Page 13 of Serpentine Valentine
The voice was low and rich, emerging from a throat like roughed-upvelvet.
A shiver slid down my spine and every inch of my skin seemed to come alive.
I turned my head to the desk beside me even though I knew, somehow, she would be sitting there.
The girl who’d lived her own tragedy.
Lex Gorgon.
She was looking at me, features impassive, but those pale eyes––gray! They were gray as wet stone––were intent on my face. I don’t know why I blushed, but I could feel the heat of it spill down my cheeks to my chest like red wine.
When I only blinked dumbly at her, her full mouth flattened into a line. She gestured to it with a black-tipped hand. “You were gazing into space smiling.”
The class was still filling up around us, so I paused as a guy walked in front of us to take another front-row seat. It gave me a moment to suck in a sharp breath and scold myself not to be an idiot. She didn’t deserve that after what she’d been through. Would probably think I was some judgmental prude ready to pin her with a scarlet letter.
“I like the tragedies best,” I told her, my voice softer than usual because suddenly I was thrown back to my childhood when shyness crippled me, and I was unsure of every sound I made.
A thin black brow arched high on her forehead. “What do you know about tragedy?”
They weren’t fighting words. There was no condescension in her tone or manner, more a gentle kind of curiosity, maybe even a playful dare.
Tell me the secret of your sorrow, she seemed to say.
And for some inexplicable reason, I wanted to share with her.
I shrugged a shoulder, fiddling with my ballpoint pen on the frontof my notebook even though the ink was making ugly splotches on the page. “I think that’s the point. Everyone can relate to a sad story. There are degrees of tragedy, obviously, but every person living knows some sort of unhappiness. It’s love and laughter, success and happy endings that divide us. Pain brings us together.”
Lex blinked at me then, a slow closing of those thick-lashed, stony eyes. When they reopened, a fresh intensity was there.
God, I thought, despite the way the words made me shaky,she’s so gorgeous.
“That’s an interesting thought,” she said in that low, almost masculine voice that vibrated in my bones. “A clever one.”
The blush that had receded to just my cheeks bloomed across my entire chest again. “Thank you. I’m Luna Pallas.”
A thin smile that seemed more unhappy than not. “I think you know who I am.”
I bit my lip, pressed my pen tip too hard to the paper, and rent the page. “I do.”
She shifted a heavy sheet of wavy dark hair behind her shoulder, and I caught the flash of a scar like a starburst over her collarbone in the shadow of her collared shirt. Above it, a tattooed snake kissed the side of her neck with an undulating tongue.
It was erotic somehow, the snake and the scar. Tragedy stamped and inked on her body for everyone to see. It was bold and courageous. I liked that about her, and I didn’t even know her.
“I know you, too,” she startled me by saying, sliding her gaze to me out the corner of one eye. “So don’t feel bad. Luna Pallas, captain of the field hockey team, popular and beautiful with too many friends to name and a boyfriend like jock Ken to her academic Barbie.”
I laughed, embarrassed even though everything she said was true. “You make me sound like a stereotype.”
“If the cleat fits.”
The professor walked into the small auditorium then, stopping our conversation before I could defend myself. I was more than a stereotype. I had depth and angst galore. I just covered it up, hid it to make myself more palatable to the masses.
I opened my mouth to contradict Lex, but she was already facing forward with Shakespeare’sHamletflipped open, the pages already riddled with blue-inked annotations. I leaned forward automatically, wanting to read what she’d seen in the famous bard’s words. It earned me a glare and the angling of her body around the book, obscuring it from view.
I sat back, angry and embarrassed by her cold shoulder and my own blatant curiosity.
She was just a girl. A very pretty girl with thick dark hair down her back and features copied out of an art book. I’d known pretty girls before and pretty boys.
None had done to me what Lex Gorgon did with a single blink of those cold eyes.
