12. Four Days Until Bonding #3
How many women have been led through these doors in white dresses or silk gowns, their hands tucked into the arms of men with the same dark hair and sharp faces as Carrson? How many times has this room been transformed for a celebration like the one waiting for us in two nights?
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Sam asks softly.
Pretty isn’t a big enough word. Suddenly I get why Patrice needed to know what song I want for my entrance.
This house isn’t being prepared for a party.
It’s being prepared for a ritual.
For everyone in The Order to watch Carrson Ashford walk me into the center of his world and place me beside him, where there will be nowhere left to hide and no easy way to get back out.
In the mirrors, my reflection stands with Sam at my side.
But farther down the room, repeated again and again in the gold-framed glass, I’m already alone.
There’s air. I see it in the flutter of a leaf, in the way one of the workers’ collar lifts and then falls, but none of it reaches my lungs. A bead of sweat races from my hairline to my chin. My vision doubles, and this time it’s not a trick of the mirrors.
“Sam,” I say. The word barely leaves my mouth. “Samantha,” I try again, clutching at her hand.
“What—are you okay?” It takes her all of two seconds to recognize that I’m panicking. She takes my arm, drags me down a short corridor filled with boxes while my heart tries to crawl out of my throat.
She bursts through a swinging door, and we’re outside. Blessedly alone beneath the open sky, with birdsong all around us. Sam releases me.
I put my palms on my knees and bend over, gulping air in through my nose and out through my mouth.
“I—I can’t, can’t do it,” I gasp.
“What? Can’t do what? Bond with Carrson?” Sam’s hand comes to my back, rubbing circles. “Laurel, you love him. I can tell.”
“I do.” I bend farther over, trying to slow my breath the way Mom taught me when I was little and worked myself into a panic before a test. “I love him.”
“Then what?” Sam asks. “The ball? You dance, make small talk, smile at people you don’t know. It’s not that bad. I can help.”
“No.” My stomach clenches. I shut my eyes against the gray stone beneath my feet, concentrating on making the words come out right. “It’s not the party. It’s what comes after. Back at Ashford House.”
“The bonding?”
“The sealing. I can’t.” The words don't want to come out. Saying them makes the whole thing more real, turns it from a horror I can keep tucked away in the back of my mind into reality. “I can’t have sex in front of everyone. I just can’t. It’s too invasive. Too much.”
Sam’s hand stays on my back, though the circles have stopped.
“I know it’s a big deal to you,” she says, “but you have to remember that we aren’t as inhibited about sex here in The Order. It’s not something that makes us uncomfortable.”
I hold on to the anger that pushes through the panic because it’s easier to breathe that way.
“You don’t get it,” I snap at her, then wince when she draws back. Guilt follows, because none of this is her fault. She’s trying to make it easier. Trying to explain the world she grew up in.
“I want Carrson,” I say, rubbing my upper arms though there’s no breeze. “We’ve already been together like that. I trust him.”
Sam tilts her head, listening.
“The problem is that I want to keep it private. Just for us.” I swallow, looking down at the ivy twisting through the cracks in the stone. “I don’t want anyone else seeing him when he forgets to be guarded. I don’t want Jackson watching. Or Carr. Or people I barely know.”
The back of my throat stings as the picture solidifies. Hundreds of people standing around us. Watching me take off my clothes. Watching Carrson enter me. Waiting to see whether I make a sound. Whether I want it enough. Whether my body reacts the way they think it should.
What are the rules for something like that?
Am I supposed to pretend I’m not scared? Am I supposed to be aroused? And if I can’t be, if fear turns my body cold and I freeze beneath all those eyes, what will they decide that means? Will they see it as weakness? Use my failure as a weapon against Carrson?
“I don’t want them to see me with him either.” My voice has begun to tremble. “You may not see it the same way, Sam, but I was raised to believe some things should be private. Reserved.”
“It’s not just the sex.” Sam looks back toward the ballroom. “The sealing makes it public.”
“It makes it theirs,” I say. “I want to keep it ours. Carrson and mine.”
“It’ll still be yours.” Her eyebrows pinch together. “Of course, it will.”
“Will it? Or will it haunt us?” I search for the right words, because this is the part she doesn’t understand.
“Once they’ve watched us, we can’t take it back.
Later, when it’s only Carrson and me again, I’ll remember them watching.
I don’t know how I’m supposed to let Carrson touch me afterward without wondering whether I’m ever really alone with him again.
” I look back toward the house, the ballroom, the future that waits for me.
“What if that one time ruins us forever?”