As if I want to be close to you, she thought, so heatedly it seemed like something he should feel. But if he did, he gave no sign of it. He just stared at her, like he had in Grand Central Station, like he had in the hall of past headmasters, like he had in the maze. A little sullen, a little amused, a lot like a challenge.
Go on, I dare you, girl who doesn’t belong,it looked like to her.
So she answered in her head:I will, bastard who wants to break all my dreams. Then she stumbled and fumbled and fought her way past his probable friends, and shoved herself into the seat. Breathless and even messier than she had been when she started this day. But she had done it.
And of course, she regretted it instantly.
Sitting down that fast and frenziedly meant she hadn’t thought about where any of her limbs were going. So now her hand was on the armrest of her seat, quite by chance. And his hand was in the same position, on his armrest. And both were far too closetogether. She could have clenched her fist and grazed the cuff of his sweater.
Though it wasn’t the cuff she was concerned about.
It was how far up he had shoved it. How much forearm he had exposed, and how thick that forearm looked, and oh, the amount ofhairall over it. She didn’t even have to see it. She could actually feel it whenever she so much as took a breath. The shift of her body stirred her arm, and there it was.
The brush of that fur against her own frighteningly bare skin.
None of which she could cover up. She couldn’t abruptly tug her sleeves that far down—he would notice she was doing it. She just had to pretend nothing at all was happening. That none of this bothered her. Even as she felt each individual hair almost bristle against the back of her hand.
It made her think of spider legs, of things scurrying over her.
She ached to rub wherever he was almost touching.
And that wasn’t even the only terrible thing about sitting so close to him. No, god, no—there was also that winter air scent. The one that was now so strong it seemed to fill her body every time she took a breath. She could almost taste it on her tongue, like melted ice, like frost on glass. Strange sounding, she knew, but at the same time it made some kind of sense.
Because for some reason, he seemed to have almost no body heat at all.
He shifted, and instead of getting a bloom of warmth from him, she got a wave of cold. Like she was sitting next to the opposite of molten lava—freezing instead of fiery, yet somehow no less searing for it. It branded the side of her face, the back of her hand, her arm. It made her want to move away even more than the brush of his hair had.
But before she could, she felthimshift.
He leaned toward her, so close it made her go rigid.
“Happy now, about doing this to me?” he asked, so close to her ear and so amused sounding she could tell what it meant. He knew she was uncomfortable. He knew this was hell for her. And now he wanted to make sure she suffered for her perceived crimes.
Even though the crimes weren’t hers at all.
They were his, and the sheer injustice of that made her spit fire before she could stop herself. “You did this to yourself. If you hadn’t been so eager to punt me from this place, you’d be in whatever snooty advanced classes you wanted to be now. Instead of being stuck here with someone you loathe in a lecture you’ve probably been through before,” she hissed under her breath. Though it was loud enough that the guy on the other side of her shifted nervously. And a girl in front almost looked back.
At which point she realized:
None of these people were his friends. He had no friends in a basic class like this. Everybody here was afraid of him to almost as great a degree as she was. Greater, really, because none of them were squabbling with him. It was just her, signing her own death warrant.
“I was doing you a favor, sending you back to the beginning,” he said, even more heatedly than he had those first words. Yet somehow, she still didn’t stop. She kept her face forward, but she answered him in kind.
“Is that what you tell yourself to help you sleep at night?”
“No, I count how many ways I could ruin you, and that sends me straight off.”
“Well, this conversation is going to have you out like a light, then.”
“If this cuts you that deep, god knows how you’re going to cope here.”
“I wouldn’t have to just cope if people like you would let people like me be.”
“What exactly do you mean, ‘people like me’? Who is themein this scenario?”
“People who look wrong and act wrong. People who don’t know the proper way to dress or the right way to talk or the exact etiquette needed to get anywhere in life. People who have nothing,” she said, so frustrated and furious that the last word came out far too breathless, far too scorched by emotion.
It made her seem vulnerable, she could tell, and vulnerability was the last thing she wanted to reveal to him. It was like baring her throat for a thing with fangs. He was probably going to say something so vicious now that she’d never recover.
