Page 34 of Better in Black
“Marry me,” I said.
And you laughed.
I’ve been sliced bloody, Jocelyn. I’ve felt ichor burn through flesh to bone, I’ve endured fangs, claws, curses, wounds that should have been fatal and nearly were—but nothing has ever cut so sharply as the sound of that laugh.
“I’m serious. I want to marry you.”
“You’re a good friend, Lucian,” you said. “But I could never ask you to do that.”
“You’re not—”
“I need to get away,” you said. “I need to disappear, so deep, so well, that he never finds us. I can’t ask you to do the same, just because you feel obligated. I don’t need your pity, or your protection, Lucian. I only need you to understand.”
I could have told you that you were wrong. It wasn’t pity or obligation. I loved you. I wanted, more than I’d ever wanted anything, to be by your side. I could have said,I love you and have loved you since I drew my first breath.I could have said,Please, join your life to mine, let me be the father to your child, the other half to your heart, let us be a family, let me throw away everything I know and everything I am to be yours.
But: After what had just happened between us, how could you not already know? The way I’d held you, kissed you, loved you…how could you imagine I felt only pity and obligation?
Unless…that was all you felt.
“It’s so early,” you said. “Let’s talk about it later.” You kicked off your shoes, lay down, and drew me down beside you. And I let you. I let you nestle into my chest and close your eyes. I willed myself to memorize the moment. Your warmth. Your presence.
I don’t know when I fell asleep. But when I woke, the sunlight had deepened into late afternoon. And you were gone.
The note you left read only:I don’t know how to say goodbye to you.
I rushed to Charles de Gaulle, of course. And maybe you wanted to be found, because there you were, waiting on a bench outside the security line. Unsurprised. Even then, I couldn’t say it.I love you. I need you. I want you to stay.
“I have one priority now,” you said. You took my hand. Sometimes I imagine I can still feel your palm in mine. “I have to protect her.”
You were so sure your baby was a girl.
“If anything happened to her…I wouldn’t survive it.”
I understood, then, how you’d survived the loss of Jonathan. It wasn’t the beauty of Paris, or some indefatigable lust for life; it wasn’t me. It was Clary—you lived for her, even before you knew her. And it’s why I loved her, even before I knew her, even though she took you away. She saved you. She’s never stopped.
I told Clary the last words you said to me that day were “Valentine is not dead.” And you did say that; I’d long known you believed it.
I couldn’t tell her that as we embraced for a final time, you wrapped your arms around my neck and whispered one last thing.
“Tell me this is the right thing to do.”
Was it cowardice, letting you go? Or would it have been selfish to persuade you stay?
Back when you were pregnant with Jonathan and starting to fear your husband, I confronted Valentine with your fears and he dismissed them as night terrors of a hormonal mother-to-be. You know that was the night we went into the woods together and my fate came for me, its jaws gaping, its teeth sharp. But I never told you what Valentine accused me of, in that last walk through the woods.
“You’re trying to destroy her, you know.” He said it casually, as if it was understandable, so how could he fault me? “Rejection has curdled your heart. You hate her, just a little bit, for not loving you. You probably hate me too.”
“You’re wrong.”
“You don’t want to see it,” Valentine said. “You tell yourselfyou’re looking out for her—it’s just coincidence you’re doing so by trying to tear apart her family. You can’t separate what you want from what she wants. That’s only human.” That was back when he still considered himself one, or pretended to. “But it’s cowardice, Lucian, to look away from your own dark desires. And if you face the truth, maybe you can move on. Otherwise, ask yourself, where does this end? If not in her destruction, then in yours. Are you prepared to waste your entire life on someone who will never love you the way you love them?”
Valentine lied fluently. But his best lies, his most poisonous, derived their power from truth. Why else did we follow him, if not because he could see what no one else could? He could see into the darkest corners of our hearts; he could map our personal fault lines as clearly as he did those of the Clave. So when he told me I couldn’t trust myself when it came to you, I believed him. When I fled to the woods and began a new life as a child of the moon, I longed to tell you I was alive—but I couldn’t shake the echo of Valentine’s warning. What if I did resent your happiness? What if he was right, and the wages of my unspoken love could only destroy you?
And of course, once you found me alive, and we began our secret alliance, what happened?
Destruction.
It’s another of Valentine’s dark legacies, maybe the longest-lasting one. How can we ever trust ourselves again, having chosen to follow him?
