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Daniel knocked on my door again in what must have been the middle of the night, so lightly that if I’d been asleep I might have missed it. Of course I wasn’t.
“Can’t sleep?” Daniel asked mildly, when I got up silently to let him in. His face was split by the shadow of the hallway and the light coming from my room, half of it invisible. I couldn’t help the adrenaline spike. It was late. The others were all in bed. I could start shouting and wake them all up again, claim Daniel wouldn’t stop pestering me, put everyone in a vile mood that would carry on through til morning. Two rows in one night might be pushing it, but I needed to push it. And it was dangerous for me to be alone with Daniel just now.
I stepped back into my room and said, “Yeah. Want to chat?”
There is something intoxicating about the truth, more and more when it’s hidden, shared only between a few people. Like the alcove where Daniel and I had kissed, a place just for us. A secret is as good as a hard drink. Alone it can become nothing but a conduit for misery, but Daniel and I shared it, the knowledge of who I was, easy and comfortable as passing a bottle of whiskey back and forth. And just like sharing a drink with him, this was a mistake, one I couldn’t help but keep making.
He followed me in and shut the door. I could nearly smell the mint again, feel the brush of ivy along my shoulder. “I can’t sleep either,” he said, spoken like a confession. “I suspected you might be in a similar predicament. I thought we might do some studying. I find I don’t work as well in solitude. I know you’ve been struggling with your thesis. Perhaps a change of pace might help.” He gave me a flicker of a smile, quick as a candle flame. “Or we could play piquet.”
“Maybe,” I said, hedging. I didn’t know what he wanted; I just knew whatever it was I shouldn’t give it to him. “I’ve got a headache, though. Don’t think I’ll get much done.”
“Well, then,” said Daniel. “You won’t be any worse off than usual, surely.” He stepped closer to me, close enough to touch, and I had to fight not to let my shoulders rise, not to twitch my hand for my gun, taped to the bedside table not three feet away.
“I guess,” I said, still mulish.
The edges of Daniel’s mouth curved. He put his hands to the buttons of my pajama top and began to undo them, neat and careful. His motions were so steady and casual and bizarrely familiar feeling that for a moment I stood frozen, not reacting at all.
His eyes came up to meet mine. Daniel held my gaze the way a speaker or a politician or a king can hold a crowd, me standing there riveted by nothing I could name, until the shirt was open to my navel. Then he did look down, and back up, an eyebrow raised. The mike was in the same place he’d seen it earlier today, clipped to my bra. He wasn’t checking me out: he was making a point.
I raised an eyebrow back. We’d already had this conversation. I’d made my points. Had he changed his mind? Come to try to make sure whoever was on the other end of the mike knew I’d been burned?
He finished unbuttoning my shirt, and touched the wire coming out of the bandage on my side, running his first finger and thumb up and down its length. An offer. That was intoxicating too, him holding a hand out to draw me further in, into our own little garden.
I shook my head. I knew that I couldn’t be off the record with him. Not anymore. For all my fuckups, I still knew that much.
That was when I should’ve kicked him out. I would barely have needed to lie; I could have acted like he’d made a pass at me and called him a pervert and thrown the whole house into midnight chaos. This wasn’t safe, but it made my heart speed up and my mouth go dry and it was fun, to play this game with him. It was fun and it was necessary in a natural, bone-deep way, like taking a deep breath after a run, like finding my feet under me again after throwing myself into a cartwheel. I didn’t want to kick him out. I wanted to see what hand he was going to play next.
“I admit,” he said, “I was also wondering if we can’t reach an agreement about our earlier discussion.” He was toying with one of my buttons now. Every time I breathed out the skin of my belly pressed against his knuckles.
I met his eyes. They were dark and endless, an abyss I could lose myself in. “I don’t think so,” I said.
He nodded, accepting this, and then he put his hands on my waist. I never thought of Daniel as the graceful one, but he walked me back to my bed just like he was leading me in a dance. It never occurred to me not to follow.
If he thought I was going to go quietly to my own murder he didn’t know me at all. But he only sat me down gently at the edge of the bed, and trailed his hand unbearably lightly from my waist up to my collarbones. His fingers ghosted up my neck.
Absently, I said, “What is that rot you’re reading, anyway?”
“Anne Finch again,” he said in an even voice. “Don’t take your bad mood out on her,” and he tilted my face up with a thumb at my chin, fingers along my jaw. I bared my teeth at him.
I knew by then the move he’d picked. He wouldn’t try to burn me into the microphone again. He wasn’t going to say my name or tell me again about the onions. Daniel wanted me to give myself away. He had with his typical unerring shrewdness identified my worst possible opponent and his best possible weapon: myself.
He bent his head, then, to kiss me, tipping my chin up to meet him. I sat deathly still, heart pounding and mind racing. He kissed me soft this time, with none of the sweet viciousness of last night. I missed it, just like he meant, and I didn’t kiss him back. Before there had been all the wide night around us, birds and the trickle of the stream and drunken revelry to at least give the illusion of cover. Frank might or might not have heard us, but just now I had nothing to hide behind; I had to measure my every breath to be sure the wire didn’t pick up too much.
Frank was pissed at me now. He’d use any ammunition he could get to really fuck up my life once this was all over. But I wasn’t thinking about that, not really, not about the fate of my career or even about Sam. When this was all over was as faint and distant as a song I’d heard in another life. I just didn’t want to share this with anyone else. It was mine, that kiss and all that came after it; it was ours.
Our noses brushed when he pulled away, and even that touch felt like a shock, strong and heady. Daniel pressed his lips just beneath the hinge of my jaw then, dry and silent. I breathed out evenly, imagining us sitting companionably beside each other on my bed, a book in each of our laps. I tried to imagine it so hard Frank would see it in his cramped little room in Rathowen station, so vividly that he’d get disgusted with us prissy academic types and fall asleep.
Daniel kissed his way down my neck, strangely neat and chaste. Somehow that only made it more electric. I wanted him to open his mouth and bite down. He was getting just what he wanted, making me wish he would touch me less delicately, with the same tender ferocity he’d had in the garden, when part of him still thought I could have been Lexie.
“Lexie,” he said into the still air. The name made me want to jump straight out of my skin. “You’ve been strange, lately. I won’t pretend not to have noticed. You would tell me if there was something wrong, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said. My heartbeat was going hard, and felt like it must be as good as a siren blaring into the mike. “I already did. My hangover.”
“I know it’s been difficult.” He was speaking in a low voice against my neck, just where it met my shoulder. “I worry about you.” I bet he did.
The bed frame creaked every time I shifted my weight. I nearly laughed, remembering how impressed I’d been at the thought of Lexie getting pregnant in this bed. It shouldn’t have been funny, but it was, it really was. It was funny the way everything is, when you’re with someone you love.
“You sound like Justin. Are you going to try to feed me soup next?” I breathed out hard, an annoyed little huff. It helped, a bit. “Will you just shut up already? Let me read, I was finally starting to get somewhere.”
Daniel stepped back then, and I nearly made a sound at the loss of him. He offered me a hand like he was a suitor asking me to dance. I stood up without taking it. That didn’t bother him; with that same strange grace he folded himself to his knees. Lexie’s pajama bottoms were a little loose on me still. He eased them down my legs without any trouble, and I stepped out of them. We moved easily together. It was all perfectly natural, like moving in a dream: it’s only when you wake up that you realize none of it made any sense.
I stood there in Lexie’s bedroom in my underwear and bra and open pajama top; and, of course, the battery pack taped to my chest. I raised a hand to Daniel’s cheek. He didn’t move into or away from the touch, even when I slid his glasses off his nose and leaned over to set them on the bedside table. He just let me do it. He didn’t look vulnerable without them; his eyes were just as heavy. If anything, he looked more like himself, like the part he didn’t show to the world.
All those other undercovers who went off, who slid into the kind of lives they were pretending to live and got stuck there, I wonder if they each had a moment like this: when they did the wrong thing and knew it. You can explain away plenty if you try, to yourself and to the world, but even as I did it I couldn’t explain this. I let Daniel touch me because I wanted it. Sure, it kept him away from the others, it bought me time, maybe information—all that was nothing. It hurt not to have his hands on me, and the bastard knew it. We both did.
He splayed his hands out wide on my hips. The way Daniel looked up at me wasn’t lecherous or appreciative or even assessing. It was worse than that, so much worse. He was watching me comfortably, warm, like this wasn’t the first time. A first fuck can be exciting, and also terrifying, like leaping across a gap you’re not sure you can make. Sometimes you can’t. It happened that way with me and Rob. We took the leap and crashed. Rob and I were a matched pair back then, but the night we spent together wasn’t worn-in. That was fun, at the time, it was grand. I never laughed so much in my life. This wasn’t going to be like that, giddy and all-over new. No, Daniel was looking at me like we’d done it a hundred times before. In a way maybe we had—he could’ve knelt here before, after all, just like this, with Lexie’s fingers curling along his cheek. I shivered, the ghost of a hand going up my spine. Urging me on or telling me to walk away? Well, it was Lexie. She only ever ran when she had to.
I was trying so hard not to think of Sam. Did Daniel guess that with his eyes on me like that, it was impossible not to?
Finally he tugged my underwear down my thighs. I let him. I stepped out of them and I let him sit me back down on the edge of the creaky bed too, him taking some of my weight so I didn’t make a sound. There’s something about Daniel that makes him easy to follow: the sure set of his mouth, the weight of his eyes, the unerring steadiness of his hands.
I wouldn’t say I’m much of a talker in bed, but I’m not silent as the grave like this either. It didn’t feel natural. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, filler for Frank’s long night. Just then Daniel parted my legs with a hand under each thigh, a wider stretch than was comfortable. My feet left the floor, and I had to fight not to overbalance; I pressed my fist to my mouth, tight against my lips. I glared down at him, and Daniel met my gaze, easy and sure. I was hot in my belly and wet between my thighs, and I couldn’t seem to make myself feel embarrassed or awkward or even nervous about any of it. I couldn’t make this feel anything but inevitable.
When he put his mouth on me I really wasn’t sure I could keep quiet. I’ve had sex in plenty of places where I couldn’t make too much noise, cramped shared flats with barely insulated walls, Dublin’s finest. But that was more about politeness than secrecy. I fumbled blindly for the Brothers Grimm book I’d left open at my bedside. I could just reach it with the tips of my fingers. When I tried to rustle the pages as loudly as I could, my hand slipped across the cover, sending it crashing down. “Oops,” I said, a little higher than my usual Lexie register.
“That was a gift,” advised Daniel, sounding for the first time tonight actually a little sharp. He was still so close I could feel his breath on my skin as he spoke. He picked up the book and lay it down beside me with a gentle reverence. He was right, after all. It was Lexie’s, and it had been a gift. “Careful.”
I didn’t look down at him. “I drop it all over the place,” I said. “It’s held up all right.”
“Then you should be even more careful, don’t you think? Make sure it stays that way.” He dipped his head again. My foot twitched when he kissed at the crease of my thigh. I dug my fingers into the sheets. He went slow with his tongue this time, making like he was being polite, easing me into it. There was nothing polite about it. If it was Sam I’d knock him lightly on the head with my knuckles, tell him I’d like to finish up before we were old and grey, but there would be none of that here. If Daniel wanted to keep me here til dawn poked its greedy fingers in through the window, he could. I would let him. That should have scared me, but alone there in the dark with him I couldn’t find anything to fear, not even the future.
More than anything else, I had to stop myself from laughing. From the absurdity of it all, from how good it felt, from how it would be so much easier if he was shit at this. He wasn’t. When I caught glimpses of his eyes peering up at me, there was a glitter of satisfaction in them, and something else, too. Longing. I tried not to think of what for.
I leaned back on my hands and tried to focus on anything but this room, on how loud my breathing was or wasn’t, on the way Daniel’s neat fingernails bit into my thigh. I couldn’t track time at all. It was agony, and I kept trying to hold my breath so that I wouldn’t cry out, letting it out only in awful slow bursts. I was going to make myself lightheaded.
“Lexie,” Daniel said suddenly, his breath hot against my skin. His voice was perfectly casual. “What are you working on?”
I could have wrung his neck. “Nothing.” I sounded breathless, choked. I hoped Frank was passed out at his desk. “I told you I wouldn’t get anything done. I’m just reading.”
“You haven’t turned a page in five minutes.”
“Jesus,” I said, hoping I sounded pissy. My fingers knocked into the book at my side, and I tried to see it, Lexie turning a page all exaggerated. “Are you my advisor now? What about you? That’s not Anne Finch, you switched.”
Keep him talking, I thought vaguely, but it’s not like he didn’t have hands. I’d thought about them often enough. He put them to use: two fingers inside me and his thumb working at my clit while I bit down on my palm and had vivid daydreams about kicking him in the teeth. It did not actually help my situation to think too hard about his solemn bruised mouth.
His eyes were fond when he smiled up at me, the curve of his lips wicked. “No,” he said. “I suppose I’ve also given up on studying for the night. I borrowed it from Justin. Donne. He wanted my help with the chapter he’s working on, but it’s really his area of expertise, so I’m honestly just reading for pleasure.” He paused then, hands and voice both. “You have a better voice for it than I do. Would you read to me?”
I took my hand away from my mouth. Daniel started moving again. I fisted my hand in his hair and squeezed my eyes shut, so I couldn’t see his fascinated gaze on me. “I’m not going to read you a bedtime story,” I managed.
“Alright,” said Daniel placidly. “Shall I?” He waited until I’d opened my eyes again, until I could see the spark of mischief in his, to continue in his deep voice: “Let’s see. ‘Licence my roving hands, and let them go, before, behind, between, above, below.’” He suited action to words.
I wanted to throttle him, or at least tell him I could do it if I wanted to. My gun was two feet away. Even Frank, who’d rather soak his brain in acid than read a book of poetry, was going to register that as flirting. I decided Lexie would think it was funny. I laughed for her, and shifted my weight, letting the bed squeak, like she was nudging Daniel in the shoulder; it also meant I could move my hips. “I don’t want a bedtime story either,” I said. “I’m not in the mood. I had a headache and my stitches are all tingly.” I sniffed. “Rafe’s got better lines, anyway.” Let Frank chew on that, if he was awake and listening.
Daniel pulled me up short, though; he didn’t follow my lead. We’d been so in step before. Instead of teasing me back, he pulled away, watching me seriously. He raised his head to kiss just above my navel, next to the bandage. His hand lingered on my waist, his thumb brushing against the tape and then above the battery pack. His mouth followed, like there really were stitches under there. Like it was really the wound that had killed me.
All at once none of this was funny any more, not even in the way it had been before, tinged with hysteria. I couldn’t bear it. I didn’t know if I wanted to laugh or scream or just say something true. I reached up with one hand, slow as I could, my fingers inching towards the mike clipped to my bra. I should have done it quick instead, but I was still trying to keep quiet, trying to keep my breathing under control. Daniel looked up at just the wrong moment, and his eyes flashed. His hands were around my wrists faster than lightning in a storm.
We stared at each other. Daniel had big hands, big enough to wrap easily around my entire wrist. I didn’t feel fragile in his grip, exactly. He was holding me with a very measured amount of strength. He would only bruise me if he meant to, if it would turn into a card he could play.
I think right then I wanted him too. I don’t know. How would I have played that to the rest of them? I could bring it to Abby or Justin to get sympathy, Rafe to get rage. It would shake them up, if they thought Daniel had hurt me.
Lexie was there in that room with me. That’s not an excuse or a condemnation of what I did, of what I let Daniel do; it’s just true. She was there with me more than Frank was, over the crackling mike, or Sam, the thought of him lodged like a knife under my ribs. Right then she was leaning over my shoulder, whispering in my ear. She was telling me to run, and damn the mike and damn anyone on the other side of it: whatever you do don’t let him hold you. Don’t let him keep you. The wound I didn’t have, throbbing on my side, the place where Daniel had kissed, was all the argument she needed.
I wanted so badly to be her. Maybe she had done this, just this way, Daniel kneeling between her legs while she tried to keep that godforsaken iron bedframe from squeaking. But I wasn’t. If Daniel had made anything clear it was that. I would never be Lexie Madison, who belonged in this house, who belonged in this room. She was a ghost. She’d tried to run and she’d gotten nowhere. Even she couldn’t be herself, squeezed into a role made to fit her.
He was still watching me. Something passed between us then, something lighter than air and heavier than words. Daniel let me go. I put my hands down on the covers, very gently. I didn’t reach for the mike again. I kept still and quiet as Daniel’s hands settled back on my thighs, and he bent his head back between my legs.
I knew something then that Lexie never learned: you can’t control who keeps you. You can always cut loose and run so hard that no one who loves you can ever catch up, but you can’t stop them from loving you. You don’t get to control that. Once you entangle yourself with someone, it takes two to unravel it. Her fiance never forgot her, not in four years. He wouldn’t in forty, not ever.
It was like that with me and Rob. I was done with him and he was done with me. Even in a place as small as Dublin I might go my whole life without ever speaking to him again. Still, though, I kept him locked away somewhere deep inside, with that night and those headlights and the dance we shared. Neither of us could ever escape that.
If Lexie had ever learned it I think it would have killed her. Maybe she figured it out, at that very last moment, and it did do her in. Was she stabbed for betrayal or for love, for the agony that she would abandon them? Hard to say. You can’t have betrayal without love, though. I learned that from Rob too.
I’d already made the betrayal; there was no use in turning back now. I slid one leg over Daniel’s shoulder, carefully, we had to be so bloody careful not to make a sound. His hand was hot on my thigh when he helped me hitch it up; there was sweat dripping down from the crook of my knee. He pressed in hard there with his thumb, and it was the same as his grip had been on my wrists: hard enough to hold but not enough to hurt.
He put his mouth back to my cunt and finally stopped messing around, going slow just to drive me thoroughly insane. I think by then he might not have been able to even if he tried. Daniel has a luminous pragmatism to him that gives him the patience of a saint. He waited by Lexie for a long time, after all. But as strange and fey as he could seem, he was human too. If nothing else, his knees would start to ache soon enough.
I wished suddenly we weren’t doing this here. I wanted to be in Daniel’s bed, in Daniel’s room. It was the only place in all of Whitethorn House I hadn’t been yet. That absence made it take on a hallowed quality in my mind, the way forbidden things call to children. Maybe if I’d just picked the lock that first day none of this would have happened.
And besides that, I wanted to see that part of him. I wanted to know where Daniel lay his head down at night, I wanted to know what strange things lived inside him, beyond his ironclad convictions. I wanted to touch him too. It was unbearable, suddenly, that save for his glasses he was still dressed like he meant to walk out the door and go straight to college while my bare thighs were pressed against his shoulders.
I knew even then I’d never see the inside of that locked room, on my back or otherwise. I’d never see the inside of Daniel’s head, not entire, and I’d never see so much as his naked knees. This was it, this was the most I would ever get.
The hand he had curled around my thigh tightened, and I threw my forearm over my open mouth to stifle myself. Lexie in my ear, asking me how it felt, like we were friends bending our heads over gossip: it was good, tender and sweet. My hips jerked and the bed gave an awful screech and I didn’t care, fuck Frank and all the rest of them. I bit down hard on my arm.
I dug my heels hard into his back when I came, not kicking him—too loud—but grinding them in. I hoped he would bruise. There was something nice about not having to be considerate; I was always considerate with Sam, and him with me. I loved that about him. I did. It wasn’t that I wanted to hurt Daniel. It’s that I knew nothing I did in that room could. If I’d slapped him across the face he wouldn’t have flinched from it, or lunged at me, or even complained. We could only hurt each other with other people. By ourselves we were bare-handed, unarmed. Safe. In that room we were the safest we’d ever be again.
A muscle in my thigh started to cramp. I slipped that leg off his shoulder, stretching it out and pointing my toes at the wall. I breathed in and out, evenly, until that evenness came naturally. Like smoothing wrinkles out of a shirt. I wanted so badly to laugh. There was a tension in me that still hadn’t eased with the orgasm, but my head was too muddled, too soft. If I laughed I’d have to think of something to pretend to be laughing at, and my mind couldn’t grasp it. Everything felt funny just then, and nothing at all.
Meanwhile Daniel leaned his head against my thigh. There was an unbearable sweetness to the way he looked, gazing up at me like that. Even on his knees he had to hunch a little to do it. He’d taken out a handkerchief to wipe off his hands and dab at his mouth, which was so hysterically funny that it made me shake, and so quintessentially Daniel that it nearly brought me to tears. Without thinking about it at all I put my hand in his hair to ruffle it. It was soft between my fingers.
Then I tightened my fingers and ripped the microphone wire out from the jack and grabbed at him, pulling him to me with all my strength. I held his face between my hands and kissed him savagely, shatteringly. His mouth was wet, and he met me just as fiercely. His hands were everywhere now that no one was listening, sliding down my back and cupping the nape of my neck, squeezing hard. I was leaning over him, tipping his head back, but he could have broken my neck, easy. Either of us could.
That kiss was a lifetime, but even lives have to end. So it did. He held me close, though, so close my eyes couldn’t focus properly, so close that I breathed in the air that he breathed out. I don’t think I’ve ever been that truly close to another human being in my life. The closest I came was when we had each other at gunpoint. You never forget the way it feels to hold someone else’s life in your hands.
If I was going to break it would have been then. Not with his head between my legs, not out in the grass with whiskey on my tongue, none of that. It was there, when we were nearly beyond words, at a level of understanding that didn’t need them. They had that, all four of them; all five of us, when I was Lexie. I’d never had it with any of them as myself before. But Daniel knew me, knew Cassie, and here we were, tucked away in our own little secret.
I could have stayed in that house forever. Ditched my job and my name and Sam, easy as shrugging off a coat. Lexie could do it, and so could I. When Daniel kissed me before I’d pulled back because he was inches from finding me out, but now he already knew. There was nothing stopping me except my own balance, the anchor of my life holding me back, holding me down. Nothing but Lexie’s whisper in my ear: run, run, run.
There aren’t words for how much I wanted it, to tell Lexie and her ghost to shove it, and let me have what she couldn’t. It was a shock even to myself when I tore myself away. I plugged the microphone back in. Daniel’s face shuttered imperceptibly, like he knew we’d reached a fork in the road, and I’d picked the wrong way. We could have walked together hand in hand. He would have let me. I was the one who turned away.
Daniel let me go. He picked up his glasses, and blinked at me from behind the lenses.
I’ve thought a lot about what it was that stopped me. It had to be Lexie, no two ways about it: she had called me there, and she, too, told me when I could go no further. She couldn’t have this, not for keeps. She couldn’t put down roots, and I couldn’t escape mine. Even in this room, in our own cozy garden, Frank and Sam and Lexie were haunting me. If I’d been able to forget them, if I’d just given myself away, maybe that would have been enough to snap the thread, to make me let go and finally stop caring about what there was to lose.
Daniel was trying to give me something as much as he was trying to outplay me, but I just couldn’t take it. When you accept a gift you make a promise. I couldn’t promise Daniel anything, no more than Lexie had, and now we both knew it.
Daniel’s words cut through the darkness. There was a finality to that. “Lexie,” he said, in a hushed tone. He pressed his hand over my mouth so I couldn’t answer. We stayed like that for the space of three breaths. Then he drew his hand back. “Ah. Good night, then.”
And then, as though I really had fallen asleep in the midst of our mock study session, he tucked me into bed.
I watched him the whole time. I had to. What was I going to tell Frank if I woke up the next morning and he’d nicked my gun? So my eyes were open when he brushed my fringe off my forehead and pressed a warm dry kiss there. My eyes lingered on him as he stepped away. I couldn’t read anything in his face. Absurdly, I wanted to reach out and ask him to come to bed, to feel the weight of him steady and warm at my back. That was a greater betrayal of Sam, I think, than any of the rest of it.
Later I wondered who he was thinking of when he looked down at me curled up in bed: me, or Lexie, and the silent vigil he kept by her body while her life drained away.
Silently, he switched off the light and left me. I waited ten minutes, trying my best to think of nothing at all. Then I got up and made myself presentable enough to slip down the hall, and locked myself in the bathroom.
For a moment I didn’t know the girl in the mirror. It wasn’t me and it wasn’t Lexie. That was some stranger, staring back at me, some stranger I’d never met in Undercover who I would never say a word against, not even in my mind. But I knew who she was: one of the ones who did whatever it took to crack their case, and whatever it took was whatever they wanted. The ones who used Undercover as an excuse.
I did it for Lexie and I did it for me. Did there really have to be a difference? In the end I walked away. That had to be enough.
There was a livid mark on the inside of my forearm where I’d bitten myself to keep quiet, just starting to color up. Daniel had gone to a lot of trouble not to bruise my wrists, but I would have to hide this anyway. It reminded me strangely of Lexie, how useless her teeth had been for identification; her secret little grins. She and Daniel were so different, and I had no way of knowing this, I hadn’t seen it on those blurry video clips, but when the moment struck them right, they both had the same utterly surprising way of smiling. When Daniel smiled like that, it was like the shock of winter air on a bright cold morning, crisp and clear. I was sure with Lexie it had been the same, an unexpected burst of sweetness.
I wondered if I kissed like her, or bit like her. Looking at my arm, it was like she’d taken my hand in hers and pressed her lips to my pulse, and then again and again, climbing up my wrist. Kissed me hard enough that I’d remember. She wanted more than anything to be free, just like Daniel, and they both had totally different ideas about what that meant, but it came out to the same thing: with both hands they each reached for freedom that left destruction in its wake, a tornado blasting through anyone who dared get too close.
But still, I decided then that this bruise was what she wanted from me. To mark me up, so I would remember the parts of her that mattered, even if they weren’t the nice ones. Maybe that’s why she wouldn’t let me stay here. If I became her I would forget her. I wouldn't, now, not ever. I think Lexie did want to be held, even if she couldn’t bear it. She had to have known a child wasn’t something you could ever run from. I think she wanted to learn to stand her ground.
Daniel, too, had told me what he wanted, straight and true as an arrow. He wanted his home and his friends, impenetrable fortresses that had been cracked at the foundation from the start. Sometimes you get only ash for your sacrifice, burnt up to nothing on its pyre.
Daniel never cared at all about being remembered. He took it for granted. How could you not, when you were handed a place like Whitethorn House on a platter? But the past came for him in the end, and so did the future. He couldn’t survive either of them, and he left no marks on me at all.
I looked at the shape of that mouth on my arm for a long time. I wondered if Lexie had gotten anything at all from her sacrifice. I hoped so, really, with all my heart. At least one of us should.