Angels Twice Descending (Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy, #10)

He still couldn’t believe Magnus Bane was someone’s dad.

“I’m sure,” Isabelle said, stripping off her dress in one smooth motion to reveal the unending stretches of smooth, pale skin that lay beneath. “But if you want to leave . . .”

“No,” Simon said, struggling for enough breath to speak. “Definitely. No. Here’s good. Very good.”

“Well, then.” Isabelle swept a family of stuffed kittens off the couch, then stretched across like a very satisfied and very dangerous cat. She looked pointedly at Simon’s shirt, which was still on his body.

“Well. Then.” Simon stood above her, unsure what to do next.

“Simon.”

“Yes?”

“I’m looking pointedly at your shirt.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Which is still on your body.”

“Oh. Right.” He took care of that. Dropped down beside her on the couch.

“Simon.”

“Yes? Oh. Right.” Simon leaned toward her and pulled her close for a kiss, which she indulged for about thirty seconds before extricating herself.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“You tell me,” she said. “I, your incredibly sexy girlfriend that you never get to see, am prostrating myself before you half-naked, and you seem like you’d rather be watching a baseball game.”

“I hate baseball.”

“Exactly.” Isabelle sat up—though, mercifully, she didn’t put any clothes back on. Not yet. “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”

Simon nodded.

“So if, hypothetically, you were feeling a little nervous about this whole Ascension thing tomorrow, and wondering whether you still wanted to go through with it, you could talk to me about that.”

“Hypothetically,” Simon said.

“Just picking a topic at random,” Isabelle said. “We could also talk about Avatar: The Last Airplane, if you want.”

“It’s the Airbender,” Simon said, suppressing a grin, “and I love you even if you are nerd-clueless.”

“And I love you, even if you are a mundane,” she said. “Even if you stay a mundane. You know that, right?”

“I . . .” It was easy for her to say, and he thought she probably even meant it. But that didn’t make it true. “You think you would? Really?”

Isabelle let out her breath in an irritated puff. “Simon Lewis, are you forgetting that you were a mundane when I started dating you? A rather scrawny mundane with terrible fashion sense, I should point out. And then you were a vampire, and I still dated you. Then you were a mundane again, but this time with freaking amnesia. And still, inexplicably, I fell in love with you all over again. What could possibly make you think I have any standards left when it comes to you?”

“Uh, thank you, I think?”

“?Thank you’ is the correct response. And also ‘I love you, too, Isabelle, and I would love you even if you lost your memory or grew a mustache or something.’”

“Well, obviously.” Simon tugged at her chin. “Though I’d draw the line at a beard.”

“Goes without saying.” Then she looked serious again. “You do believe me, right? You can’t be doing this for me.”

“I’m not doing it for you,” Simon said, and that was true. He may have gone to the Academy, in part, because of Isabelle—but he’d stayed for himself. When he Ascended, it wouldn’t be because he needed to prove something to her. “But . . . if I did back out, which I would never do, but if I did, wouldn’t that make me a coward? You’d date a mundane, maybe. But I know you, Izzy. You couldn’t date a coward.”