Page 59 of House of Hearts
“Why shouldn’t I?” I challenge, but my voice shakes when it leaves my lips.
It happens too quickly for me to register. The tiniest fraction of a second where I’m hunched over him, my palm pressed to the broad plane of his shoulder, and the next where he’s got me pinned beneath him, my back crashing a melody of its own into the keys.
The weight of his body falls over mine, and I feel the cage of his arms on either end of the organ. He leans into my throat and shudders as he feels my rampant pulse.
Exhaustion has turned the whites of his eyes red. “B-because I…”
He cuts off abruptly. I stop breathing as his knuckle charts a path up my ribs to my throat and finally to my lips. The groove of his finger curls longingly against my lower lip, and he swallows as I exhale. “Because I can no longer trust myself around you. Every time I see you, all I can think about is kissing you, and I ca—”
I don’t hear the rest. He’s rigid as I lean all the way forward. He’s gone statuesque, Medusa-turned by my kiss.
“Violet?” he muffles against my lips. When I don’t respond, he shifts with a sigh and pulls me closer. It starts off gentle enough. A tentative brush of his mouth against mine. The careful conquest of my lips, delving deeper as his fingers comb through my hair.
When his teeth graze against my lower jaw, it’s like a bolt of lightning in my veins. He offers an approving noise as my hands find his hair, a low groan that dances along my skin. I hum against the kiss, and that propels him even further.
A dam bursts at that moment. He kisses like a man starving, like he might feast on this moment and last the winter off the memory.
I wonder if this is how all the other girls felt. Diving in the deep end and quickly realizing you can’t swim, but it’s okay, you want to drown in him anyway. Should we be doing this? I’d be a liar if I said I hadn’t thought about it again and again and again, in all the quiet moments staring at the ceiling and whenever my gaze lingered on him too long in class.
My name is a prayer.Violet, Violet, Violet, like I’m some great and terrible saint, a woman worth worshiping.
When we finally pull away, I gasp for air. His lips look good swollen, the type of mouth meant to be kissed. I marvel at the sight of him.
Except it isn’t longing I see on his face. “We shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why?”
Horror burns in his eyes, fathomless and deep. “Because I’ll kill you.”
18
I don’t know what it says about my rapidly deteriorating mental state, but I immediately start laughing. It’s not a little giggle, either. My laughter ricochets off the vaulted ceiling and echoes back like a canned laugh track when I ask, “Melodramatic much?”
He’s not laughing. He’s staring ahead at the altarpiece with grim determination; I imagine if Calvin actually were religious, he might be asking God for the right words to say now. “Anastasia’s going to make me kill you,” he confesses finally.
That’s not the punch line I was expecting. “Don’t even joke about that.”
Dust motes play in ribbons of moonlight overhead, their speckled bodies floating in the night air.
“Do I look like I’m joking?” he asks, and okay, admittedly, he doesn’t. “I didn’t tell you before because I wasn’t completely sure, but I think we’re—”
I cut him off. “Please tell me you’re not going to say what I think you’re going to say.”
He’s horribly, tellingly silent, and I wait for him to utter the words and ruin everything. He doesn’t disappoint. “We’re soulmates,” hewhispers, and the truth drapes over everything. It weighs my world down and consumes it.
I brush a thumb across my mouth, the intrinsic fear building in me as I think of the ghosts only I can see and all the little moments avalanching over one another. “You don’t even know my middle name,” I say like it’s some magical rebuttal, an ace slapped on the table that will end this conversation. “You’re not in love with me. There’s a million reasons not to be. I’m cold and unpleasant and, as you saw back at the gazebo, enormously petty. I’m also broke, and a boy in eighth grade told me I act like a robot and—”
He finally rediscovers his own voice. “Your middle name is Alice, not that it matters.”
Screw my ace.
“Wh-what?” I sputter. “How did youknowthat?”
Embarrassment colors his cheeks, but he doesn’t let it dissuade him. “You’re not the super spy you think you are. When you were playing FBI and scrolling through my Instagram, you accidentally liked one of my photos from two years ago. I…might’ve looked up your page as well. You’ve got your middle name in your bio. Aside from that and some old selfies, your page was pretty boring.”
I don’t have it in me to deny the Instagram-stalking accusations. “O-okay, fine, you know my middle name, congrats, but that doesn’t magically make you in love with me,” I relent, taking a step backward until I hit the organ keys once more. I jump as the sound reverberates through the chapel. “How does Anastasia even know we’re…whatever it is that we are? I’ve only known you for a short while, and besides, you’re not the oldest child, so it doesn’t count, right?”
He toys with a signet ring, twisting it anxiously around his finger.“The curse relies on fate and some cosmic concept far beyond our understanding.” His knuckles bleach white as he balls his hand into a fist. “When Percy cast himself out of play, apparently it switched hands to the next eldest. I’m thirty minutes older than Sadie, so here we are.”
