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They went back to Magnus and Alec's apartment. The couple had taken their new baby on vacation to Bali, which meant Simon and Isabelle could have the place to themselves.
"You sure it's okay for us to be here?" Simon asked, looking nervously around the apartment. The last time he'd seen it, the decorating ethos had been part-Studio 54, part-bordello: lots of disco balls, velvet curtains, and some appallingly placed mirrors. Now the living room looked like something puked up by a Babies"R"Us--blankets and diapers and mobiles and stuffed bunnies everywhere you looked.
He still couldn't believe Magnus Bane was someone's dad.
"I'm sure," Isabelle said, stripping off her dress in one smooth motion to reveal the unending stretches of smooth, pale skin that lay beneath. "But if you want to leave . . ."
"No," Simon said, struggling for enough breath to speak. "Definitely. No. Here's good. Very good."
"Well, then." Isabelle swept a family of stuffed kittens off the couch, then stretched across like a very satisfied and very dangerous cat. She looked pointedly at Simon's shirt, which was still on his body.
"Well. Then." Simon stood above her, unsure what to do next.
"Simon."
"Yes?"
"I'm looking pointedly at your shirt."
"Uh-huh."
"Which is still on your body."
"Oh. Right." He took care of that. Dropped down beside her on the couch.
"Simon."
"Yes? Oh. Right." Simon leaned toward her and pulled her close for a kiss, which she indulged for about thirty seconds before extricating herself.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"You tell me," she said. "I, your incredibly sexy girlfriend that you never get to see, am prostrating myself before you half-naked, and you seem like you'd rather be watching a baseball game."
"I hate baseball."
"Exactly." Isabelle sat up--though, mercifully, she didn't put any clothes back on. Not yet. "You know you can talk to me about anything, right?"
Simon nodded.
"So if, hypothetically, you were feeling a little nervous about this whole Ascension thing tomorrow, and wondering whether you still wanted to go through with it, you could talk to me about that."
"Hypothetically," Simon said.
"Just picking a topic at random," Isabelle said. "We could also talk about Avatar: The Last Airplane, if you want."
"It's the Airbender," Simon said, suppressing a grin, "and I love you even if you are nerd-clueless."
"And I love you, even if you are a mundane," she said. "Even if you stay a mundane. You know that, right?"
"I . . ." It was easy for her to say, and he thought she probably even meant it. But that didn't make it true. "You think you would? Really?"
Isabelle let out her breath in an irritated puff. "Simon Lewis, are you forgetting that you were a mundane when I started dating you? A rather scrawny mundane with terrible fashion sense, I should point out. And then you were a vampire, and I still dated you. Then you were a mundane again, but this time with freaking amnesia. And still, inexplicably, I fell in love with you all over again. What could possibly make you think I have any standards left when it comes to you?"
"Uh, thank you, I think?"
"`Thank you' is the correct response. And also 'I love you, too, Isabelle, and I would love you even if you lost your memory or grew a mustache or something.'"
"Well, obviously." Simon tugged at her chin. "Though I'd draw the line at a beard."
"Goes without saying." Then she looked serious again. "You do believe me, right? You can't be doing this for me."
"I'm not doing it for you," Simon said, and that was true. He may have gone to the Academy, in part, because of Isabelle--but he'd stayed for himself. When he Ascended, it wouldn't be because he needed to prove something to her. "But . . . if I did back out, which I would never do, but if I did, wouldn't that make me a coward? You'd date a mundane, maybe. But I know you, Izzy. You couldn't date a coward."
"And you, Simon Lewis, couldn't be a coward. Not if you tried. It's not cowardly to make a choice about what you want your life to be. Choosing what's right for you, maybe that's the bravest thing you can do. If you choose to be a Shadowhunter, I will love you for it. But if you choose to stay a mundane, I'll love you for that, too."
"What if I just choose not to drink from the Mortal Cup because I'm afraid it will kill me?" Simon asked. It was a relief to finally say it out loud. "What if it had nothing to do with how I want to spend the rest of my life? What if it's just being scared?"
"Well, then, you're an idiot. Because the Mortal Cup could never hurt you. It will know what I do, which is that you'd make an amazing Shadowhunter. The blood of the Angel could never hurt you," she said, intensity blazing in her eyes. "It's not possible."
"You really believe that?"
"I really do."
"So the fact that we're here, and you're, you know--"
"Partially disrobed and wondering why we're still making small talk?"
"--has nothing to do with the fact that you think this might be our last night together?"
This earned him another exasperated sigh. "Simon, do you know how many times I've been almost certain one of us wouldn't survive the next twenty-four hours?"
"Um, several?"
"Several," she confirmed. "And on not one of those occasions have we ever had any sort of desperate, angsty farewell sex."
"Wait--we haven't?"
Over the last several months, Simon and Isabelle had gotten very close. Closer, he thought, than they'd ever been before, not that he could quite remember. At least conversationally. As for the other kind of close--talking on the phone and writing each other letters wasn't exactly conducive to losing your virginity.
Then there was the excruciating fact that Simon wasn't certain he still had a virginity to lose.
All this time he'd been too embarrassed to ask.
"Are you kidding me?" Isabelle asked.
Simon could feel his cheeks burning.
"You're not kidding me!"
"Please don't be mad," Simon said.
Isabelle laughed. "I'm not mad. If we'd had sex, and you'd forgotten--which, by the way, I assure you would not be possible, demon amnesia or no demon amnesia--maybe I'd be mad."
"So we really never . . . ?"
"We really never," Isabelle confirmed. "I know you don't remember, but things were a little hectic around here, what with the war and all the people trying to kill us and such. And like I said, I don't believe in 'farewell sex.'"
Simon felt like the whole night--possibly the most important night of his young and sorrowfully inexperienced life--was hanging in the balance, and he was very afraid of saying the wrong thing. "So, uh, what kind of sex do you believe in?"
"I think it should be a beginning of something," Isabelle said. "Like, say, hypothetically, if your entire life were going to change tomorrow, if it were going to be the first day of the rest of your life, I'd want to be a part of that."
"The rest of my life."
"Yep."
"Hypothetically."
"Hypothetically." She took off his glasses then and kissed him hard on the lips, then very softly on the neck. Exactly where a vampire would sink its fangs in, some part of him thought. Most of him, though, was thinking, This is actually going to happen.
This is going to happen tonight.
