CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
His lips pressed warm against mine. I drew in a sharp breath at the sudden contact, melting as my body realized what was happening.
At my hesitation, he pulled away. I chased his mouth with mine, lifting to my tiptoes to capture his kiss, to make this moment last. I snaked my arm around his neck, burying my hands in his hair, and he gasped.
Energy coursed down my limbs as all I could think about was my hunger for him, and his hunger for me.
His hands tentatively wrapped tighter around my waist. My heartbeat pounded against my ribcage, and I pressed myself against him.
He tore himself away, panting. I leaned in for more, but he took a small step back.
A giddy headiness flooded my senses.
“I have to know,” Thom said, his voice raspy in a way that sent tingles down my spine. “Why did you cancel your wedding?”
I blinked. “I loved him. But I needed…” My mind raced as I tightened my grip on him. “I needed this. I needed you.”
He gently took my hand from the back of his neck, bringing it in front of him, clasping it with both hands. A breeze wove its way through the open air now between us, making me shiver. He lifted one hand to gently rub my chin. Pain sparked in his eyes.
“That’s not the answer I hoped for.”
He dropped my chin.
My nostrils flared. I threw his hands aside. “So I failed your test, did I?”
His eyes widened. “No, that’s not what I—”
“What was all of this? Another one of your experiments? An act of charity for a commoner?” My voice rose, my anger rising like a tidal wave beneath it.
“No, Lyra—”
“How dare you. You look at me, at all of us—me, David, Papa—and you think that we are small. Commoners incapable of making our own decisions. As if because we have little to our name, that we are less. You’ve always thought that.
” I shook my head. “From the moment I met you, you have made that clear to me.”
Confusion filled his eyes and I relished it.
“The first time we met was at this pond. My father had died that day. You told me to move.”
He wrinkled his brow. “I don’t remember that.”
I nodded, a bitter laugh falling from my mouth. “You wouldn’t.”
“I swear I don’t—”
“And then Asha,” I went on. “You enjoyed reminding me how poor of a job I’d done as her guardian. How it was my fault she was hurt. How I was merely her aunt.”
“That’s not what I—”
“You tore Ella away from your brother, didn’t you? Spirits forbid her common blood soil your family line—”
“That’s not—”
“And then there was your insult in the library.”
His eyes flashed. “Oh, yes the library, where you flaunted your engagement? Where you let me know just how taken you were after flirting with me—”
“I flirted with you?”
“—for months, making me fall unbearably in love with someone who could never be mine.”
Silence rang between us, his chest heaving as if our kiss had never ended.
My eyes flicked down to his lips, and his to mine.
“I’m sorry to have caused you so much strife,” he muttered. His fingers reached for my hand, and my heart fluttered once more at the contact. But instead of grasping it in mine, his fingers latched onto my engagement ribbon, tugging on it so it rose between us.
He gave me a meaningful look. “This is why I can’t.”
Loathing smoldered within me. “I don’t understand you.”
He leaned forward and then hesitated, as if to kiss my head before thinking better of it.
“I want you to. I desperately want you to.” His head tilted left.
There, water rose once more, levitating in the air, twirling and swirling in magical movement.
I barely spared it a glance. “You’re doing that thing where you think you know better than me,” I said.
He shook his head. “There are some things you can only know for yourself, Lyra.” He stepped away. “I’ll be gone tomorrow. But I’ll write to you regularly. Let me know how your studies go. Find a proper master—someone better than I. I wish you all the luck in the world.”
I refused to meet his eyes.
“Did you ever get that parchment to rip?”
At my silence, his footsteps crunched on fallen leaves which faded in the distance. I watched my water pillar rotating in the air, at least twenty feet high.
Almost at the heavens.