… a fact to which I could attest only too well, as I’d apparently slept with my face pressed against it all night long.
I’d also been weeping against it, if there was any truth to his next statement.
“You were crying,” he said, smoothing some of my dark hair from my forehead. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
“Not really,” I said, feeling mortified as I remembered all those times my mother had mentioned my crying in my sleep. I lifted a wrist to wipe my cheeks. He was right. They were wet.
Crying in my sleep in front of him. About him. Great.
I knew I had bigger things to worry about — so big, I didn’t know how I was ever even going to begin to deal with them — but I had never spent the night with a boy before. Then again, I’d never been in love with any boy but him.
I’d been wrong about his skin. When I looked more closely, I realized it wasn’t entirely gold. There were fine, pale lines crisscrossing it here and there. What were those lines? A closer inspection was going to be necessary.
“You know you don’t have to worry about her anymore, don’t you, Pierce?” he asked, his dark brows lowered with concern. “I know it will take awhile to sink in, but you really are safe here with me. It was just a dream.”
I wished I could share his confidence. I knew from experience that though dreams don’t leave scars — at least not ones that anyone can see — they sometimes leave an ache that can prove every bit as painful.
And now that I’d gotten a better look at them, I could see that’s what the pale white lines were that occasionally crisscrossed the otherwise golden skin of his body: scars from long-healed wounds.
I bit my lip. I knew who’d inflicted those wounds, and why. It was one of those worries that felt too big for me to deal with right then. Remembering the monster from which he’d saved me — more frightening than any ocean swell — by sweeping me from the cafeteria of my new school in Isla Huesos and bringing me to his world, I realized I was probably going to have post-traumatic stress for life. How does someone deal with finding out that her own grandmother hates her so much that she’s tried to kill her … twice?
Apparently, she dreams about her boyfriend drowning right in front of her, then gets a little distracted from that dream when she wakes to find him tantalizingly shirtless on top of the bed beside her.
“But other people got hurt besides me,” I said, as much to remind myself of this fact as him. “Do you really think bringing me here is going to make them just … stop?”
Because the rest of my worries were about precisely this.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, dipping his head to press his mouth to the back of my neck. I felt an immediate zing all along my veins, like his lips were carbonated or something. “This is the first time I’ve ever been in love with a girl who the Furies were trying to kill. But I do know there’s nothing you can do to stop them. This is exactly where you belong. Where you’ve always belonged. And where I hope you’ll consider staying … this time.”
This time. Right.
“Well,” I said. Love. He loved me. Hearing that word fall so casually from his lips might help a little with the post-traumatic stress. “This is certainly better than world history, which is where I’d be sitting if I were back in Isla Huesos right now.” If school hadn’t been canceled due to the giant hurricane bearing down on the island, anyway.
“History was a subject in which I was particularly good in school,” he assured me, his mouth sliding down my throat, towards the gold links of the necklace he’d given me.
“I don’t doubt it,” I said.
“I can tutor you,” he said, continuing to press kisses to my throat, “so you don’t fall behind.”
“Wow, thanks,” I said. “That’s such a relief.”
He laughed. I wasn’t sure, but it might have been the first time I’d ever heard him do so. It was a good laugh, throaty and rich.
The only problem — well, not the only problem, because there were many problems, I was quickly realizing, with our situation — was that he was wrong. Not about world history, obviously. I was certain he’d be good at anything he tried. I meant about the Furies.
I was never going to believe there wasn’t a way to stop the evil spirits — angered by where they’d been sent after passing through the Underworld, and who’d managed to return there — determined to seek vengeance on John … as if where they’d ended up was his fault, and not their own.
But when John’s merest touch sent my blood fizzing as if I’d just downed a six-pack of soda, it was hard to concentrate, particularly on forming an argument with him about the Furies, or whether or not it was true the Underworld was “exactly” where I belonged.
If that were true, that meant other things had to be true, as well … like that my grandmother was possessed by one of those Furies, and that she really had wanted to kill me for the sole purpose of causing John pain.
This was no foundation on which to build a lasting relationship. It wasn’t as if my parents were going to like him much, either, if they ever got the chance to meet him. I wasn’t sure my dad would consider any guy good enough for me, but a death deity who’d kidnapped me from my school cafeteria — even to protect me from Grandma — was never going to be high on his list.
And what about what Richard Smith, the sexton of the Isla Huesos Cemetery, had said to me that rainy day in his office about why John might have given me the necklace Hades had forged for Persephone?