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Sensing her mood, he gave her a sideways glance, grumbled some more, and stormed to the other side of the bed. His leather uniform creaked with jerky movements as he lit the next candle. A lock of long blond hair dangled as he bent forward, so he tucked it behind his ear.
“Are you going to watch me light all the candles?” he intoned without removing his eyes from the match as he struck. It flared too hot, and he almost burned himself. Cursing, he dropped the stick and stomped on it.
“Maybe.” Her lips curved.
A wave of concern and frustration hit her through their connection. He tried to hide it, maybe even clamped down on whatever invisible tube allowed them to share, but she felt it. His lack of patience with the matches was another clue to something being wrong.
“How did the meeting go?” she asked.
“They want to talk with you.”
“Okay.”
“I said they had to wait.” His scowl deepened as he took the matches to the drawing room.
“I don’t mind. The sleep has done me good. Once we eat, I will be ready to take on the world.”
He scoffed softly, lighting another match. It wouldn’t strike. “Food isn’t capable of miracles.”
Right. Snarky, rude Leaf came out when he was bothered. She slid off the chair and walked to the drawing room. She took the matches from him and raised her brows. “Do you need help,Papi?”
He gestured at them. “The stupidest invention Trix has come up with.”
“Trix?”
“She’s from your time and likes to tinker with things,” he mumbled. “Fae use mana to light candles, but I don’t want the house to burn with the taint ruining things. These matches are what humans used in your time.”
“I’m well aware of that.” She smirked, pulled another stick from the book, and struck the end on the sandpaper. It fizzed and sparked, lighting with flame. “They’re easy when you understand the right pressure and angle.”
She gave him the lit match and leaned on the drawing room’s doorframe, amused as he reluctantly lit the remaining two candles on the table for four. Beside it, near the window, were two upholstered settees of the same fabric as the armchair in his room. A framed picture of the ocean hung on the wall. A chandelier dangled from exposed wooden beams, but the glass canisters were empty. They might have held manabeeze once.
Seeing Leaf in this domestic setting reminded her of family meals at her kitchen table. She suddenly smelled her mother’s spicy cooking and saw his younger self laughing and helping himself to more rice. She saw Niles argue with their father. She saw the crooked poem typewritten on yellowed paper on the frame on their wall.
“We used to have a poem near our kitchen table,” she mused. “My mother loved it. My father hated it. My brother thought it was dumb. But Jace… he read it every time he came for dinner.” She frowned as she tried to recall the words, but they flittered from her memory like one of the falling leaves outside. “Something about the world beginning and ending at the kitchen table.”
Leaf joined her at the door. His gaze sharpened on her, and she sensed he was also listening to her emotions. She indulged in the details of his face. The brackets around his lips were from years of smiling, and like the fine lines outside his eyes, she realized they were from the sun—from the years he spent in the ocean, letting that heat bake down on his skin. When he became fae, he stopped aging, but it didn’t reverse. Some of the fae Nova had met had skin so smooth sun damage was never a factor. Leaf’s humanity never disappeared… even when he left Jackson Crimson behind.
Somehow, that thought made her smile.
“Did you read the journals?” His soft voice broke into her thoughts.
She hugged herself. “A page or two. But I couldn’t read much.”
“Do you need more time?” he offered. “I’ll tell everyone to mind their own fucking business if they keep pestering me to meet you.”
“They don’t know you’re… him?”
“I didn’t presume you wanted them to know. It makes no difference to me.”
She rested her head on the doorframe. “I think I know how you feel.”
His fingers flexed once, then fisted as though he held back something. Candlelight flickered in his eyes, warming the blue. His sudden torrential release of emotions through their bond was a complicated mix of longing, need, concern, and fear. Her breath hitched at the intensity. His gaze darted to her lips, but he remained at a respectable distance.
The desire to reach out and drag him closer was impossible to deny. She wanted to finish what they started in the tree’s hollow. She needed that comfort, so she pushed off the doorframe and closed the gap between them. She slid her palms up his leather jacket, bumping over the ribbing and piping until she locked her hands around his neck.
Tears stung her eyes as she remembered the first journal entry—Jace’s agony when he woke from that illness at the Bellagio and found her gone and the world frozen around him. That illness was Jace’s transformation into an elf. If she’d known all she had to do was wait it out with him, she’d never have left. She might have frozen anyway. His mutation might have raised his body temperature or made it possible for him to survive the temperature. She would never know.
“I flicked through the journals,” she admitted, “but the more I read, the more I realized how much he missed me. How much he blamed himself for losing me. But then his accounts of me became unreal after a while. He wrote about me as if I was this perfect fantasy—he made me his religion. I was without flaws or mistakes, but…”
