Page 40 of Serpentine Valentine
Effie was holding a small vial and twisting the lid off. When she caught my gaze, she lifted it to me in cheers. “Smelling salts work like a charm.”
“May I?”
The three of them blinked at me in comic unison, but I didn’t feel well enough to laugh.
“Why?” Grace demanded.
“Because I was with her when she fainted.”
It was a weak explanation, but I couldn’t find words to explain that I wanted to be the one to wake her. It seemed foolishly romantic, as if I fancied myself some kind of Prince Charming waking the princess with a kiss. In truth, I knew it would take more than a single kiss to wake Lex up from the nightmare her life had become since last Halloween.
“Stop being such a bossy boots,” Juno reprimanded Grace, wrenched the vial out of Effie’s hand, and passed it to me. “Have at it.”
I caught it easily, then walked around to Lex’s head. I was incredibly aware of the Gorgon sisters’ gazes as I carefully lifted Lex’s head and kneeled down on the ground to cushion her skull on my thighs. Only then did I gently brush the thick curls from her face and wave the smelling salts beneath her nose.
She came to with a tremendous, soul-quaking scream.
The hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood on end, and my ears throbbed from the noise. That scream baptized me in a miniscule amount of the enormous pain wedged inside her small, feminine form and made me feel sick. How much was there inside her just waiting to get out? And when it did release, what form would it take?
“Hush,” I told her when she settled, taut as a board in my lap. I bentover her face to view her upside down and pressed my cool palm to her hot cheek. “You’re safe.”
Her eyes were wide, wreathed in mink lashes, and textured like wet concrete. Such lovely eyes so filled with knee-weakening fear. I watched up close as she came to her senses, and that soft gray hardened into stone.
She pushed up and off me so quickly that she was lying down one moment and standing over me the next. Her beautiful mouth was twisted like hot metal into an ugly snarl.
“I told you, next time you are on your knees for me, it better be because you’re willing to beg for more.” She spat the words at me like venom and then stalked into the house, the door slamming so hard behind her the wreath of pine cones fell off the door and broke apart on the ground.
One of them rolled into my thigh and pricked my thumb when I picked it up.
“You should stay away from her,” Effie said, but she’d lost her edge. Instead, she looked sad and burdened, shoulders sagging, mouth a downward droop. “She’s been through enough without some straight girl teasing her.”
“I’m not teasing her,” I said automatically, but the truth of her words resonated deep inside me and made my stomach ache.
Wasn’t I?
Only minutes ago, I’d professed my heterosexuality to Lex. Argued for it, even. When so much evidence was pointing to the contrary, or at the very least to the possibility of bisexuality.
Hadn’t I been one stiff breeze away from orgasming myself watching Lex touch her long, agile fingers against the swell of her groin? Hadn’t I breathed deeply just to catch a hint of her sweet musk beneath the cool spice of the autumn breeze?
“I’m not teasing her,” I repeated slower. “I want to be her friend.”
That was the truth, as much as I could give anyway.
“Yeah? Benevolent Miss Popular wants to take on the charity case of the girl who was raped?” Gracie asked with snapping teeth. “I heard you like taking in strays. Be careful with Lex. She bites.”
My mind instantly conjured the memory of her strong teeth clamping over my throat, but I shook my head to clear it.
“That’s not the epithet I would give Lex,” I argued. “To me, she’s gray-eyed and lionhearted. I know she’s been wronged, not just by whoever attacked her, but the rest of them, ofus, on campus. But to me, she’s not a victim. She’s the strongest girl I’ve ever met, and I want to know her. I wish I was more like her. Iwantto be strong like her.”
And for her, I thought but didn’t say.
My words seemed to mute the sisters. They sat there staring at me with cold, shrewd, reptilian eyes. There was violence in them, like there was in Lex, but it was better restrained. Still, I wasn’t sure if they would hug me or tear me to pieces like crazed maenads.
“It takes courage to love someone who thinks they are broken, and you reek of fear. It’s easy enough to say that to us,” Juno said softly, standing up in eerie tandem with her sisters so they loomed over me, pretty yet somehow monstrous beneath their skins. “Come back when you’re ready to tell the world.”
I was soexhausted from the day, so tangled in my own tormented thoughts that I completely forgot about my standing Friday night date with Pierce until I pushed through the door of my basement apartment and found him cooking in my kitchen.
Happily, he was playing music loudly, totally in the zone because of course, he was the perfect man, and he loved to cook and did it well.Otherwise, he might have seen the crestfallen look on my face, and the whole minute it took me to drag the remnants of my tattered identity around me like a funeral shroud.
