Chapter 185: I Bit It

Jack walked her back the long way, behind the library, where the lamps didn’t reach.

Neither of them spoke. Her wet shoes squelched on the path. She had pulled the damp sweater back on under his coat, and she kept her hands inside his sleeves.

At the bottom of the hill below Dormitory G, he stopped.

He lifted the coat off her shoulders. The night air found her at once. She was a little chilly, and nothing more.

"Eight o’clock," Jack said.

He shrugged the coat back on. Then his hand came to the back of her neck, under her wet hair, and stayed there a moment.

He took it away and went back down the path. Somewhere past the trees, wings opened.

Blair climbed the hill.

* * *

She took her shoes off on the front step and carried them up the stairs, two fingers hooked through the heels.

Room 204 was dark and exactly as she’d left it.

She peeled off the sweater. The burnt cuff flaked under her fingers. She rolled it into a ball and pushed it under Heather’s bed, as far back as her arm would reach, and the shoes after it.

Then the washroom at the end of the hall. She turned the water as hot as it went and stood under it until the lake was out of her hair. She watched her left hand the whole time. It stayed pale and ordinary.

Back in her room, she pulled on a sleep shirt and lay down facing the wall.

Her mind a mess of confusion.

* * *

Knocking.

Gray light at the window. Blair lifted her head off the pillow.

"Bunny?" The knocking stopped. "You alive in there?"

She was out of bed before she’d decided to be. Halfway to the door she saw her right hand, the knuckles swollen purple with a neat little crescent at the back, and pulled her sleeve down over it.

She opened the door.

Daemus filled the frame. His hair was wet from the rink showers and his bag hung off one shoulder. There was a fresh scrape along his jaw. His ears were up.

"You didn’t answer," he said. "I sent, like, six messages."

"I was asleep."

"Figured. Either that or dead." He grinned. Then his eyes dropped to her mouth, and the grin went away.

"What happened?"

Her fingers went to her lip. The cut had closed, but it was still swollen, a dark line in the middle.

He waited.

"I bit it," Blair said.

The lie came out easily.

"In your sleep?" He stepped in and kicked the door shut behind him. "You’re a menace."

He took her face in both hands and frowned at her lip.

"Does it hurt?"

"A little."

"Hold still."

He bent and kissed it. Barely. His mouth just brushed the cut, warm and careful, then the left corner of her mouth, then the right, as if he were working his way around it.

Blair shut her eyes.

"Better?"

"Yes."

He dropped his bag, toed off his shoes and fell onto her bed. The frame groaned. He held up the edge of the blanket.

"Get in. I’ve got forty minutes, and Coach had us skating suicides since five."

She climbed in on the wall side and tucked her right hand under the pillow. He pulled her back against his chest and dragged the blanket over them both. He was warm everywhere, still a little damp, and he sighed into her hair.

For a while neither of them said anything.

"So," he said. "Tonight."

"Eight o’clock."

"Jack drives. I stay here." His thumb moved on her hip, back and forth. "Can I ask you something without you getting weird?"

"Depends what it is."

"The fish." His thumb stopped. "Is he gonna be another Jack?"

Blair turned over to see his face. He was looking at the ceiling. His ears had gone flat.

"No."

"Because he keeps touching you. And he sends you dresses. And he..."

"He isn’t someone I will ever be interested in." Especially not after what he did to her in the hotel lobby, and especially not after what he did to those innocent Blairs. Jasper, to her, is nothing but a murderer, a cold-blooded monster with an appetite for even his own kind.

Daemus looked at her then. Whatever he found in her face, his ears came up a little.

"Jack I can live with," he said. "I don’t love it. But I can." He picked at a loose thread on the blanket. "I can share you, Bunny. I just want to know who with."

Blair looked at him.

I went to the lake. Olive put me under the ice. Jasper pulled me out, and he kissed me, and I didn’t kiss him back. He put my hand in a fire. The professor came through a window.

"Daemus. Last night..."

He waited.

She wanted to tell him, but...

"I missed you," she said.

That part was true.

His whole face changed. He rolled her onto her back and kissed her, careful of her lip at first, then less careful. His hand slid into her hair. His weight settled over her, solid and warm, and she opened her mouth under his and let him in.

Her left hand fisted in his shirt and pulled him down. He made a low sound against her mouth, and his tongue slid against hers.

His hand found the hem of her sleep shirt and pushed under it, palm spread wide across her bare stomach, then up over her ribs. She arched into it. He smiled against her mouth and did it again, slower, his thumb brushing the underside of her breast until her breath caught.

Then his hand left her ribs and slid up her right arm, toward the wrist under the pillow.

Blair caught it with her left hand and brought it back down, under her shirt, flat against her stomach.

"Oh," Daemus said, delighted, and kissed her harder.

His ears were all the way up when he finally pulled away, breathing hard, his forehead against hers.

"Film session," he said, as if it were a swear word.

He left at twenty past eight with his shirt on inside out. She didn’t tell him.

At half past nine she pulled on her longest sweater, tugged the right cuff down to her fingertips and opened the door.

Olive was sitting on the corridor floor across from Room 204, her back to the wall and her knees pulled up to her chest.

She was still in the camel coat. Her face was bare and blotchy, and the diamonds were still at her throat. Blair didn’t know how long she had been there.

Olive looked up.

"He said I’m yours." Her voice was hoarse. "So what do I do now?"