Page 62 of Enchantment of Silver and Sea
Even though these thoughts flashed through my mind in a matter of seconds, that was apparently enough time for Kieran to pick up on my hesitation. He swallowed the last bite of muffin and drained what was left of the water from the glass.
“Don’t you have a shower?”
Fuck.
If I could have burrowed through the floor of my apartment, and the floor below that, all the way until I was burrowing deep into the ground, I would have done it.
“Uh, yeah,” I stammered, my face blazing with humiliation. I forced out a laugh. “That probably would have been the more efficient thing, huh? Rinsing off in the shower instead of me wiping you down one cut at a time?”
My self-deprecating humor fell flat. I didn’t even have to look up at him to know it.
Just fucking great. He probably thought I wanted to sit in the candlelight and tend to him like we were in one of those romance novels on the eighth floor of the Library. Actually…he had grown up Outside and had probably never seen those kinds of books before. Or had he? Cecil had said he brought Irene books because the Strangers didn’t have much use for them, asin they weren’t necessary to survival. It didn’t mean that people outside the walls didn’t read for fun.
It didn’t matter. There was no denying how it looked, and he wasn’t about to let me off easy.
“I can’t say what the smart thing would have been.” He started to stand, then leaned over at the last second so his lips were an inch from my ear. “But I did enjoy this.”
Pre-Awakening or Post-Awakening, there was no bigger idiot than me.
Kieran limped in the direction of the shower. The limp kind of detracted from the effect of his words, but I was too frazzled to even begin to think of how to point that out. I grabbed a towel from one of the cabinets and thrust it into his arms, not meeting his eyes or even checking to make sure he had a grip on it before I hurried back to my desk. I grabbed the empty glass and saucer and deposited them in the sink.
On the other side of the bathroom door, I heard the shower turn on.
I couldn’t think of anything else to do with myself at that point other than climb into bed and pull the comforter over my head.
I lost track of how long Kieran spent in the shower. It felt like a while, but I couldn’t blame him—living Outside, how many opportunities had he had to use a working shower? The cool water probably felt refreshing after being out in the humid night. Running around. Almost getting himself captured or killed.
He was so fucked. And I might be, too.
The reality of our situation was finally starting to creep over me like threads of ice. But then I heard the click of the bathroom door, and my heart jumped into my throat.
Kieran emerged wearing nothing but a pair of boxers, scrubbing his hair with a towel. Even looking like he had taken a tumble off the edge of a cliff, his body still made my breath catch in my throat. The candlelight flickered off every pane of muscle, lighting him up in an almost otherworldly glow.
No one in Cyllene looked quite like that. Even Zander. There was no substitution for a life spent literally fighting and clawing for survival.
“How was your shower?” I asked lamely.
“Great.” His smile was neither amused nor smug. He seemed genuinely happy and relaxed, and seeing that brought a smile to my face as well.
“I see you finished bandaging your leg.”
I waited for him to jump at the opportunity to embarrass me some more, but his mind seemed like it was somewhere else as he stood in the middle of the room, flexing his leg beneath the bandage.
“Yeah, I have to say…I’m not used to walking away from a fight with injuries like this. One of theEnforcersshot at me when I was coming over the wall, and I guess my head was somewhere else because really, what a fucking horrible landing. It’s not broken or anything, but I’m probably not going to be able to put much weight on it for a while.”
I considered what he had said. And realized he had never actually answered my question from earlier. I smoothed the comforter with my hands. “You never did say why you’re here. Do you all need me for something else?”
Kieran was silent for a moment. He was no longer examining his leg but still seemed distracted. Suddenly, as if making up his mind about something, he strode over to the bed and sat down on the edge. “Give me the larimar stone.”
A beat passed.
“Damnit, not like that,” he huffed, rising again and disappearing back into the bathroom. I heard the rustling of fabric, then he returned with a chain of some sort, dangling from his fingers. It was silver. Pretty, actually. “I brought this for you, for the stone. So you don’t lose it.”
I retrieved the stone from under my mattress. There was a clump of some sort of silvery wire on the center of the chain, and he manipulated it with careful fingers, clamping it around the stone until it was perfectly caged in. A necklace.
When he handed it back to me, a lump formed in my throat. “I can’t wear this around Cyllene,” I said, trying to force my emotional mind to be rational.
“Not every day,” he conceded. “But it’s better for it to be portable.”
