Chapter 221: If our places were switched

BONNIE

By evening, the lake had turned the color of hammered copper.

I sat at the end of the old dock with my boots beside me and my bare feet hanging a hand’s width above the water. The planks held the day’s warmth, and the air smelled of reeds and cooling stone and the faint smoke of the kitchen chimney drifting down the slope. Somewhere behind me, a sentinel’s boots crunched on gravel and then went quiet, as though their owner had remembered he was supposed to be invisible.

I had expected to feel worse.

All afternoon I had waited for it, the way you wait for a bruise to bloom. I had sat through lunch with my stomach in knots, pushing lamb around a plate while Nicholas hovered with the sauce boat and Lysander told a story about a stolen boat and a furious gamekeeper. I had waited for the silence that would mean he was reconsidering. I had waited for him to look at me across the table and see Lycaon’s chin, Lycaon’s eyes.

He had only reached under the tablecloth and put his hand over my knee.

My worst fear had walked up to me, and it had been a story about a boat.

I dragged my toe through the surface and watched the rings spread. The relief was strange. It did not feel like joy. It felt like setting down a bag I had carried so long that my arm kept lifting out of habit, reaching for a weight that was no longer there.

Footsteps pounded down the planks behind me.

I turned too late. Something large and warm tore past my shoulder, a rush of air and the smell of cedar soap, and then there was a tremendous splash that threw water across my lap and my face and the front of my dress.

I sat there dripping, blinking, with my mouth open.

"Lysander?"

Nothing but spreading rings. I twisted around to look at where he had come from, and found a trail along the dock like a path of breadcrumbs. A boot on its side. The other one ten feet farther on. A gray shirt crumpled against a post. A belt coiled like a sleeping snake beside a pair of trousers, and, flung farthest of all, a scrap of dark cloth that I stared at for a full three seconds before my brain finished the sum.

He had gone in naked.

"Oh, for goodness’ sake," I muttered, and my face went hot all the way to my hairline.

The water broke.

He surfaced twenty feet out, head first, shaking himself like a dog. Droplets flew in a bright arc off his hair, and he dragged both hands back across his scalp and turned in the water to look at me with a grin so wide and so pleased with itself that I forgot, for a moment, that I was meant to be scolding him. The last of the sun lit him from the side. His shoulders shone.

"Join me," he called.

"No."

"You have not heard the offer."

"It is evening. It is cold. I can see my own breath."

"You cannot."

"I can see something."

"That is mist." He kicked lazily onto his back, floating, one arm trailing. "Come in, Bonnie. It is wonderful."

I pulled my feet up out of the water and tucked them under me. "It looks freezing."

"It is not."

"It looks like it is."

"Trust me. It is not cold at all."

"You are lying."

"I cannot lie to you." He tapped his chest with two wet fingers. "Mate bond. Remember? You would know in a heartbeat. Go on, look."

I did not look. I knew exactly what I would find, because I had felt it wash over me all through the afternoon, a clear, unclouded delight, a boy’s pure pleasure in a cool lake at the end of a hard day. He was not lying. He was just ridiculous.

"You jumped in a lake this morning," I said. "In your clothes. And you nearly drowned me."

"I did not nearly drown you. You jumped in. And may I point out that it was heroic."

"It was stupid."

"It was both." He rolled onto his front and swam a few strokes closer, until the water at the foot of the dock lapped against his chin. His eyes were very bright. "A part god should not be afraid of a little cold, you know."

I stared at him.

I was not sure if I wanted to laugh or hit something. "You are really going to use that."

"I am going to use it every day for the rest of my life."

"You are the worst."

"A fine title. I accept it." He said it lightly, but his gaze had gone soft at the edges, and I understood that it was a test, a small, careful one, a hand held out to see whether I would take it. He wanted to know if I could hear the words without flinching.

I let out a slow breath. "Does it not bother you at all?"

"Which part?"

"All of it." I pulled at the hem of my dress. "I told you who my father is. I told you what he is. I have been waiting all day for it to land on you."

"It landed." He rested his folded arms on the edge of the dock, and the water slid off his shoulders. "I am not going to pretend it did not. I am not made of stone. I lay awake some of the afternoon, turning it over, though you were not watching."

My stomach tightened.

"But I will tell you what I cannot do," he went on. "I cannot hide much from you. We share a bond, Bonnie. If I were repulsed, you would know. If I were afraid, you would know. You have felt every single thing I have felt since you walked out of that bedroom this morning, and I do not think any of it is what you were bracing for."

I did not answer. I could not, because it was true.

"Let me ask you something." He tipped his head. "If our places were switched. If it were my father in that tank, and I came to you in a room with a fire and a quilt and told you everything. Would you think any differently of me?"

"No."