Page 81 of Serpentine Valentine
Brave, bold, free.
Pierce didn’t get it. He was angry for me, forever my champion, and he wanted to storm over to Lex’s house and give her a piece of his mind. Given what I knew now of Lex, her anger, and her abilities, I didn’t think that was a good idea.
In any case, I was distracted.
Not just by heartbreak but also by a burgeoning sense of injustice stirring in my own gut like twisting snakes.
I couldn’t stop thinking about herbitter, anguished words.
Both a woman and a wolf. Something with teeth and more aggression than society allows women to have.
Would you have us be alone and suffering? If we are wolves, should we not become a pack? Something to be feared by others, to give comfort to our own?
You have to take action, Luna. It’s not enough to stand by and let these things happen.
For four days after our confrontation and breakup, I stewed in the residue of her anger and righteousness. Through some kind of osmosis, I found myself increasingly unable to stand my own inaction.
Lex had chosen anger and cruelty in her pursuit of truth and justice.
But that wasn’t the only option.
I could do something without becoming like her.
Like them.
Like my mother.
My stomach problems got so bad that I was swallowing Tums like they were candy and losing my breakfast almost as soon as I finished it.
But that stopped the fifth morning when I woke up in Pierce’s apartment and decided, finally, to do something.
It started with a phone call to my mom’s assistant, who was happy to tell me Mina would be busy all evening with a faculty dinner in town. I went to my classes, ate lunch alone in the cafeteria, blind to the whispers about me and the fact that none of my field hockey girls deigned to sit beside me, and then, when the sun fell to a ribbon of gold on the horizon, I set off to do something courageous––heroic––for the first time in my life.
It was the week before Halloween, but a wintry wind cut through campus, stirring up little whirlwinds of dried leaves and cutting through layers of wool and cotton until even my bones seemed to shiver. I huddled up in my tweed overcoat and cut through the quad with purpose,ignoring the looks from Flora and her lackeys as I prowled by where they congregated, gossiping together.
“Pervert,” she spat at me, and her friends twittered.
It rolled off my back, barely felt.
Loving Lex, touching her body and enjoying the way we had brought each other pleasure wasn’t perversion. It was something like worship, something holy that I felt all the way through to my spirit. I felt bad for Flora that she didn’t understand that.
Clearly, she’d never been in love.
Clearly, something about my own easy acceptance of this aspect of myself threatened her.
Part of me, the same part that crushed on Draco Malfoy and loved Lex Gorgon, wanted to go to her then and offer help. Offer kindness and unconditional acceptance to see how my old friend might grow and evolve under the sunshine-like alchemy of love in the human heart.
But I had bigger things to worry about.
I stood outside my old house for a long time after I arrived. It was a stately home befitting the president of Acheron, meant to hold faculty parties and visiting professors with a steeply gabled roof and huge mullioned windows under stone arches. I wanted to burn it to the ground.
The viciousness of the thought took me by surprise. I was a pacifist, a harmony-seeker, and a peacekeeper. Not the vengeful demon I’d thought could love me.
But I couldn’t shake the tempting image. The house burning, plumes of smoke and ash clogging the bitter cold air, reducing this status symbol of my mother’s to cinders.
She didn’t deserve it. Lex was right.
If she was really hushing up scandals on campus to better her own career, she deserved to be stopped and stripped of her glory.
