Page 31 of The Same Backward as Forward
“You’re a nursingstudent,” he replied. “An excellent one. And you’ve lied to me many, many times, almost as frequently as you’ve lied to yourself. What I haven’t quite figured out”—if I’d thought Harry’s gaze was wolfish before, it was a thousand times more sonow—“is why you try so hard to hide yourself away. I have my theories, of course.”
“It’s not a crime to be reserved.”
“You feel things.” Harry’s voice was softer than it had been a moment before—not gentle, but soft in the way that silk was against skin. “Deeply.” He made a study of my eyes and didn’t bother to mask the fact that he was doing it. “Watching you keep your emotions locked down is like watching stormwater rise and rise behind a dam.”
Everywhere I looked, there he was: dark green eyes, lighter around the rim, so focused on mine that there was no escape.
“You’re grieving,” Harry murmured. “And you’re so angry I can taste it.” He paused, daring me to tell him he was wrong, and when I didn’t, he continued, “You’re frightened—and not just because coming here is dangerous for you.”
I raised my chin and stared him down. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“My life is four walls, this bed, a bearded fisherman with questionable survivalist tendencies and horrific taste in interior design, andyou.” He paused, just slightly. “Do you know what I’ve discovered about myself with all that spare time? I’m hungry, Hannah.” For once he used my name. Only my name “My brain drinks in every last detail of its surroundings. Of you.”
I took a step back.
He seemed to take that as an invitation—not to come after me but to tell me exactly what he saw when he drank in every last detail. “You have ways of going elsewhere in your mind. It’s like you’re a dreamer trapped in a cynic’s body, a cynic’s life. Your hands are never still but always steady. And your face—it’s like you have control over every little muscle, even the ones of which most people are completely unaware.”
His weight shifted slightly toward me, and there was something utterly unfamiliar—utterly new—about the set of his lips.
He’s thinking about kissing me.That thought was horrible and unexpected. I told myself that I was imagining things, but…His lips, parting. His eyes on mine.The worst thing was that this time, Ididn’tstep back.
My heart beat out a steady rhythm, and I felt it in every inch of my body.I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.
“Shall I tell you a story, Hannah?” His words wrapped around me. I became acutely aware of the rise and fall of his chest, of the rise and fall of mine. “A fairy tale? I think I will, and you can tell me how I do. Once upon a time…” Harry took a step back, then another, giving me room to breathe, giving himself room to take in all of me at once. “There was a princess, born to a feckless king and a wicked queen.”
I thought about my father, holding my mother off—to a point and only because he’d lost Kaylie first. But I refused to let my opponent think he’d gotten anywhere close to the truth.
“Name one fairy-tale princess who was actually born to a wicked queen,” I said.
“Hit a nerve, have I?” He flashed me a twisted, knowing smile. “Princess Hannah shined like a beacon in the darkness, nothing like those around her.Selfless. Kind.” There was an edge to the way he said those words, like they weren’t entirely compliments. “But alas, the selfless never fare well in fairy tales until the very end.”
“I’m not selfless,” I shot back. “You said it yourself—I hide.” Making myself invisible for so long had come at a cost. I’d left Kaylie in that house. I’d left her at our mother’s mercy. I’d told myself that I would get her out, but Ihadn’t.
And you’re the reason why, I thought, staring bullets at the person telling me the story ofmylife.
“Not selfless?” Harry said. “You’re here, aren’t you? I am, even by my own reckoning, a real prick, and yet, you come here, day after day. You avert your eyes. You look through me when you can. But you’re here. You saved me.”
“Because youwantedto die.” The words burst out of me.
“It’s possible,” Harry allowed, “that the princess is capable of spite.” He gave the smallest of shrugs. “Her mother is, after all, a wicked queen.”
A muscle in my jaw twitched. “What has Jackson been telling you when I’m not here?”
That was the only explanation for the story myreal prickof a patient was spinning, the only way he could have ever seen so much. No one wasthatperceptive.
“The fisherman hasn’t told me a damn thing. As it turns out, Beardy is impossible to get a rise out of. But you…” He smiled. “You’re like a lock with seven keys, each more complicated than the last.” He gave another little shrug. “I deeply suspect that I’ve always been fond of picking locks.”
“Start moving,” I gritted out, gesturing to the door. “Walk. Use your legs, because we’re getting ready to go out on the rocks.” I was going to get him all the way to the lighthouse this week if it killed me.
“Always the taskmaster, never the pupil.” Harry had the gall to make a tsking sound, then launched back into the fairy tale of my life, as seen through his eyes: “When she was very young, Princess Hannah learned to lock herself away. She had a secret, you see.Magic.And the evil queen would have sucked her dry.”
My throat tightened. He was describing the wrong sister.Iwasn’t the one who’d been magic.
“So the princess locked herself away. She built towers, one inside the other inside the other, all of them invisible to everyonebut her.Locks and keys.Alone—where no one could harm her, where her magic could be used to do no harm.”
I didn’thaveany magic. I was unremarkable. I wasnothing.
Why wouldn’t he just let me be nothing?
