I give him a weak, empty laugh. It sounds like a few pennies rattling around in a tin can. Something innately pitiful about it, although you can’t quite put your finger on exactly what.
“Jam?” says a girl’s voice from behind us.
I look past him to a girl standing outside his bedchamber.
“Oh, hey,” he says reflexively.
She’s quite beautiful. Dark, curly hair. Rather olive skin. Pink lips, and I realise his lips I’d been admiring just before—it wasn’t the sun that had kissed them, it was her. Her legs are bare, so are her feet. Her hair’s all disheveled, and they’ve obviously—obviously—just had sex.
But do you know what? That’s not even the worst part. The worst part? She’s wrapped up in his coat. The one I love. The one that I think means something to me and I thought to him, and as soon as he sees she’s in it, he looks over at me, but my eyes aren’t his anymore. They belong to the sea now.
For me, want feels like being kicked in the stomach, but anguish feels like pain shooting through my fingers down into my nerve endings. I feel it in my bones, where he feels want—which I think he must have never truly felt for me. I feel that now.
The girl eyes me carefully for a moment before she looks over at him. “Where are we?”
He gives her a smile. “I just needed t’ catch up with a friend about something.”
She stares over at me again, and I raise my hand awkwardly.
“A friend.”
“Go back t’ bed.” He nods his chin at her. “I’ll be ri’ there.”
My mouth falls open, and I shut it quickly, absentmindedly pinch my lip between my fingers until I taste something salty.
Jamison looks back at me, and his face falters. “Ye hurt yer lip.” He reaches for me, and I dodge his touch. Something like hurt or offence rolls over him, and I’m glad for it. He clears his throat, looking uncomfortable now. “Can I give ye a ride back?”
“Oh no.” I shake my head. “I’ve got the boat.”
“A tow then?” he offers, eyebrows up.
“Nope.” I shake my head as I walk back towards the rope. “The water will take me.” I flash him a quick smile. I need to get out of here before he sees me crying.
He offers me his hand. I pretend I don’t see it and dive off into the ocean, beg the water to wash how my heart’s stinging away, but it doesn’t. Not as I climb into my little dinghy and stare up at him. We say something to each other with our eyes, but I don’t know what it is because we don’t know how to talk to each other, and I don’t think we’ve ever been on the same page.
I’m just a game.
I put the paddles in the water and make one big stroke, and the water and the wind do the rest for me. They carry me the whole way back to the home I thought I left this morning.
It’s a pirate thing, I think—he gets into my head sometimes, that’s all. Being around Jamison pulls the rug from under me; everything I’m sure of when he’s not around becomes so uncertain the second he’s in a room, but that doesn’t mean anything other than he’s good at making me feel uncertain about myself, which isn’t even a good thing! Why did I think that was a good thing? It’s actually a terrible thing. Jamison is a terrible thing.
I’m not ready to go inside when the boat pulls up at the dock. I don’t know how to yet face the boys I just tried to leave, one of them in particular.
I sit at the end of the dock, my legs dangling in the water, staring at the blue that still feels like a miracle no matter how many days in a row I see it.
I take a deep breath, look up at the sky, and as I do, I see one of the suns rise between two of the moons, and I have this deep revelation that there’s no going back.
If it can’t be Jamison—and it can’t be—then it must be Peter. What can Jasper England do for me now that I’ve known this life? These boys? The wind in my hair, the ocean giving me rides home, secrets that live inside a volcano. Anything else now would feel like half a life, and I don’t want half a life. I just want one here. Whatever that might look like.
I take another staggered breath and wipe my face.
“Girl?” Peter says quietly from behind me.
I look back at him, and he’s frozen there, eyes wide with nerves.
He creeps towards me the way you might move towards a frightened animal. “Girl, why are you crying?”
I give him my bravest smile. “It’s the grown-up things, Peter. They keep coming for me.”
He sits down next to me, eyes heavy and sorry for me. “Okay.” He takes his sleeve and wipes my nose with it. “Want to go up to the cloud? You could put them away.”
I shake my head, my eyes filling up again. “Not this time.”
“I don’t understand.” He pulls back. “You’d rather be sad?”
I bite down on my bottom lip. “I just need to feel them for a moment.” I flash him my bravest smile. I need to remember them so I don’t go back to him.
A moment, I tell myself. And then I’ll put them away forever.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
“Girl,” says Peter, floating over me as I lie on the dock, sunning.
I peer up at him through one eye.
The width of his shoulders takes up half my view of the sky, blocking two of the suns. I can’t imagine that he’s actually getting bigger in real life because he drinks from the fountain every few days, but still to me, he looks to have grown.
Maybe just in my mind’s eye.
A couple of weeks have passed since Jamison definitively categorised our relationship as “friends,” and they’ve both dragged and slipped by.
Sort of how it feels to be pulled under a wave and tossed around.
Once you get past the feeling that you can’t breathe and maybe you’re dying, the rolling about’s not so bad. Almost like a ride.
Peter Pan is a ride and a half and the most beautiful distraction from the ache in my chest that I could have ever daydreamed.
He took me to Aqueria the other day. I met the Poseidon, who Peter told me isn’t a god but is king of the sea. Not just this one but all the seas.
He was quite firm, but I get the feeling that were you to be on his good side, he might be quite nice. I suspect I’m not on his good side though. I don’t think the mermaids care for me much, not now that most of Peter’s attention is on me.
Still, he said he wanted me to meet them. Actually, he said he wanted them to meet me.
He wasn’t unkind, the king, just stern. Bowed his head in a little nod and spoke mostly in hushed tones to Peter.
It was still impossibly beautiful though; Aqueria is beyond imagination. An underwater city and palace that’s made of coral and limestone and sandstone, with underwater plants you’ve never seen before, crystals I’ve never heard of, and streams of light pouring through windows that never close, because why would they? We’re so far down that it doesn’t make sense for the light to still reach, but it does, and I suppose it makes sense here, because magic.
Peter gave me this little thing that you hold in your mouth. It’s almost like a tiny harmonica, and it lets you breathe underwater.
Speaking’s still hard. Kissing harder still.
But breathing is easy.