I pause what I’m doing and glance at myself in my vanity mirror. I’m still wearing last night’s dress, my makeup is smudged beneath my eyes, and if I look close enough, I’m pretty sure my lips are still swollen from kissing Severin.
Sighing, I sink onto the bench in front of my vanity. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I tell Isis, keeping my voice down so the girls won’t hear me. “I’ve never felt like this after sex before. Usually, I’m fine. But I feel...”
I search for a word for this feeling swirling inside me, making my chest feel tight and heavy.
“Sad,” Isis says simply.
With a sigh, I nod. “I don’t get it. Everything went well. So, why do I feel like this?”
Isis uncurls herself from around my neck, then slithers down my arm. I hold my hand out so she can move onto my desk, where she twists herself into a coil and rises up to look at me. “You feel like this,” she hisses, “because youcare. Have you cared about any of the others you’ve shared yourself with?”
At first, I almost tell her yes, that I cared about all of them. And I guess that’s true, in a way.
But not like this. Not like how I feel about Severin.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“You are lying to yourself.” Isis flicks her tongue at me.
I bristle a little at that, sitting up straighter. “No, I’m not.”
Her slitted eyes stare back at me, unwavering. I’ve learned over the years that she has the patience of an old forest, and I’ll never be able to outstare or outwait her.
“You are,” she repeats. “You have enjoyed others. You have wanted others. But you did not carry them back with you the way you’ve carried this one, like a treasure made of glass, something you’re afraid to shatter.” Her tongue flicks out again, and I break eye contact with her.
In the mirror, my reflection stares back at me. I grab my brush and start to glide it through my hair, but the feel of the strands slipping through my fingers reminds me of him, of how his hand felt at the nape of my neck, his lips and breath on my throat.
Isis shifts slightly, her glossy black scales whispering against the wood of the vanity. “Your storm is quieter today. It feels...” She flicks her tongue out, tasting the charge in the air. “Content.”
Content.
I suppose I feel that too, under the layer of sadness trying to weigh me down. My mind flashes back to this morning, to the fear I felt when I woke up to find Severin no longer in the bed beside me. But then I felt such relief at seeing him beside the fire, and my whole body reacted to it.
I’ve never cared if the person I was sleeping with was next to me the following morning. More often than not, I’d leave while they were asleep or send them home the night of. But not Severin. I wanted him rightthere, close enough to touch, to smell, to hold.
“This feels dangerous,” I whisper to Isis.
“For whom?”
“For me.” I press a hand to my chest. “I have plans. Goals. The fellowship, the Arcanum Collective. I thought this was just going to be a brief thing between us, but...” I clench my teeth. “I can’t throw everything away because I’m tangled up with my professor.”
Isis makes a thoughtful sound, and I get the feeling she’s about to impart her wisdom upon me.
She’s been helping me keep my head on straight since we met all those years ago. And I’m not sure how I would’ve made it through my teenage years—or losing my dad—without her.
“You speak as though love and ambition cannot share the same body.”
I jerk upright, startled by her use of that word. “Okay, one, I’m not inlovewith him. And two, they usually don’t. Not without one stifling the other.”
“You’ve experienced it, then? Love?”
The way she asks it, so directly, I know exactly what she’s getting at.
I deflate. “No.”
“Yet you know, hmm?” She slithers up the carved wood of my vanity and drapes herself over the mirror so she can look directly into my eyes. “Or is this your fear speaking?”
Isis has a thing about fear: facing it head-on, not letting it influence or control you.
