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I squeezed him tight for a second before I held him normally. Was he really dead with a disembodied spirit attached to the mortal form? Probably. Whatever, he was still the best bird ever.
“Tertrue, please take me home.”
She didn’t answer, just drove, with her impeccable lawyer driving skills while I clung to Poe and tried to ignore the stinging in my eyes at the thought of the hours Percy would have to spend repairing the damage he’d let me do to him.
Chapter
Fifteen
“Ican’t tell you, because it’s a secret society, and they’ll cut out my tongue if I say a word.” I reached into the mini fondu fountain to dribble chocolate over my strawberry. We were in my tiny bedroom, cross-legged around the fountain wearing nightshirts and leggings, green masks on our faces, and toe nails freshly polished.
Rynne pursed her lips and widened her eyes before she nudged me, so I got chocolate all over my fingers instead of just on the strawberry. Oh well. It was inevitable that we just ended up drinking the chocolate directly from the fountain. May as well start now.
“But Percy is part of it, and your dad, the guy with your hair that my mom thinks is movie-star handsome, and now you?”
I licked my finger and shrugged. “Not me, I’m just sort of…”
She waved her hand. “Forget about the secret society and tell me about Percival Marigold. Why did he let you torture him?”
I stared at my strawberry, picking little seeds off and wiping them on my napkin. “He’s an idiot.”
“But is he your betrothed? You train with him on weekends, right? He wouldn’t waste his precious time on anyone who he didn’t find even more precious.”
I shook my head, getting hair in the chocolate. I should just dunk my face now, except it wouldn’t taste nice with the face mask. “It was a lie that he told to get in with my dad, but it wasn’t ever real. We were just using each other.”
She wrinkled her nose. “What were you getting out of it?”
I sighed heavily. “I don’t know. Stress and ulcers, probably. Can we talk about something else? Have you told your mom about your detective dreams yet?”
“I’ll tell her when she’s ready. Do you know why he stopped torturing you? I told him to. Specifically, I told him that he’d never have a chance with you because the only guy you’d ever fall for was made of stone with horns and wings.”
I scowled at her over my mutilated strawberry. “Why would you think he wanted to have a chance with me?”
She leaned forward, giving me a pointed look. “Are you kidding? No one puts that much effort into someone else unless they have a reason. Sometimes when he didn’t think anyone was watching him, he’d watch you across the courtyard, or down the hall, and he just looked completely tortured.”
I snorted. “I thought you were going to say moonstruck or something. I like him tortured.” Except not when he just lays down and takes it and lets the bugs bore into him. I didn’t like that at all.
“And that’s when he started writing all those songs about unrequited love, and star-crossed love, and other sentimental drivel that only his sheer musical genius could keep from sliding into the realm of complete mush.”
I pointed at myself. “You think I’m someone he likes because he tortured me?”
She shrugged and popped a strawberry in her mouth. “Because he was also tortured by his torturing of you.”
“You make him sound completely unhinged.” Like someone who wouldn’t kill the bugs, and who fought off the cops when they tried to come and save him. Maybe he’d get arrested for that. It would be very satisfying to see him behind bars in an unflattering orange jumpsuit, maybe with a shocker collar to control his magic.
“Your mom said that you guys baked cupcakes together.”
“She’s such a traitor. Yeah, we did cupcakes, because we had a deal, and the end result was that I had to bake cupcakes that he chose ingredients for and then I had to eat them. I didn’t, though. My mom ate a ton.”
“What disgusting ingredients did your mom find so irresistible?”
“They were good cupcakes. He stopped torturing me intentionally two years ago, so… Can we not talk about Percy of No Mercy? It’s depressing.”
“But training with him every weekend for months? Isn’t there rolling around on the mat involved?”
I pressed my lips together. I tried not to think about that part. Every session started with defense spells, because defense always came first, then attack spells, but I also had to deal with physical attacks, and there had been close contact on several occasions that had made me breathless for reasons unconnected to being slammed to the mat. I shouldn’t have noticed the way he leaned over me, his hair brushing my skin and bringing me to life like he wasn’t my old torturer who couldn’t be trusted. We didn’t hang out except on Friday afternoons when I sang something with him for purely magical recharging reasons, and I only saw him between classes in passing during the week, but the weekends had been a lot of physical contact that I hadn’t hated, particularly when I was pinning him, which he let me do if I was fast enough. I was getting faster, because I was motivated, and maybe if I was honest with myself, it had to do with the close physical contact that I’d gone from not hating to really looking forward to.
She elbowed me. “There is.”
