Page 59

“ I want you, Lex. “ It rang in the small dark room. “I have wanted you since the locker room. I want you now. I am a coward and a fool, and I want you.”

For a long moment the only sound was his breathing.

Then, slowly, he wiped his nose on the back of his wrist, and a terrible, wonderful grin spread over his face.

“Okay,” he said, sniffling. “That’s better.”

I could have wept. I could have gone down on my knees on the floor. Instead I stood there with my mouth slightly open and let a young man smile at me as though I were the sun.

“So,” said Lex. He sat down on the edge of the big bed, and his grin turned sharp, and dangerous, and I understood that I was about to be punished. “You want me. I want you. Great. Terrific. But you were being a jerk for like sixty seconds, and I think there ought to be consequences.”

“What consequences?”

“A dare.”

“A dare.”

“You said you weren’t the one who does this.” He leaned back on his hands, eyes glittering. “Fine. I’ll go first. I’m not scared. But you have to watch. All of it. You don’t get to look away, you don’t get to leave, you don’t get to stand in the corner. You sit in that chair and you look at me. Deal?”

I looked at the chair. It was the same wooden chair I had turned around, three days before, to make a barricade.

“Lex,” I said. My mouth had gone dry. “You do not have to—”

“I know I don’t.” His voice was very steady. “I want to. I’m choosing it. If I hate it, I’ll say ‘icing.’ Like in hockey. It means stop, right? Whoever calls it, play stops. No questions.”

I could only nod.

“Then say you agree.”

“I agree,” I said, and the sound of it did something to the base of my spine. “Icing. It stops. Instantly.”

“Good.” He swallowed. “Sit.”

I sat.

I will try to describe what followed with the dignity it deserves, although I am no longer certain that dignity is the correct tool.

He did not do it quickly, which was the first surprise. I had expected a challenge, a show, something fast and defiant, the way he does everything else. Instead Lex Pendleton, at the moment of truth, became slow and shy and unbearably careful. He took off his jacket and hung it on the bedpost, and then he sat on the edge of the mattress with his hands in his lap and stared at his knees until his ears turned red, and when he finally looked up his eyes were enormous.

“This is weird,” he whispered.

“Yes.”

“You’re allowed to say something.”

“What would you like me to say?”

“I don’t know. Anything. Say ‘nice shirt.’”

“It is a very nice shirt.”

He laughed, a short and helpless breath, and reached for the hem and pulled it over his head. He was flushed from his throat to his collarbones. There were scars on him, a small pale one over the ribs, a long one along the shoulder, a fine white line across the forearm, and a bruise going yellow on his hip where someone had checked him into the boards. I had seen a great many bodies in eleven hundred years, wounded and starved and buried and burned, and I had never once seen one offered.

“You are very beautiful,” I said.

“Shut up.”

“I am telling the truth.”