“You could have been using magic to hop over tothiswhenever you wanted, and you chose a study room likethat? What is wrong with you?”
Loch’s shoulders stiffen. “Doyouuse Christmas’s magic to fund your study sessions? Christ, Mary, and Joseph, you wasteful bloody arsehole.”
“I’mthe asshole? I’m not the one who hunkered down in that roomillicitlywhen I had literalparadisein myhouse.”
The abruptness of being in a room like this while well past tipsy absolutelywrecksmy barriers, letting a tidal surge of emotion through.
This is how I felt when I stepped into Cambridge’s library my first year and had an entirely different major lined up alongside a naive resolve to do something forme.
Wonder.
That’s the feeling.
Like all these books hold possibilities and if I pick the right one, I’ll get swept away somewhere better andrighterand truer.
I tear my hands through my hair, yanking it out of the topknot, letting it hang down loose and messy because an ache is rising up the back of my head. I tug at my damn tie and manage to get it undone enough that I can take my first non-gasping breath since Wren forced me into it hours ago.
“Fuck.” I spin back to Loch. “Just—whatever. Where’s my room?” I need to lie down. I need to not be—not be inhere,with these books, with these little slivers of potential I gave up.
When was the last time I wrote something that wasn’t a school paper or stuff for Christmas? When was the last time I read something that wasn’t a research text?
Oh my god I hate whiskey so much.
But Loch doesn’t move, studying me in the light that has fully shifted into blurry nighttime gray.
He pulls out his phone and switches on the flashlight. “C’mon.”
And he heads off, not back out into the hall, but deeper into the library.
I hesitate.
Then follow the flashing of his phone’s light.
He doesn’t go far before he stops beneath the wrapping balcony. With the hostility of someone who would rather be hurling breakable objects at a wall, he yanks books off a shelf and shoves them into my chest.
I stagger, make a cradle of my arms, and he piles books in it.
“What are—”
“You’re gonna be down here anyway, yeah? And I know in that fancy-ass international relations track that they sure as hell are na having you lot read good shite.”
My mind cartwheels over the fact that he knows what track I’m in. But I know what track he’s in too. Shut up, whiskey.
“So if you’re gonna usemylibrary.” He grabs one last book, adds it to the pile, but doesn’t let go of it, hovering over me in the yellow-white beam of his flashlight. “You gotta read the literature that matters.”
I glance down at the spines, willing my spinning eyes to focus. “Oscar Wilde. William Butler Yeats. Bram Stoker.”
“Irish—”
“Irish authors. I know. I was in the English track for a term.”
I hear the words. Feel their echo.
And go impossibly still.
I never told anyone I did that. Not even Coal. He assumed that I was always in International Relations because Dad forced me to, and I never corrected him.
And I just admitted the truth toLochlann Patrick,of all people.
