Page 94 of Vesuvius

A weight settled beside him. Loren had dressed again, donning the embroidered yellow tunic Julia had gifted the day before, now stained and unpolished. Felix liked it better that way.

Pushing to his elbows, he said, ‘Your hair is a rat’s nest.’

‘You always know what to say.’ Loren dug in Nonna’s satchel until he withdrew a comb with a victory cry and set to work detangling.

Felix studied the narrow slope of his shoulders. He could drink his fill of this, watch Loren the way a thirsty man begged for water, toe the surface of his depths, so long as Felix didn’t let himself drown.

‘You seem happier,’ he said after a time, ‘since the mountain.’

The comb slowed. ‘Do I?’

‘Happierisn’t the right word.Lighter, maybe. Like a burden was lifted.’

‘I wasn’t honest before when I told you nothing happened in my dreams. In truth, they’re nightmares. Horrible visions. Things I can’t repeat, but – you heard me in the Forum yesterday.’

‘Pompeii. You worried – saw – something happening to it,’ Felix guessed. ‘Something involving the helmet?’

Loren picked at the tines. ‘Even I underestimated what its power could do.’

It sounded like another half-truth. ‘And now?’

‘Now I have an answer. Everyone will be safe once you put it back come morning.’ He hit Felix with his burning smile, sunshine made tangible in the sweet upturn of his lips. ‘I think everything will turn out all right.’

He resumed the steady drag of his comb.

Felix’s nerves, meanwhile, felt flayed.

He had done all Loren asked, hadn’t he? He had talked to Nonna, trekked up and down a mountain, confessed fears he had never divulged to anyone else. Yet Loren kept the truth obscured. Whatever answer he’d found on Vesuvius about the helmet, he wasn’t tellingFelix in full.

Felix had a sick sense those answers would come out the hard way before this ended.

Rules clashed in his head.Avoid attachment. Stay in the present. Belief is never worth it.Felix lived by his mantras to keep from dying if he went against them, but in the span of three days, Loren had systematically sorted through each one, pondered it, then flipped it on its head. Still, even through the jumble, Felix kept hold of the one he’d learned first:trust your gut.

Others could keep religion and magic, augurs and oracles. None had ever served Felix the way his instincts did. What started that night with Servius, when he first felt the ground shake under his knees, had spiked to a maddening buzz he couldn’t put from his head. A constant chatter of wordless talking, disembodied hands grabbing his ankles, tripping him. Like a skittish animal, he wanted to lay his ears flat against his skull, turn tail and duck away until the storm passed. Everything about Pompeii was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Tossed in the tall grass, Mercury’s helmet gleamed red. That siren’s song still, beckoning Felix closer. A thread of a memory, demanding its knots be unpicked.

An inhuman whisper, muttering the worst was still to come.

He knew he should be angry that Loren posed yet another barricade in Felix’s quest to understand himself. Hewasangry. But he didn’t want to waste their last night, and if nothing else, Felix had mastered compartmentalising his feelings. Separating his emotions from the task at hand.

Loren pulled his hair over his shoulder, dividing the strands into three.

‘No.’ In a surge of boldness, Felix touched the back of Loren’s hand, fingers prickling. ‘Leave it loose.’

Loren’s lips parted. He blushed. ‘You didn’t let me finish telling you before.’

‘About your floating dream?’

A nod.

‘I think,’ Felix said, ‘I can guess.’

This time he kissed Loren, and they were both completely sober.

Still, Felix thought as his mouth moved against Loren’s, a jug of wine may well have been decanted directly into his gut. His veins burned. Loren’s movements were still sweetly clumsy, but he caught on quick, lips soft but sincere. Want scorched through Felix, thrill and terror coupled in equal doses. This, now, was all too much. Not enough. Too much. He didn’t permit touch like this. He didn’t allow it. Another rule Loren upended, simply by noticing – without being told – that Felix had such a rule at all.

When he reached to draw Loren closer, his hands shook.

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