Chapter 44
Tomorrow, I think. Tomorrow. Tomorrow’s the end.
I wander through the bookstore after seeing Honey and my parents out, panic building inside me.
Tomorrow, they won’t be my books. Tomorrow, they won’t be my bluecaps.
It won’t be my cat to name, my turnip leaves to brew, my fire to spark to life.
Tomorrow. The word is an incoming tide, beating against my mind: tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
What’ll happen to Sasha, to Amaritha? Will they write me letters once I’ve gone? Or will they become so caught up in their lives that they forget after a while?
What’ll happen to the princes? Will they all simply leave once I’m gone?
What will happen to Bash? my mind whispers, and the despair rises inside me.
He vanished today; what if I never see him again?
What if the sorcerer lifts the curse and my parents bundle me away tomorrow morning, and I never even have the chance to say goodbye?
Were we going to kiss before my parents arrived?
Was I finally going to kiss someone because I wanted to, and not because it was my royal duty? Will I ever have the chance again?
Did all the kisses not work because I didn’t want them to?
I pace to the front door and pull it open, place my hand against the invisible barrier, and look out into the night.
It ought by rights to be storming, or at least overcast; that would be appropriate, given my mood.
But the air is cold and pure, and the moon is bright in the sky.
It was summer when I arrived; it’s nearly winter now.
Bash, I think. Please come back so I can say goodbye. Come back, even to let me see you one last time.
Nothing happens, of course. I’m not speaking magic words, incanting some powerful spell; I’m not doing anything other than feeling sorry for myself, and regretting not having leaned into him a little faster earlier today.
Although, if I had, Mother would have walked in on me actually kissing someone, not just nearly about to kiss someone.
Only the great green dragon herself knows what would have happened if she’d seen that: Immediate, lifelong imprisonment, probably.
For him and for me. There’s simply no way she’d have let me have that one pure moment of my own.
I’m not meant to have moments of my own.
These few months: They’re the closest I’ve ever come to freedom.
And tomorrow, they’ll be gone, too. I should have just kissed him, and to hell with the consequences.
Because the consequences would have been the same no matter what, and now I’ll be leaving—as I was always going to, in the end—without having even had that to take with me.
I let my forehead rest against the barrier between me and the outside world, the odd sensation of resting my weight against nothing, and then step back and close the door.
I return to the desk and sit, and pull my ledger toward myself.
Every sale has been recorded. All monies that have gone in and out since I first took over have been tracked.
My accounts are balanced. There’s plenty to leave for whoever comes next, even once I pay Honey back for the money she paid out when I was first cursed.
I draw a line under the final sale, my last sale, in blue ink—for no reason beyond giving myself a sense of a resolution, no matter how small.
The door opens, and I shoot to my feet. It’s him, of course, standing there, looking a little less collected than usual.
“You came back?” I say.
“I…did,” he says, but doesn’t step inside, doesn’t close the door. I don’t move, either.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he says.
“They brought a sorcerer,” I say. “They’re breaking the curse tomorrow. I was afraid I’d have to leave without…without seeing you again.”
“I shouldn’t be here,” he says again.
“I’m glad you came,” I say.
“Tandy,” he says, and then pauses.
“When Mother asked if you were my lover,” I begin, and he blushes.
I swallow. My hands are shaking so I stuff them into my pockets.
“I said no, but I want you to know, I—” I look around a little wildly.
“I think I’m in love with you and I wanted you to…
to know. In case I don’t get to tell you again. ”
“You’re not in love with me,” he says, a little sadly. “You like me. I give you something to think about. I annoy you. I tease you. I push your boundaries a little. I don’t think you’ve had much of any of that before. That’s not love. That’s just…novelty.”
I’ve never read a book where someone confessed her feelings to someone else, and that person told them, very gently, that they didn’t actually feel that way.
I don’t know what one is meant to say to someone who doesn’t believe you.
I’ve read too many tragic romances. Usually, the one person confesses their love, and the other sweeps them up for a single night of passion, always frustratingly left un-narrated, and when the scene resumes they wake the next morning thinking they have their whole lives ahead of them, together, when really, an evil duke is about to come abduct her and keep her locked in a tower for the next forty-five years, or he’ll have to return to his kingdom and marry the nice, sensible girl his parents have earmarked for him, the only way to keep two kingdoms from war.
But no one ever confesses her feelings only to have the other person deny them.
That’s not a sweeping tragic romance. That’s just a little everyday heartbreak.
“Those are reasons that I like you,” I say, balling my hands into fists in my pockets, willing him to believe me.
“But I love you because you’re smart and you’re interesting and you’re funny and you smell nice and you feel good.
And you make me happy.” I look down at the surface of my desk, willing myself not to cry.
He’s silent, but I can hear him breathing, hard. I look up and find him watching me, his expression careful. Guarded.
“I don’t mind if you don’t love me,” I say. “That’s not…Why would you? But please believe me when I tell you how I feel.”
The silence stretches between us.
“Why do you think I wouldn’t love you?” he finally says.
That, thankfully, is a straightforward question.
“I’ve never done anything,” I say. “You’ve traveled to the ends of the earth.
You stole something so precious, so powerful, from a sea witch that she cursed you to be eternally afraid of the sea, the thing you’ve loved since before you knew what love is.
My life is so small, compared to yours.” I wave a hand at the darkened shop.
“This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me, and it’s four stories and a nest of bluecaps. ”
He smiles, a little sadly. “I don’t know how you can even think that,” he says.
“You’re the kindest, most generous person I’ve ever known.
Every person who meets you falls in love with you.
Why do you think those seven idiots keep hanging around?
It’s certainly not because this town has anything else worthwhile to keep them busy. They all live in hope.”
“They do not,” I say, aghast. “They all have to stay because Driz is staying!”
“And why do you think His Most Worshipful Loudmouth is staying?”
“We’re friends.”
He ducks his head. “Plus, you’ll be less impressed when you learn what I stole from the sea witch. My abiding hope is that you’ll leave before I’m forced to confess.”
He’s trying to distract me. I won’t be distracted.
“I want you to stay tonight. With me,” I say, desperation making me bold.
“Tandy,” he says, trailing off.
“They’re breaking the curse tomorrow,” I say. “Don’t you see? I’ll lose everything.”
“You won’t lose anything. You’ll be free.”
“I have more freedom inside here than I ever did out there. Please stay. Please let me have something that’s just mine, that no one can take away from me.”
“Tandy,” he says, for a third time. There’s some little magic in saying a name three times, I dimly recall, but this is something else.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” I say, feeling whatever boldness, whatever madness had impelled me to speak, begin to ebb. He doesn’t want to stay. Why would he?
“It’s not that I don’t want to be here. With you,” he says. “There’s nothing I want more.”
Hope flares inside me, wild and hot.
“But how can I? Before now…before today, it was easy to think, to pretend, it was just us.” He gestures between us. “The games we played, that they were just that; two people, irrespective of the rest of the world. It was foolish of me to think, to forget, that it wouldn’t last, it couldn’t.”
“It is just us, right now,” I say.
He shifts, glances around, then back at me. “Do you know what you’re asking?” he says, a little hoarsely.
“Yes,” I say, stepping forward. “I’m asking you to stay because I want you here.
I want to kiss you, and I want to fall asleep with you, and I want to wake up with you still there.
You, that’s all; I want you.” And then, tomorrow, my shop will fill with my parents and Honey and the sorcerer and the hundred curious folk who always seem to appear at catastrophic moments, and the sorcerer will break the curse, and I’ll leave and never know what it was that I could have done to break the curse.
I’ll get to live the rest of my life, wondering what my heart’s desire really was, and whether I’d have found it eventually.
“If you don’t want to stay,” I say, “of course that’s fine. But if you do…”
“If I do,” he says, very quietly, “and I stay, and you leave tomorrow, then I lose even more than I am already going to.”
I close my eyes. Of course, he’s right. If he cares, if he has so much as a single warm feeling for me, then staying with me one last night will only make it hurt more when I leave. He doesn’t have to be in love with me to be unhappy to see me go.
I sit down on the stairs, the step I think of as his spot, where he’s lounged a hundred times, where we almost kissed, and put my face in my hands. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t even think…I just wanted you to be here with me, and I didn’t think about how it would affect you.”
I hear him move, feel him sit beside me and put his arm around my shoulders.
I lean into him and try to calm myself; this is enough, isn’t it?
This is enough to take away tomorrow. I’ll enter into some sort of courtship eventually, marry someone somewhere, have a whole life outside of this bookstore, this moment, someday.
But the memory of the way it feels right now is at least something I’ll be able to carry around.
It’s not an entirely nice feeling, but some of it is.
“It’s not the worst thing in the world for you to practice telling people what you want, you know,” he says, lightly.
“You’re very good at accommodating yourself to everyone else’s needs.
Even here, where you haven’t got anyone’s needs to accommodate yourself to, and you certainly don’t need to, you put everyone else first anyway.
I don’t think those fools over at the inn have the first clue, really.
It’s probably quite revolutionary of me to admit that I include your parents among their number. ”
Despite myself, I snort a little. How can one feel like the lowest worm in the eight kingdoms and still be able to laugh?
“And I’m awfully glad they brought a sorcerer,” he continues.
“Though I’ll be fairly put out if they turn out to be young and attractive.
I was hoping they’d arrive with something unexpected and deeply strange.
Isn’t there meant to be some fellow who was cursed to be a dragon two hundred years ago?
The one who sits on top of a mountain and dispenses advice? ”
“He doesn’t practice magic or divination,” I say, although my head is still in my arms, crossed over my knees, and my voice is a little muffled. “Just tells people what they want to hear.”
“He wouldn’t fit in here, even if he could be tempted off his mountain.
And what if kissing you broke his curse?
By all accounts, he’s quite happy being a sage old lizard on top of a mountain.
Then you’d still be stuck here, the wise old dragon would be back to being a boring old nobody, and your mother would still be furious. ”
I smile into my arms and will myself to sit up. If he’s teasing me, perhaps everything is fine and we can pretend I’m not the world’s biggest ass for one last night, and he can talk nonsense for a while longer and then sneak out with a pocketful of dust bunnies.
He still has his arm around me; we’re very close, close enough now that I can smell his faint, human scents under the smell of seawater. “Bash,” I say, sitting up to look him in the eyes, taking a deep breath.
“Tandy,” he says, taking my chin gently between his fingers so I can’t turn away, “I can tell you’re about to apologize to me for something absolutely ridiculous and I’m going to warn you, if the words ‘I’m sorry’ come out of your mouth, I will leave.”
“I, uh,” I say, and stop. The heat from his fingers is scalding. I wonder if he’ll leave fingerprints.
“Go if you have to. Don’t go if you don’t want to,” I finally say. “I understand if staying is too hard, but”—I swallow—“I want you to stay. If you want to.”
He smiles, a little wanly. “Have you enjoyed a single one of those kisses you’ve had planted on you?” he says.
“I, uh,” I say, a little taken aback. “No.” I pause. “Maybe one of them, a little.”
“I think we all enjoyed that one. But my point is: I would like to kiss you,” he says, and I feel heat creep into my cheeks. “But I won’t, because you deserve to kiss someone you actually want to kiss.”
“I pretended it was you,” I say, and that, I realize for the first time, is the truth. “When Calla kissed me.”
“She’s probably a better kisser than I am,” he says.
“But I’d rather kiss you,” I say, my heart beating so wildly in my chest I can hear it roaring in my ears. I’m shaking.
“Kiss me and I’ll stay,” he says, very softly.
I kiss him.