Page 36 of Serpentine Valentine
I could have laughed at that. Would have last year before the incident.
Now, the humor only flared and faded in my chest.
“Not quite.” I pushed off the post and sauntered toward her, lifting her socked feet so I could sit beside her, then replacing them on my lap. She wore frilly socks and had delicate ankle bones I wanted to trace with my tongue. “I likeThe Merchant of Venice. ‘I hold the world, but as the world, Gratiano, A stage where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one.’”
She clucked her tongue, waving her pen as she spoke. “It’s still sad.”
“I like sad things. I wouldn’t be in our Tragedies class if I didn’t.”
“Because you understand them?” she ventured, finally looking something other than bright and warm. Finally looking a little something like me.
I didn’t like it.
“Yes,” I agreed, but I didn’t want to linger on me and the things I was known for, so I reached out to wrap a lock of her pretty hair around my finger. It gleamed yellow, orange, and red like the leaves falling from the massive oak in the front yard. “I likeA Midsummer’s Night Dream, too.”
“‘Though she be little, she is fierce’?” Luna guessed at my favorite line with an impish grin.
“No,” I said slowly, pulling the word apart like taffy as I leaned close enough to count the faint freckles on her milky cheeks. “‘So we grew together, Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition, Two lovely berries moulded on one stem.’”
Luna’s full mouth parted, a small pink tongue peeking through her teeth. “I’m surprised you have that one memorized. It isn’t particularly famous.”
“No,” I agreed, wrapping my finger up her strand of hair and down again, watching the play of the setting sunlight against it. “But I always like the imagery of it. Two beings on one stem, separate but together.”
“Why, Lex, that seems romantic,” she gasped, then laughed when I pulled hard on her hair. “I’m sorry, it’s just surprising to hear you speak like that.”
“Because I was raped or because I’m gay?”
The words dropped between us, ugly and rude. I winced at my own self-cruelty. What Morgan had done and how he had done it had tainted even my view of my own sexuality.
Let me teach you what it’s like to be loved by a man.
The twin snakes of anger and fear that lived in my belly seethed and writhed.
“You’re gay?” Luna asked like it was a big reveal.
I slanted her an unimpressed look. “Don’t quote Shakespeare to me, then insult your own intelligence by acting surprised.”
“But Iamsurprised,” she insisted earnestly, leaning forward like an eager child. “I didn’t know you were a lesbian.”
“Forgive me, but you do remember our kiss in the library last night?”
Her blush was instant, white to pink from one second to the next. I watched her gaze slide away from mine, unable to look me in the eye as she remembered our embrace.
“Of course, I remember,” she murmured, tucking a wayward piece of hair behind her ear.
God, even the shell of that ear was sexy.
I gave in to an impulse and reached for her slightly pointed chin, pinching and lifting until her green eyes locked on mine. Only then didI reach up and smooth a thumb over her pink cheek, testing its warmth.
“You seem unsure,” I said, soft and husky, already moving toward her. No, not moving, but pulled to her by some gravitational force. “Shall I remind you?”
“‘O, how ripe in show, Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow!’” she whispered against my lips, and I couldn’t help the moan that slipped from me.
A beautiful, ethereal girl who quoted Shakespeare back to me?
Why did Mina Pallas’s daughter have to be like this?
So pure.
