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Was. Past tense. Just the way Gunter spoke of her. The gravity of that single word punctuates my elation, this dreamlike state the sky has swept me up in.
“How could her favorite be anything else?” I ask, my breath fogging in the cold as I stare up at the sky. As I watch my breath swirl in smoky tendrils, I realize it’s the first fresh air I’ve tasted in weeks, and all of a sudden, it’s like I can’t breathe fast enough to make up for the lost time. My chest spasms, in and out, in and out, like I’m a parched runner on the brink of death, gulping from an oasis in the middle of the desert.
I can’t get enough, I can’t get enough, and the air that fills my lungs isn’t enough either, I can’t…
“Blaise.” Gentle hands cup mine as Nox wraps his arms around me from behind.
My next words come out like a sob. “I can’t breathe. There’s all this air and I can’t breathe.”
“Hey,” he whispers, and then he’s pulling my hands upward, one to my chest, the other to my navel. “Do you feel that?”
A tremble rocks through me, and this time it has nothing to do with Nox’s touch. I don’t know what he’s talking about, because I can’t feel anything except for the way my lungs are collapsing, withering as they reject the air that my body is no longer capable of using.
“Right here,” he says, thrumming his thumb across the hand that rests on my belly, “And here too,” as he strokes the hand against my chest.
And then I feel it, the steady in and out.
“You’re breathing. You’re breathing, Blaise.”
Tears flood my eyes, and when my knees give out in relief, Nox doesn’t let me fall. Instead, he lowers us both down to the ground and pulls me into his lap, rocking me gently like my father used to do when I woke from a night terror and I’d crawl into bed with him.
When enough time has passed that I haven’t dropped dead and I’m convinced the air isn’t poisoned, I give myself permission to use some of the air to speak. “I didn’t realize how long it’s been since I’ve seen the sun,” I say, half-laughing, half-choking. Nox goes still, and I realize my folly soon enough. “I guess I still haven’t seen the sun, have I? But the sky. I didn’t realize how long it’s been since I’ve seen the sky.”
When he still says nothing, mortification at my come-apart overtakes me, and I free myself from his grip, turning to face him as I sit myself on the stone veranda across from him.
I was wrong before, about never seeing color before. Because it’s there—the blue in Nox’s eyes, pale as it may be. He watches me like he’s afraid I might disintegrate any moment now, like if he takes his eyes off me, I might hurl myself off the top of this tower.
It shouldn’t, but the concern with which he looks at me fills some gaping hole inside me.
It’s not that I don’t know what it is to be loved.
Evander loved me, loves me still, despite our relationship being complicated. My father loved me, too, and even Ellie.
I’ve known what it is to be loved, and loved abundantly, but this is new.
This is not what it is to be loved.
This is what it is to be seen.
I hadn’t realized until now how much I ached for that.
Because flickering behind those blue eyes of his, I don’t detect a misled infatuation with a girl whose blitheness is intoxicating.
All I see is a male swathed in darkness who searches my eyes and finds a mirror.
Because when Nox looks at me, he sees my pain, and he does not look away.
“Theo. Rose,” I find myself saying, and he cranes his head at me in question.
“You asked me earlier about the darkness. Where it came from. I was afraid to tell you…afraid…” I bite my lip, grasping for the right words. “It’s not even that I’m afraid of your judgment. Of you seeing me differently. It’s just that for the past six years, I’ve kept this secret inside me wound so tightly; it’s like if I unravel it, the rest of me will come undone too.”
Nox doesn’t argue with me. He doesn’t try to convince me I won’t come undone.
He just nods, and it’s such a gentle nudge, but it turns out it’s all I need.
So I tell him. I tell him of Theo and Rose, of Derek and the kitchen pantry. He winces when I get to the part about Derek cutting my hair, and I know he’s remembering how I reacted when he took a lock of my hair for the failed potion, but he says nothing. He just listens and watches and witnesses the unraveling, and I suppose that’s all I ever needed.
I tell him of the dozens of faces I’ve seen on my child, the hundreds of dimpled smiles. I tell him that Rose paints and Theo loves to hunt, but finds himself drawn to poetry in the quiet moments. I tell him all the lies I tell myself, and he takes them as truths. I tell him what a master I am at pretending, and he doesn’t look at me like I’m a child, and I silently thank him for it.
