same way I do. The way I have ever since you defended Rick’s honour on your first day of work.
’ The weight of his gaze is so intense, I can feel the physical pressure of it settling on my shoulders.
Something in me is going to catch fire. Max’s voice drops to a low murmur. ‘Tell me I’m wrong.’
Wrong? Max has been wrong about so many things these past few weeks. I have been wrong about even more. But how I feel about him?
I close the space between us, my mouth meeting his.
Max reaches up for my face and pulls me in until our chests collide, electricity humming wherever our skin touches.
All the questions, all the disbelief, melts.
For once, I’m not worried about Max’s teeth elongating, his nails ripping holes in my skin, how he’ll break, just because I love him.
All I care about is how right this is. Him, being here with me.
He leans back for a breath, his forehead touching mine. ‘So, does that mean I’m right, orrr—’
‘You’re right, okay,’ I say. ‘I like you. God.’
Max smiles softly. ‘Thought so.’