Chapter 49
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Receive Not a Swallow in Your House
The clouds had moved overhead at last, pregnant with moisture, such a dark gray they were nearly black. Returning to campus, I felt shaky and unsteady, like I was standing over the precipice of a steep drop.
“You shouldn’t have stopped me,” I said, anger shaking my voice. “We could’ve followed them and seen where they were hiding it. Now what? We go back and just hope we find the spot again in the entire canyon?”
Max shook his head. “Don’t do this, Cel. Not now.”
“They did something to Aaron, Max! Intimidated him, scared him, God knows what else.” I shut my eyes tight. I couldn’t let myself imagine what else.
I was terrified and frustrated. A million other emotions were all swirling around me, and I couldn’t keep them bottled up anymore. “We could have had them.”
“And what if they found us?” he said. “We were outnumbered. Even with Magic, we would’ve never gotten out of there.
I suppose you’d like to go and leave me behind again, but guess what, Cel?
Even if you don’t think you need me or anyone else, sometimes you do need people.
Especially if you want to take on a whole group—”
But something was at a breaking point. I’d swallowed my feelings this entire time here with him, shoved them into this tight little box to not dredge up things better left buried.
Now I was sick of holding them all in. And with the revelation that I was unbound, neither of us knew where we stood.
We were afraid, and I could feel it all, swirling around us.
Tears seeped from my eyes. He turned toward me, his eyes widening. “Cel?” Suddenly, we were too close. The heat of his hands was on my face, cupping my chin, holding me all together.
And I felt so stupid and embarrassed at the tears sliding down my cheeks, but I just couldn’t do it any longer.
“Of course, I fucking need you,” I half-laughed and half-sobbed. “I need you every second of every day. But I’m terrified to need you. I don’t want to need you, but I do all the same.”
And I guess that was all he needed to hear because then his warm lips were on my freezing mouth. His hands tangled in my hair and clutched my waist like I might fly away if he didn’t hold me tightly enough. I leaned into him, hands running up his chest, drinking him in.
Tears rained down my cheeks, but for the first time in what felt like forever, something actually felt like it made sense. Our Magic hummed together, reunited at last, and I felt so safe, so warm, so right.
Then he pulled away. “I can’t.”
What? “We’re two halves of a freaking Magical soul, Max. We’re meant to be together.”
He shook his head and walked toward the cliff at the edge of the parking lot. Behind the clouds, the sun was setting over the horizon, and it lit up the canyon with flecks of gold. But all I felt were the coming shadows and the chill from the storm clouds overhead.
“I spent so long wanting you, Cella, and now you pick this moment? You left without a word. Hell, you tried everything you could to tear yourself away from me. You didn’t give a shit then, so what makes it different now?”
Was it really some great mystery to him why I’d left? I walked over to him and put my hands against the metal railing. “You slept with someone else.”
He kicked the ground. Rocks scattered and clattered down into the canyon below.
“I seem to remember quite clearly you telling me we should just be friends, that getting closer would ‘interfere’ with the Magic. Mind you, this was after we’d slept together three times. How do you think that made me feel?”
“Well, I—”
“I was in love with you, Cel. You have to know that. And then you just left me behind. Vanished. Poof, like that. You’re always leaving me behind.
And, you know, I think I finally understand why it all feels so goddamn familiar, why you care so much about saving Dani.
The similarities are so blinding I don’t know why I didn’t see it before.
The unbinding, all that time you spent with Jamie and the others.
You hated being a dimidium so much that you were in exactly the same place as Dani—willing to try whatever experimental spell, in whatever book you could get your hands on, to separate yourself from me.
I can’t help but think you’d be right here in Dani’s shoes if you were at school now. ”
“I wanted to separate myself from your Magic,” I said quietly. “Not from you.”
He shook his head. “I see no difference. You had to know how it would’ve made me feel, or you wouldn’t have been doing it in secret. Jesus, I was in love with a girl who hated being my dimidium so much that she nearly killed herself to get rid of me. Can you imagine how pathetic that feels?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Tears stung my eyes, and I wiped them with the back of my hand.
“But is it so wrong to want something on my own for once? I was sick of living in the shadow of the great Max Middlemore, of having every one of my accomplishments tied to you. Especially when you didn’t give a shit about Magic to begin with. ”
“Of course I cared about Magic! Why would I have studied it for years and years? But whatever you could use to justify moving a thousand miles away without a thought as to what it’d do to me, you did.
You didn’t give a shit about how it would affect me when you took my Magic away, too.
All I ever had was Magic. I didn’t know how else to help my family, and you went and took it away.
Dad can’t work anymore, and Mama’s sick to death taking care of him all the time. ”
“They only ever needed you, Max, not your Magic.” I took a breath. “And I didn’t want to be your dimidium, but that didn’t mean I didn’t care for you because I did. I do.”
My voice broke, and the sky opened up at last. Rain drenched our clothes, our hair. It washed all the sweat and makeup from my skin.
“I wanted you, Cella. Every messy, gritty, wonderful part of you. And I’ve been beating my brains out this whole time trying to make you believe that I’m not some anchor tying you down, holding you back from uncovering the mysteries of the world.
I didn’t want to be the anchor, I wanted to be right there on that ship with you.
Can you really say you wanted that, too? Have you ever wanted that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and the rain and my tears were mixing in my eyes. For a second, my vision blurred as my contact slid out of place, and I could barely see him. Maybe that was good; it all hurt too much.
“I was young and hurt,” I said. “I was stupid.”
I was supposed to be like Ellendale, with a score of books published under my name, the next great Magical theorem discovered, spells and research and accolades.
But after Aaron died, I couldn’t even look at myself anymore without thinking of all the things I’d missed as I tried to become great.
After he died, I ran so far from Magic that I could barely feel it anymore.
Since I’d left, my life had been a study in shades of gray.
And now I was back here, where life was a burst of red, the cherry-red of Max’s cheeks when he laughed too hard, the rust-colored hills, the apples in the orchard, the clay and sand and dust over the buttes and mesas.
The colors all melding together like the blood of the earth, and the Magic underneath its warm, beating heart.
“You’ve never been stupid in your life, Cel,” he murmured.
And I knew he was right, that I’d made this decision. I’d made it years ago and had stuck by it every day since. As we looked at each other, we both knew it.
There was no Magic to make us work, to fix all the things that were broken between us.
I opened my mouth once, twice, and he waited for my reply, always waiting on me, but that was it. His eyes left mine. I saw it in the way his shoulders turned away from me. He was tired of waiting.
He opened the door to his truck and turned the ignition, and I slid down to the ground and held myself, trying to keep it all in. Trying to hold myself like a bandage so I didn’t fall apart.