Page 88 of Petrify

The assurances are as much for myself as they are for him.

He nods, his emerald eyes shiny.

“It’s just music,” I say, because at the end of the day, it’s true. I tell him what I wish someone would have toldme, years ago while I taught myself in my dingy apartment bedroom. “Don’t focus on anything else but loving it.”

When my eyes open again, I am no longer seated at the piano, and the fire has long turned to dim embers. But I am still warm.

A body is curled around mine on the velvet couch, arms slung around my waist. A strong pale hand holding my wrist, his thumb pressed right against the delicate heart beat between thin bones. He must feel how my pulse quickens as I come to,because his thumb begins to skate back and forth. Goosebumps erupt across my skin.

“Tired?” he asks, a hint of amusement in his voice.

I rub at my eyes. “You couldn’t have carried me to my room?”

But I don’t remember drifting off. I was practicing our song, and my exhaustion must have pulled me under.

He exhales a laugh. “You were drooling on the keys,” he lies. “I only thought to put you here on the couch, but I found I was getting quite tired, too.”

“A ghost, tired. How odd.”

The clock on the wall reads half past midnight. I’ve been here a few hours, then. It feels like just a second ago I was sitting at the piano.

His form is molded to mine almost perfectly. I fit against him like one of us was sculpted for the other. I watch his thumb brush against my wrist almost absentmindedly, my eyelids heavy. The headache is still there, ever-present in the base of my skull. A haze blankets my directionless thoughts. With every breath, his body shifts against mine, his ribcage expanding, my spine sinking into the beat of his heart.

His face nuzzles into my hair, my neck, and only after some time passes do I realize his lips are touching my skin.

He’s not wearing the mask.

His thumb stops when he senses my pulse beating more erratically. “What is it?” Mumbled into the sensitive skin of my throat.

It would be so easy to turn my head and take him in. It crosses my mind that this could be some test of his, an exercise in trust, even, after the other night. Tempting me—pushing me to see how far I’ll bend before I break.

I swallow the lump in my throat. “I’ve just realized—it’s now Christmas Eve.”

Another amused sound rumbles in his chest. “It is.”

“I don’t have a present for you.”

A pause. “If you think I was expecting anything other than yourself, then you are mistaken.”

A sprinkling of tiny white snowflakes are illuminated by the lamps below the windows, enough to accumulate into a dusting of powdered sugar on the ground by sunup. The embers in the fireplace crackle. And the house is otherwise silent, the residents gone to bed.

It’s the first moment of true calm I’ve felt since arriving here, this sense of stillness, though not like we are holding our breaths for the next terrible thing, even with the party looming. My eyes drift closed, the pull of sleep too great, Bastien’s fingers on my wrist lulling me under.

“I’m not really a fan of the holidays,” I whisper.

“I imagine not,” he says, like heknows.

“They only tried to make it a big deal when I was little. My mom and my aunt.”

He’s quiet, and my mind swims, half-asleep maybe, loosening my lips.

“I don’t have a father.”

Some part of me almost expects a snide comment. But there’s only silence and his thumb gently caressing my skin, as he waits for me to continue.

“My mother gave me to my aunt when I was seven. Said I—” My throat constricts and I have to take a deep breath before I can begin again. “She said I was too much. She didn’t have the time for me. I think she just didn’t want the responsibility. But neither did my aunt, really.”

Bastien, who seems to know everything, falls still once again.