Chapter 16 #2
There is no warmth in me as I consider him, waiting for more explanation, waiting for some reason I should care about any of this performance between us.
“I didn’t intentionally ignore you,” he adds, but the flush on his cheeks says otherwise. “I was just… preoccupied and didn’t have a moment…”
His lie trails off.
I know it’s a lie. Not just because of the shame on his cheeks, but because Father wouldn’t have rejected any offers until the one with Dray was officially cemented. The final contracts signed.
And I know my father was here at the academy just this week, on Monday, and he was here to deal with those contracts.
The smile that tugs the corners of my mouth is sleek. “When?”
Eric’s brows lift. “What?”
“When did my father officially decline your offer?”
“Before the ball.”
The smile fades from my lips.
I don’t believe him.
Maybe my father did pull the trigger prematurely, maybe he didn’t and Eric is a liar.
I find I don’t care either way.
Eric tries to deflect, and the attempt is so obvious that it’s lame, “Rumours spread around the ball. Gossip, probably, but I heard from a few that Dray has your contract.”
A shrug jerks my shoulders. “All I know is Asta’s contract is open to the gentry.” The look I shoot at him is unkind. “How fortunate for some.”
Eric’s jaw tightens.
He shifts around the windowsill to face me. His boots plant on the floor as he slumps against the frosted glass. “You blame me for this mess?”
I stare at him, unflinching.
Eric is much smarter than I gave him credit for.
Darker than I saw before, but I see now in his deceptively soft eyes and the lie of his kind face.
“I think you leveraged,” I say, firm.
His face shutters.
“I think,” I start and pull myself up to sit on the table’s edge, “that you leveraged your favour with me, and that got under Asta’s skin, and so she was in her father’s ear, and you invited me along to play snowmen, right under Dray’s nose…
while you knew how he felt, but I didn’t.
I think you are a bigger player at the table than you let on. ”
Slowly, his face hardens to steel.
Muscle by muscle, emotion fades away, until his expression is a vault.
But I’m not finished. “You, Eric Harling, are of a fallen family, are you not? It makes sense that you have the skills, the social playbook. What I don’t like is that you used me.”
“Used you…” He scoffs. “You offered—”
“What?” I bite, my teeth bared. “I offered what?”
“It was you who prompted me—”
“To fuck me?”
He turns his hot cheek to me, but not hot with shyness or embarrassment. Hot with a silent anger in him, stirring and stirring.
“That was me,” I agree. “I used you—but in a different way. I wanted to position you as my future. Someone I thought was kind. But the way you used me…” My stare darkens as the tension in my body turns me to stone.
“You put me in Dray’s warpath, and Asta’s, even more than I already was, and you did it knowing the impact on me, the threats I would face, all while wearing the lovely smile of the charming suitor.
I was a pawn—” My mouth curls around the rest “—that was already fractured, and you pushed for more damage. That is who you are, Eric Harling.”
I push off the table and take a step towards him.
His gaze follows me. “I didn’t invite you here to talk. I asked you to meet me, for this.” He reaches for the satchel on the windowsill. “The New Year gift. It doesn’t seem right to keep it.”
My eyes roll back, and a scoff snares in my throat.
That’s bullshit if I ever heard it.
He went out of his way to return cologne?
Please.
He just doesn’t like the way this conversation is going, he expected much less from me, and that was his backup excuse.
“I don’t want it,” I say, and that stills his hand over the buckle of the satchel. “Burn it, wear it, bury it—I honestly couldn’t care less.”
His mouth tightens and he lifts his gaze to me. “It’s a generous gift.”
There’s no gratitude in the way he says it.
“So wear it on a generous day,” I retort, a smirk slithering over my lips, “when the stars shine brightest for you.”
And how bright they will shine on the undeserving.
I don’t add that last part.
I don’t need to.
The look on my face is enough.
Under the dim light, his tanned complexion is a bit darker, and his eyes swirl like cinnamon. Even his ordinary brown hair takes a shine like honey.
Yet I find he’s nowhere near as handsome as I remember him to be.
His murmur is sarcastic, low, and yet I hear it—
“What it must be like…”
I arch a brow. “Pardon?”
That gaze of his darkens. He rolls his tongue around his cheek, then straightens up. “To be so frivolous.”
The bitter, curt laugh jolts me.
That cologne was only around ￡2,000, if I remember right.
I decide now that Eric Harling will make for a cheap husband who cries over pennies.
Poor Asta.
My smile is tight as I push into a backstep, leaning my weight away from him.
The glare he returns to me is cold.
Bet he expected me to be so different coming here, crying over our failed attempts to be together, yearning for him, all that nonsense.
Bet he thought he mattered to me.
I turn on my heels and stalk for the door.
I pause at the desk to snatch my bag back, then look over my shoulder at him.
“Oh, one more thing.”
Just an idea that struck me.
One I grab onto.
Eric lifts a brow, waiting.
“I expect my grades to improve this semester.”
His face furrows.
“Now that you’re being propped up with Asta, and her fortune of course, I doubt your apprenticeship is going to continue being all that important to you. But the public scandal of fucking a student?”
A flash brightens his eyes, like flares, and that jaw tenses so tight that his teeth might shatter.
“That might upset Mr Strom. And Asta. And then, maybe, you’re fired? Which is a whole other PR nightmare that could have all sorts of knock-on effects in your life.” My smile is full of malice. “Reputation is very important in our world, Eric.”
His throat bobs with a swallow, like he’s downing vicious words before he can fire them at me.
“Not too high.” I point my finger at him. “We want my grades to still be within the realm of believability.”
I sling the bag strap over my shoulder and turn my back on him.
I make it one step towards the door when Eric’s voice snakes up behind me—
“You and him are right for each other.”
My steps pause.
“I used to feel sorry for you. I thought you were kind of sweet, actually. But you and him are the same.”
I hmph a noise that’s nothing less than ‘whatever’ and leave him to sit in the dim light, alone.
There’s not so much as an ounce of regret in me as I stalk through the corridors, back to the main staircase.
I am absolute in the things I said to him.
My mind was a whirl of chaos for my return to Bluestone this semester, but day by day, I’ve peeled threads apart from the knotted mess, and I’ve understood more and more with each bit of untangling done.
Eric is one of those threads.
His motivations were so clear.
‘A lot of people around here think that… We expected that Dray would chase your contract.’
He knew then what I didn’t.
Dray wanted me.
He knew then that Dray went after those who pursued me.
But he also knew that Dray didn’t go easy on me.
Eric pushed me to join him in playing an innocent game of snowmen—but under Dray’s nose, under Asta’s nose, and he used that moment to his advantage.
All this time, he’s been playing me.
Eric just never thought I would figure it out.
I have the fleeting wonder if I’m the fool in everyone’s story, because it sure seems that way.
My cheeks swell with a violent huff, one so fierce that it billows the loose strands of hair around my face.
My ponytail bobs and sways and rattles with my determined steps down the final corridor—
And I falter.
Because at the end of the corridor, in the light of the landing between staircases, there he is.
Waiting.
Leaning against a pillar, hands in his pockets, ankles crossed, and those weary crushed glass eyes on me.
Another huff escapes me, but this one subdued, quieter, and my steps are slower now.
He watches me approach.
Doesn’t speak a word.
Just watches, and the closer I get, the better I see the faint red of his eyes, and so I know there definitely was a flask being passed around under the table in study hall.
It’s when I reach the mouth of the corridor, an arm’s reach from him, that he asks—
“Where were you?”
Such a simple question.
But nothing is simple with Dray.
“Getting told off by a master,” I say, and arch a brow. “Am I now to be told off by you? Or are you going to stick to the deal, and let me pass?”
Dray’s smile is small, fleeting. But the drink has it too fatigued, and it’s quick to fade. “I recall the details of that deal—and sass was not allowed.”
Technically he said I should behave, not that I’m banned from sassing.
But I don’t argue.
I just stare dully at him.
Dray pushes off the pillar. That single move brings him a whole step closer to me. “Is that what has you in such a sour mood?”
My neck arches just to allow me to meet his gaze. “The deal?”
His hand lifts for a strand of my hair.
Gently, he threads it through his fingers, toying with it, but his eyes are on mine. “Your grades.”
My shoulder lifts with a shrug. “Might be.”
This conversation is so utterly inconvenient right now.
Sass is rolling through me, residual bites from my lashing of Eric, and now I have to wrangle it all back—in case Dray throws me into one of the closets down the corridor and locks me in for the whole weekend.
“Your grades don’t matter too much,” he says, then slides the strand of hair out of my face, letting it settle down my temple. “It’s all just lace trim.”
I bite down on my tongue, hard.
“You would be better off spending your time on things that matter to you,” he says, soft, and I know he’s on the verge of drunk. “You could write music, or work on all those new friendships of yours—the ones you seem to be avoiding.”
My smile is small, inching far too close to the attitude I’m not supposed to have, and I add to it, “There’s no piano at Bluestone.”
His hum is gentle, distracted, as his fingers slip from my cheekbone, down to the curve of my chin.
My lips tingle under his gaze, a look that’s so familiar to me now.
I thin them, as if that’ll banish his thoughts.
All it does is lure his gaze to mine.
“You promised,” I remind him.
Unless I ask…
Quiet, he says, “Yes.” His gaze sweeps over my face, my cheekbones, my lashes, the shape of my nose, before he adds, a murmur, “I did.”
His touch is gone.
In a heartbeat, he’s leaned his weight back onto one foot, his hand departed from my face, and the only touch of him left is the tingle on my lips from the threat of a kiss, and the crushed-glass stare.
“Goodnight, Olivia.”
My lashes flutter, the surprise rooting me to the spot.
For a moment, I just stare at him—waiting for him to strike.
But he doesn’t.
He watches as I take a tentative step around him. Then another, and another, until he’s turning to trail my steps to the staircase.
He doesn’t follow, like I almost expect him to.
He doesn’t shove me down the stairs, like I sort of feared he would.
He just lets me go.