“Beautiful,” she said, and she meant it. “You are beautiful, James Carstairs.”
His eyes went wide as she reached to touch him. Her hands had stopped shaking. They were exploratory, fascinated now. Her mother had owned a very old copy of a book once, she remembered, its pages so fragile they were liable to turn to dust when you touched them, and she felt that same responsibility of enormous care now as she brushed her fingers over the Marks on his chest, across the hol ows between his ribs and the slope of his stomach, which shuddered under her touch; here was something that was as breakable as it was lovely.
He did not seem to be able to stop touching her, either. His skil ed musician’s hands grazed her sides, skimming up her bare legs beneath her nightdress. He touched her as he usual y touched his beloved violin, with a soft and urgent grace that left her breathless. They seemed to share his fever now; their bodies burned, and their hair was wet with sweat, pasted to their foreheads and necks. Tessa didn’t care; she wanted this heat, this near-pain. This was not herself, this was some other Tessa, some dream Tessa, who would behave like this, and she remembered her dream of Jem in a bed surrounded by flames. She had just never dreamed she would burn with him. She wanted more of this feeling, she knew, more of this fire, but none of the novels she had read told her what happened now. Did he know? Wil would know, she thought, but Jem, like her, she sensed, must have been fol owing an instinct that ran as deep as her bones. His fingers slipped into the nonexistent space between them, finding the buttons that held her nightdress closed; he bent to kiss her bared shoulder as the fabric slid aside. No one had ever kissed her bare skin there before, and the feeling was so startling that she put out a hand to brace herself, and knocked a pil ow from the bed; it hit the smal side table. There was the sound of a crash. A sudden sweet dark scent, as of spices, fil ed the room.
Jem jerked his hands back, a look of horror on his face. Tessa sat up as wel , pul ing the front of her nightdress together, suddenly self-conscious.
Jem was staring over the side of the bed, and she fol owed his line of sight. The lacquer box that held his drugs had fal en and broken open. A thick layer of shining powder lay across the floor. A faint silvery mist seemed to rise from it, carrying the sweet, spicy smel .
Jem pul ed her back, his arm around her, but there was fear in his grip now rather than passion. “Tess,” he said in a low voice. “You can’t touch this stuff. To get it on your skin would be—dangerous. Even to breathe it in—Tessa, you must go.”
She thought of Wil , ordering her out of the attic. Was this how it was always going to be—some boy would kiss her, and then order her away as if she were an unwanted servant? “I won’t go,” she flared. “Jem, I can help you clean it up. I am—”
Your friend, she was about to say. But what they had been doing was not what friends did. What was she to him?
“Please,” he said softly. His voice was husky. She recognized the emotion. It was shame. “I do not want you to see me on my knees, grubbing around on the floor for the drug that I need to live. That is not how any man wants the girl he—” He took a shaking breath. “I’m sorry, Tessa.”
The girl he what? But she could not ask; she was overwhelmed—with pity, with sympathy, with shock at what they had done. She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. He didn’t move as she slipped from the bed, retrieved her dressing gown, and went quietly out of the room.
*
The corridor was the same as it had been when Tessa had crossed it moments—hours—minutes?—before: dim with lowered witchlight stretching
far in either direction. She had just slipped into her own bedroom and was about to shut the door when her eye caught a flicker of movement down at the end of the hal . Some instinct held her in place, the door almost shut, her eye pressed to the barely open crack.
The movement was someone walking down the hal . A fair-haired boy, she thought for a moment, in confusion, but no—it was Jessamine, Jessamine dressed in boys’ clothes. She wore trousers and a jacket open over a waistcoat; a hat was in her hand, and her long fair hair was tied back behind her head. She glanced behind her as she hurried down the hal , as if afraid of being fol owed. A few moments later she had vanished around the corner, out of sight.