Chapter 21
Evie slunk out of the living room and made her way to the room she’d shared for a night with Lucas. She’d been trying to avoid it, but she really didn’t want to sleep on the sofa again.
She stood a while in the doorway trying to conjure the ghost of Lucas – squinting through her lashes to see if she could picture him lying on the bed, one leg bent sideways, the scars on his chest catching silver in the moonlight. But no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t make him appear. The images in her head were fragmenting, fading away.
She trudged to the bed and lay down, recalling for just one perfect second how it had felt when she had lain there with her head on Lucas’s chest and listened as he told her all about his family. She wondered idly how Flic was doing before pushing the thought away. Thinking about Flic and what she must be going through only made her feel even worse. It sapped all her strength, and she needed whatever strength she could summon in order to get through the coming days.
Without being aware of it she had started counting the notches on the bedpost. Cyrus, the old Cyrus, had made them. It made her squirm on the sheets, hoping he’d washed them. Though she hated to admit it, and she was trying not to think of how Margaret must be feeling, she was secretly glad that Cyrus had come back with them.
It was strange. Cyrus seemed different in so many ways. His conversation was no longer ninety percent sexual innuendo, and he wasn’t constantly trying to get her to sleep with him – but the one thing that was the same was his obsession with being a Hunter. For him it had always been about something other than revenge. And Evie had never fully understood it until he’d explained to them that he was just following his instincts. They’d led him to the Bradbury building, so who was she to argue? Maybe, Evie puzzled, instinct was just another word for describing the tug and pull of fate. And following your instincts merely meant taking the path that fate had plotted out for you. But that brought her full circle. She no longer believed in fate – did she?
With a sigh she rolled over and pressed her face into the pillow. For as long as she lived she’d remember Lucas telling her that life took you down a path, and that sometimes it took you past bad stuff, but that it always took you to exactly the place you were supposed to be.
She wished he was here right now so that she could punch him. It was such a load of crap. This place she was in right now, lying in this bed, alone and lonely, with her heart torn in two, was not where she was supposed to be. And if it was, then she hated fate.
There was a cough from the doorway. She rolled over. Cyrus was leaning against the door jamb.
‘Can I come in?’ he asked.
She frowned at him. She’d had to barricade the door to stop the old Cyrus from waltzing in whenever he felt like it. Now he was asking her permission? He’d evidently lost his memory and found some manners. Small blessings. As she sat up she wondered if the softer, less in-your-face version of Cyrus was going to be permanent or whether it would vanish the moment his memory returned. If it returned.
‘Sure,’ she told him, sitting up.
Cyrus entered the room and looked around, taking in the bunk beds with a sceptical, slightly perplexed expression on his face.
‘Did I make those?’ he asked, pointing at the notches in the bedpost.
Evie twisted her head to look and then nodded at him. ‘Yeah.’
He walked closer, obviously trying to count them, but after a few seconds surrendering to defeat. He shook his head in what seemed like amazement, though she couldn’t tell if it was that or something more like awe.
‘But you made that, didn’t you?’ he said, pointing at the massive crack running up one of the posts and frowning. ‘You were pissed at something.’
Evie nodded. ‘You’re starting to remember things.’
Cyrus dropped down onto the bed beside her. ‘Yeah, though not anything useful,’ he sighed.
Evie drew her knees up to her chest and leant her chin on them, watching him, wondering why he was really in her room.
Cyrus turned to her then, drawing a short breath, a flare of embarrassment heating his face. He looked down at his hands. Evie stared at him, trying not to smile. Seeing Cyrus blush and lost for words was a first.
He swallowed loudly. ‘Did we ever … er …’ He broke off, the blush growing deeper.
‘Did we ever what?’ Evie asked, confused.
‘You know,’ he said, jerking his head towards the notches.
Evie took a second to process. ‘No!’ she half-blurted, half-yelled.
‘Really?’ he asked, frowning hard at her as if he thought she might be lying, ‘because I …’
‘Really,’ she repeated more emphatically, jumping up off the bed.
He looked up at her, frowning still, his turquoise eyes darkening.
‘You didn’t like me much, did you?’ he asked.
She opened her mouth and then shut it again. ‘I didn’t not like you,’ she said with a sigh, sitting back down. ‘It’s just your ego kind of had its own solar system.’
‘Huh,’ he said, his eyes running over the bedposts. He smiled to himself a little ruefully. ‘But I was good, right?’
Evie’s mouth fell open. Did she need to make it any clearer that none of those notches was her? That they’d never slept together? How would she know if he was good or not? Though judging from Darcy’s thousand SMS messages and the squeals she emitted every time she saw him, she had to concede, grudgingly, that he probably was.
‘I mean at fighting,’ Cyrus added quickly, seeing her expression. ‘Was I good at fighting?’
He looked a little like a lost child and Evie had a sudden and unwanted urge to brush his dark-blonde hair back off his face. It was odd hearing Cyrus ask for reassurance. She was tempted to withhold her answer, as she would have done with the old Cyrus, to say something sarcastic just to annoy him. But she couldn’t, not when he was looking at her with such a stricken expression on his face.
‘Yeah,’ she said softly, ‘you were good. You saved my life. I never got to thank you.’
His eyes narrowed. He was looking at her again as if she was some kind of puzzle, or an object whose value he couldn’t quite work out. She wondered what he was thinking.
‘You’re welcome,’ he finally said. Then after a beat, ‘Do you know why I did it?’
Evie shook her head. ‘No. I’ve been wondering about it for all this time, wishing I could ask you. And now I get the chance, you don’t even remember.’ She shrugged helplessly.
The cheeky grin was back. ‘I thought maybe it was because we …’
‘No,’ she said, cutting him off again, at the same time trying to fight a smile, something she found herself doing more and more around him.
They sat in silence for a moment, Cyrus frowning at his lap as if trying to remember the night at the Bradbury and what his motivation might have been.
‘Just before you did it you told me that chivalry wasn’t dead,’ Evie said.
Cyrus looked up. ‘That’s kind of cool.’
‘And your last words were, I’ve led a charmed life.’
‘Shakespeare.’
Evie shot him a quizzical look. ‘You remember?’
‘No, I just know the quote. Macbeth, right? I bear a charmed life.’
She stared at him in amazement.
He shrugged. ‘I can remember random stuff like that – quotes and things I learnt at school. Like I remember my Spanish. I just can’t remember other stuff. The stuff that matters …’ He paused, scowling, ‘Like who I was.’
‘I can’t remember who I was either,’ Evie said after a pause, thinking of how much she’d changed in just a few short weeks. ‘I think that’s OK though. We change. People change. But the core of who you are stays the same. You’re still Cyrus. There are things you do which remind me of the old you.’
‘Like what?’ he asked.
‘Like the way you smile,’ she said turning to him, ‘and the way you walk.’ And the way you look at me like I’m some kind of prize, she added silently. Though the old Cyrus had looked at her as some kind of prize to conquer, or a steak he wouldn’t mind grilling and eating, and now he looked at her as if he couldn’t figure out if she was the loser’s prize or not. ‘And you still know how to fight,’ she added because he was still watching her, expectantly.
He didn’t speak for a while, his brow furrowed. Then he said, ‘You miss him.’
‘I’m sorry?’ she asked, thrown by the question.
‘Lucas,’ Cyrus said. ‘Vero and Ash told me about him. About what happened. I’m sorry.’
She had to look away. She chose a spot on the far wall and focused on it, trying to breathe through the fizzing pain shooting through her insides.
‘Did you love him?’ Cyrus asked.
Evie bit her tongue, fighting her instinct to lash out at him, reminding herself that it wasn’t the old Cyrus asking. She’d already had this conversation with him months back, had tried and quickly given up explaining the concept of love to him – to someone who’s understanding of love involved a one-night stand with a waitress whose name he couldn’t even remember the morning after.
‘Yes,’ she said, the pain of loss taking another savage bite out of her. ‘I loved him. I still love him. I’m never going to stop loving him.’
She dropped her head into her hands and tried to obliterate the image that had appeared in her mind’s eye of Lucas lying in her lap, his hand tracing her lips and then falling away, vanishing forever.
She startled suddenly, feeling a hand come to rest gently, almost tentatively, on her back. For a moment she tensed at Cyrus’s touch. And then the loneliness and the emptiness got the better of her and she dropped her head onto his shoulder.
‘It’s OK,’ Cyrus whispered, his lips grazing her ear. ‘It’s going to be OK.’