Of course, he doesn’t know he’s put me through anything, but it’s my right as a woman to hold him in contempt for that which he’s done without his knowledge. Of that I feel quite sure in this moment.
I square my shoulders and stare over at him coolly. “Friends don’t say things like that to one another.”
He swallows and clears his throat. “No.” He clears his throat again. “I s’pose they d?nnae.”
I cross my arms over my chest. “What, then, are you doing?”
Jamison presses his lips together, like there’s something he’d like to say but he’s not saying it.
“Old habits” is what he tells me.
Something about that deflates me, flattens me all the way back down to a pancake.
Old habits. That’s all I am.
“How’s the girl from your ship?” I ask him with a smile that tries its best to be bright, but it’s wilting.
Jamison juts his chin out and shakes his head, disinterested by the question. “I’ve no’ seen her since.”
“Ah.” I nod, clearing my throat as I glance away. “She sounds special.”
My voice is dripping with sarcasm, but it’s all I could muster that wouldn’t lead to tears. Something about that makes it worse.
He shrugs and tosses back his whole drink. Rum. Full glass. Neat.
“A wee bit heavy-handed coming from the girl whose boyfriend is a womanising toddler.”
I roll my eyes at him and give him a dark look. “There you go again, calling me a girl.”
“And there ye go, being one,” he shoots back, and it crushes me.
“Well then.” I lift my shoulders like his words mean nothing to me, like that yoke around my neck I feel all the time whether I’m with him or not isn’t now just choking the life out of me. I flash him a quick smile. “Don’t let me keep you. So many people here…so many women”—I give him a pointed look—“for you to choose from.”
“Aye.” He nods once. “D?nnae mind if I do.”
He saunters away and I stare after him. My neck is prickly, and my eyes are burning, and I feel like I’m drowning, so I look around quickly for something to grab on to, but everyone I know has left me.
Without the distraction of Peter immediately in front of me, that thing that I should have dropped off that lives inside my rib cage—the thing that’s like a wild animal trapped inside my chest—it starts to howl again. Trying to claw its way out and find a way to tell Jamison what I didn’t get a chance to the day on his boat.
When Peter’s with me, it feels embarrassing and like a thought I used to think about. Something I could have done in another life, but I don’t have that life anymore. Which is true, I suppose. I suppose that I don’t, but it feels less stupid when I’m alone, the idea of telling him. When I’m alone, I can convince myself it might be something Jamison would like to hear.
Maybe he’d like to hear it?
That I think of him, of his hands to fall asleep. And something more about snow?
Maybe he knows about what the snow means.
I walk back inside to find him.
The ballroom is full of people, and it’s dark, even though it’s not entirely dark outside.
And right as I’m about to round a corner, I hear his voice.
“This dress,” he says to someone who isn’t me, and my heart crashes like a ship sailing right into a cliff.
“Do you like it?” the girl says. She sounds pleased.
“Aye,” he says back.
They can’t see me.
I lean against the wall that’s hiding me and listen with a macabre sort of hunger.
“Who was that you were with before?” she asks.
“Just some wee girl from my island,” Hook says.
I swallow heavily and wipe my nose.
“You seemed to be fighting with her?” the girl inquires.
“You ken how some people just rub ye the wrong way?”
“Yes.”
He pauses and it hangs there. “She rubs me the worst.”
The girl snorts a laugh at what he just said.
“No’ like that,” Hook says wryly before his voice changes to serious. “Never like that.”
Piano.
That’s enough soul crushing for me this evening, I decide, and I push off from the wall as quick as I can.
My chest is going tight. I think I’m going to be sick.
Air.
I need air.
Peter Pan has ruined me. Once upon a time, if my heart was breaking, I didn’t need air; I needed earth. Rocks. Stones. Soil composition. Dirt under my nails or my eye in a microscope, those were the things that would have made me feel better before, and now, it’s air.
As though how I feel about Jamison is choking it all from my body.
I don’t mean to, but I gasp a little once I’m outside.
I lean over the balcony and gulp it back.
“You’re not enjoying yourself,” says the deep, warm voice of Day.
I look back at him and smile as much as I can muster. “Don’t take it personally.”
“Oh, I’d never.” He shakes his head. “This place has a way of…undoing people.”
I nod once. “Consider me undone.”
“Is it Pan who’s upset you?”
There’s something so dignified about him that I find myself folding my hands in front of myself and squaring my shoulders, and that’s when I place him.
Day.
The founder.
“Do you know with whom you’re here?” he asks gently.
“I do know.” I nod. “And just now, I’ve placed you also.”
He gives me a small smile before his head falls to the side curiously. “Do you really know who he is?”
I frown at him, trying to remember.
This is a bag I put away, I think. Something I’ve tried very, very hard to forget.
Think, Daphne, think.
What was in the bag? And why would it be relevant to founders? What was in that bag? A brown leather suitcase. Tattered with patches. What was in it?
Oh.
Fuck.
It drops like a penny in my mind. A stone on a tin roof. A loud clang that sort of jolts me.
Peter’s parents were founders.
Day flicks me a little look. “There it is.”
I shake my head at him. “That’s not a good one for me to remember.”
“I understand,” he says sagely. “But you should remember who you are with.”
I roll my eyes a little. “I know who I am with.”
He gives me a tall look.
“Some of him is Vee,” I remind him. “Some of him is good.”
“And some,” he says, “is pure evil.”
I sigh. “Do you not think that the sum total of our existence must amount to more than who our parents were?” I fold my arms over my chest. “Or are.”
I tack that on at the end because the insinuation of otherwise feels oddly personal.
Day gives me a peculiar smile that seems loaded with things I don’t know about.
“Family weighs much on this island,” he tells me right as Itheelia drifts over to us.
“I see you’ve met the Never Girl.” She gives me a tight smile.
“Indeed.” Day nods. “She’s quite charming.”
“So I’ve heard,” Itheelia says as she eyes me, and I get the feeling that I’m about to be in trouble.
Day’s face grows a bit more serious as he gives Itheelia a look. “We must speak before you leave.”
She frowns. “Of what?”
Day’s eyes flicker around the room before he speaks quietly. “Terrible stories have been reaching my shores.”
She looks at him impatiently. “They could be old.”
“There have been sightings.” Day gives her an ominous look. “A black flag flying.”