Page 14 of Blood Currents
Tonight, though, he kept adjusting things that didn’t need to be adjusted, moving his violin case from the desk to lean against the wall and straightening papers on the table.
His familiar sat on the arm of the couch and watched him, her dark colors flashing over her crystalline spine.
“How was your day?”I asked, though I could see the answer in the way he held himself.Too straight, too controlled.The perfect posture of the heir I’d thought he’d stopped being when he was around me.It made my heart hurt.
“Fine,” he said, settling into the chair across from me instead of beside me on the couch where we’d spent so many evenings tangled together.The space between us felt deliberate.
“Caught up on some assignments I’d missed,” he continued.
The words were pleasant and empty.This was Elio’s public voice—the one he used with everyone else, those who couldn’t be trusted with anything real.It wasn’t the one he used with me.
Scout chittered anxiously against my neck, picking up on the tension I was trying to ignore.
“Just fine?”I pressed, setting aside the book I’d been pretending to read.“You were gone for a while this afternoon.”
“Family obligations.”He pulled out his own textbook, opening it with the kind of focus that screamedconversation over.“Nothing interesting.”
Family obligations.The phrase was so carefully neutral it made my stomach clench.
“Elio,” I said.“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”The response came too quickly, too smoothly.“I’m just tired.It’s been a long day.”
But he wasn’t tired.He was performing.The realization hit me like ice water.“You’re pulling away from me.”
His hands stilled on the textbook.For just a moment, his mask flickered, and I caught a glimpse of something raw and frightened before he smoothed it away.
“Don’t be dramatic, Mari.I’m right here.”
But he wasn’t.Not really.The person sitting across from me was the Lightford heir—pretty and perfect.Not the boy who’d cared for me and played music for me.
I should have pushed harder.Should have demanded he tell me what had happened, what had put that haunted look behind his careful composure.But something in his posture warned me off—a fragility that suggested if I pressed too hard, he might disappear entirely.
Instead, I stood and moved to him, my hands settling on his shoulders.The tension there was extraordinary, his muscles locked like he was bracing for impact.
“You don’t have to carry whatever this is alone,” I said softly.
He went very still under my touch.Then, slowly, he reached up to cover one of my hands with his own.His fingers were cold.
“Mari,” he said quietly, and for a moment his voice cracked.“Sometimes I think… sometimes I wonder if I’m strong enough to be what you need me to be.”
The honesty in those words broke something open in my chest.“What do you mean?”
“I mean maybe this…” He gestured between us, the movement careful and controlled.“Maybe we’re being naive, darling.Thinking we can have something real when everything else in our lives is performance and politics.”
“Wecanhave something real,” I said fiercely.“Wedohave something real.”
“Do we?”He turned in the chair to look up at me, and the doubt in his eyes made my breath catch.“Or are we just very good at pretending?”
The question cut deeper than it should have.Because hadn’t I wondered the same thing sometimes?Whether what we felt in stolen moments could survive in the harsh light of the real world?
“Look at me,” I said, cupping his face in my hands.“Really look at me.What do you see?”
His eyes searched mine, and for a heartbeat the walls came down completely.I saw everything—his fear, his longing, his desperate need to believe this was real, warring with the certainty that everything good in his life eventually got twisted into something else.
“I see you,” he whispered.“I see the person I…” He stopped, swallowing hard.“I see someone I’m going to lose.”
“You’re not going to lose me.”
