XLIII
The days after Pelican Point didn’t settle.
They calcified.
Daylight was easy to fill. Nights were not. No matter how much noise we packed into the hours between school and dark, I couldn’t outrun the appointment waiting for me every night.
The red numbers on my nightstand bled into the room.
2:58 A.M.
I sat on the edge of the bed with the blanket dragged across my lap, bare feet tucked half beneath the hem, as if that flimsy barrier could keep the hour out.
Heaton was sprawled in the chair by my desk, one leg stretched out, the other bent, a posture so lazy it circled back to threatening. The window beside him was cracked open, and cold night air moved through the room in thin currents, carrying the scent of something sweet and earthy.
Ghost Flower.
He brought the thin hand-roll to his lips. The ember glowed spectral blue, briefly carving his face from the dark in sharp planes before smoke curled back around him.
I watched him, my own anxiety a tight knot in my stomach.
“Does that really help?” I asked quietly.
He let the smoke drift from his mouth.
“It helps,” he said, “when his static is all over you.”
My spine stiffened. “Ford’s just trying to help. We should be thanking him.”
A soft, humorless laugh left him. “I don’t need his help, October.”
He leaned forward, the chair groaning beneath his weight, his eyes pinning me through the dark.
“I think you just like the attention.”
“He’s a good guy,” I said, hating how defensive I sounded. “And at least he doesn’t need to smoke his feelings away just to be in the same room as me.”
The clock flickered to 3:00 A.M.
Heaton exhaled a thin ribbon of citrus-sweet smoke toward the window.
“You know,” he said, settling deeper into the chair, “I think I finally understand the problem.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What problem?”
“This.” He gestured once with the hand holding the rolled flower. “The attitude. The mouthy responses. The constant, defiant posturing.”
His gaze moved over me from across the room, clinical enough to be insulting.
“All that untouched nervous energy with nowhere useful to go. No wonder you’re a bundle of frayed wires and misplaced aggression.”
The words hit like a slap.
For one dizzy second, all I could see was Penny in the kitchen, my own humiliation burning hot enough to make the bond stutter. He hadn’t heard the confession. He hadn’t been there.
But the tether must have carried the aftermath anyway.
The spike of embarrassment.
The heat. The awful, exposed feeling of my entire nervous system lighting up.
My face burned.
“That is really none of your damn business.”
“Unfortunately,” he countered smoothly, “your body is broadcasting through mine. Your unmanaged emotions create excess static. They make you predictable.”
A flicker of contempt moved through his eyes.
“They make you weak.”
My jaw tightened.
“Are you done?”
“No.” He turned the hand-roll once between his fingers, watching the blue ember pulse. “Look, if it’s messing things up, we need to fix it. Do I need to help you fix this?”
“That’s not—”
“It’s inconvenient, is what it is,” he said, voice dropping. “Your little crush is a problem. It’s a distraction we can’t afford.”
“It is not a crush.”
His smile was slow and awful.
“October . . . ”
The way he said it made my skin prickle.
“Every time he looks at you like that, the bond lights up. Every time you worry about him, every time you soften, every time some foolish little part of you starts reaching for him because he feels safe, I feel it.”
The room seemed to shrink around us.
“And if another man puts his hands on you while we’re still connected?” He tapped two fingers against his temple. “I’ll feel that too.”
He leaned back into the chair, the scent of blood orange and cold stone reaching me from across the room.
“So, you have two choices,” he said. “You let me take the edge off whatever this is before it keeps bleeding through the tether . . . ” His eyes moved over me, slow and merciless. “Or you learn some self-control and wait until our work here is done.”
I stared at him, my mind reeling. “You’re insane.”
“Am I?” He straightened, a cruel, knowing smile touching his lips. “Or am I the only one being honest about what this is?”
My humiliation curdled into pure spite.
“Then I’ll wait,” I snapped, my voice shaking. “I’d rather die frustrated than let you touch me like it’s a favor.”
His smile thinned.
I lifted my chin. “Or better yet, maybe I’ll find someone whose touch doesn’t come with a leash.”
The smile left his face.
For a long moment, the only sound in the room was the electric crackle of the ember between his fingers. He didn’t crush it out. He only sat there with it burning in his hand, smoke curling past his wrist in slow, pearly ribbons.
Then he stood.
“Oh, Madeline . . . ”
He crossed the room in unhurried steps, eyes too bright in the dark. He stopped beside my bed and looked down at me with a strange, analytical curiosity, like I was a problem he had finally decided to solve.
“No,” he said softly. “You won’t.”
“You sound awfully sure of yourself.”
“I am.”
His attention dropped to my mouth.
Then lifted.
“Because the moment that thought forms in your pretty little head, I’ll feel it. Not the thought itself. The chemical change. The hot spike in the bond as your heart rate accelerates and your pupils dilate.”
He leaned closer.
“I’ll taste the adrenaline on your tongue before you can even say his name.”
My throat went dry.
“That is deeply invasive.”
One corner of his mouth tipped.
“That’s biology.”
My defiance wavered beneath the weight of his certainty.
“I . . . ” I swallowed hard. “You’ve made your point.”
“Have I?”
He brought the Ghost Flower back to his mouth and took another slow drag. The tip sparked blue, lighting the angles of his face for one heartbeat before smoke slipped over them again.
The scent had become a physical presence in the room: bitter orange peel, wet soil after hard rain, something sweet and wild blooming at the edge of decay.
A promise of relief.
Every raw, overworked nerve in my body reached for it.
But I wasn’t only watching the smoke.
I was watching what it did to him.
The lazy set of his shoulders. The slower drag of breath through his chest. The blue ember at his fingertips. The shape of his mouth around the pull.
I realized too late that I hadn’t looked away.
His gaze lifted and pinned me.
“Do I need to offer, October?” His eyes danced with wicked, fractured light. “Or are you going to keep staring at it?”
Heat rushed into my face so fast it almost hurt.
“I wasn’t—”
His brow lifted.
I exhaled through my nose, annoyed enough to be honest.
“You said it takes the edge off.”
His eyes moved over my face with unnerving precision, cataloging the strain I was trying and failing to hide. The tension in my shoulders. The way my fingers had twisted into the blanket.
He saw the truth I couldn’t mask.
Dead Time had flayed me open, leaving my nervous system raw and pulsing like an exposed nerve in a cold room.
Then, without a word, he took another pull.
Longer this time.
The ember burned bright as a struck star. He held the smoke in his lungs, still as a statue in the dark, his eyes fixed on mine in a silent challenge.
Then he stepped between my knees.
One hand braced against the mattress beside my hip as he leaned over me, and the bed dipped beneath his weight. He stopped close enough for the cold of him to reach me before his hands did, a radiating chill that slipped beneath my skin and lifted every fine hair along my arms.
My pulse thudded so hard I was sure he could hear it.
His gaze dropped to my mouth.
Stayed there.
Then lifted back to my eyes.
I could have turned away.
He gave me time.
One second.
Two.
His mouth curved. Barely.
Then he closed the distance.