Not to mention hard on her knees. She’d bruised one of them while trying to duck. It didn’t want to quite straighten. And there was dust all over her best woolen tights. She swiped at it angrily, in the silence that followed. In fact, she was still seeing to it, when he answered.
“Mine is love,” he said.
So simply she didn’t even look up, at first.
But then it hit, and she just couldn’t help it
She had to see his face. His expression. How sincere it was.
Only to find it hadn’t changed at all.
“No,” she said. “No I don’t believe you.”
“I have no reason to lie. In fact, lying here would benefit my image more.”
“Yes, because that’s all you’re ever concerned about. How cool you look. So how am I supposed to believe that you can whip that amount of magic out at a moment’s notice, based on soppy feelings you barely understand?”
He sighed. “Because it doesn’t matter if a feeling is out of reach. You find a way to get to it anyway. You claw your way to it, if you have to. You open wounds to make it happen. You use every trick in the book and force it from yourself.”
“It’s not that easy, with this.”
“Seemed easy the other morning, with me.”
He shrugged one shoulder. As if it to say,Hey, no big deal.
But the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth gave the game away.
“The cause was not you, you arrogant fuck. It was just the things that happened. All that excitement and then the bed and the manacles and the blood and the sensations. Anyone would lose themselves in something like that. But unfortunately for me, losing myself in those things is not something I can just do, every time I need to make a spell.”
Or do for any reason ever, she mentally added.Just in case I start liking it any more than I already seem to.Then just had to hope it didn’t show on her face. Or in her body language. Even though both were pretty rigid already. Her features felt like a mask of irritation; her arms had wrapped themselves around her chest without her even knowing it. She was safe.
She just didn’tfeelsafe.
“So imagine it, then,” he said, too soft for her liking.
She swallowed thickly to hear it. Shook her head to cover it.
“I don’t want to do that, either.”
“Because it was very disturbing?”
“Because it involves having to think about you.”
“Then you’re going to have to consider other things that turn you on.”
A jolt went through her, over those last three words. And not just because of the sudden lewdness of them. No—there was also the thing that swam into her head, the second he said it. That little curled finger almost brushing her cheek. Inexplicably, impossibly, and right in the middle of him saying more things.
“There must be something. Someone. A boy you liked,” he said.
She had to fumble into answering him, with a head full of nonsense.
“The boys I knew were not very pleasant.”
“Then a story. One of those ones that dance on that glass you all love.”
“Oh my god, you mean atelevision,” she shoved out. “You’re talking about a television. How on earth do you pass for just a person when you barely know what a fucking television is? That just seems impossible.”
“There are plenty of people here who live in closed magical communities.”
