I walk out of his cabin, and those bands pull tighter still. I ignore the part where it feels like my circulation is being cut off.
I wave my arms around my body for good measure, in case there is something actually, literally tying me to him, but there isn’t, even though there is. I just can’t see it with my eyes. I can hear it in the mountains and on the wind and in the quiet fall of snow, and I don’t want a bar of it.
I get myself off his ship that I’ll never get on again and find a little rowboat that—with very little thought—I decide to take. I throw myself into it and start to paddle.
I feel rather the same as before when I was drowning. That strange, floaty, distant feeling, fuzzy in my mind and my thinking, and then there’s this peculiar, dull ache in the middle of me. I wonder for a minute if the lightning essence Peter let loose struck me and I didn’t know. Perhaps it tore me open a little or something, and it’s too severe an injury for me to feel the full extent of the damages, and so I’m losing blood at an alarming rate and maybe actually, I’m dying? I feel a bit like I could be.
I check myself, just in case, but there’s nothing I can see. I’m not bleeding out? Could have fooled me.
I suppose it’s not on me. It’s just in me.
I begin to row across the harbor towards the tree house, and it’s the strangest thing. The wind picks up and tries to blow me back towards the town. The invisible ties that I’m fighting against to get away from Jamison pull tighter still, and I keep waiting to hear them snap and set me free, but they don’t.
I row harder and stronger, and the wind blows more.
I focus on the strange pain I feel inside of myself. This smoldering kind of pain that feels dangerous in a way I don’t yet really understand. It’s a pain I think I’ll fan into flame, drag it into a circle, and stand in the centre of it. I’ll make sure he can’t get to me again.
There are different kinds of fate. I think someone said that to me once?
I thought that’s what Jamison and I were, but we aren’t.
We’re done now, forever.
And forever really is an awfully long time.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
It’s not a completely conscious decision, me going back to the tree house. It’s a decision I made off the cuff of the man I thought was my one true love telling me he should have let his uncle—to paraphrase rather indelicately—rape and kill me.
I found myself in a boat, rowing across a harbor that was pulling in the opposite direction. And I wasn’t thinking about how it was only, what, a week or two ago that I fled this place, fled this boy, and here I am, rowing back to him.
I don’t stand outside and stare up at it, deciding whether to walk in. I battle my way to the dock and climb out of the boat, and then I walk straight in through the secret entrance.
When I do, Peter’s regaling the Lost Boys with his tale of how he killed “one hundred pirates” tonight, and they are watching on, enthralled.
He looks over at me, midsentence, his arms in the air, and then his face goes still, eyes wide.
“Hello,” I say quietly.
Peter stares at me a few seconds, and then his hands drop to his sides, and he walks over to me in four big strides.
He grabs my face with both hands and kisses me in this big, wide-eyed, peculiarly sweet way.
“You’re back,” he tells me.
I shrug carefully. “Maybe I am?”
Peter looks around at the boys and nods his head for them to leave. “Can you give us the room please, gents?”
“Welcome back,” says Percival.
“So glad you’re home,” says Kinley.
Percival gives me a little kiss on the cheek and Holden just waves.
They leave and Peter stares at me.
I swallow. “Was that true what he said?”
“What?” Peter frowns.
I cross my arms over myself, feeling stupid that I’m having to say it. “That you love me.”
Peter shrugs like it’s no big deal. “Yeah.”
My heart surges in this strange way.
It’s not pure excitement. I’m not happy that he loves me because he loves me; I’m happy he loves me like I’m shipwrecked out at sea and he is the first bit of land I’ve seen in weeks.
I’m excited not to drown anymore.
I lift my eyebrows with a cautious, choppy hope. “Do you really?”
Peter nods solemnly.
“And you’ll stop with Calla properly? And the mermaids? You’ll be mine, and I’ll be yours, and that’s all?”
He nods again, his eyes all big.
“Do you promise?” I stare up at him.
He reaches for my hand. “I promise, girl.”
“Okay.” I nod.
A smile spreads over his face, and he looks down at me, pleased with himself.
I stand on my tiptoes and press my lips into his cheeks. I pull back a tiny bit, hovering over his skin.
“Peter,” I whisper.
He doesn’t move a muscle. “Yeah?”
I stretch my body as tall as it’ll go to reach his ear to tell him quietly, “There is so much more.”
He pulls back a little bit, eyes busy all over my face. “Show me.”
I look up at him with eyes that look heavy with lust, but actually, they’re just heavy. “Gladly.”
And then I throw myself into him, like a wave I’m trying to drown in.
I guess that’s mostly true.
His kisses feel like he’s starving, and I do my best to kiss him back the same way, even though I feel like I just ate.
My hands drop below his belt, which they’ve never done before, and it doesn’t much feel like the kind of thing I’d do, but then, I don’t much want to feel like the person I was when I loved Jamison Hook.
I want to feel different, rid of him, untethered from whatever it is that’s tying me to him.
Peter grabs my hips and lifts me up around his waist, and for a moment, it feels like we’re falling backwards but I realise we’re actually just flying.
He floats me through the house and outside, where lays me down in a bed of clover, and then his hands run down my body and up the dress Jamison bought me.
That makes him pause—the dress I’m wearing. “Can we take this off?” He looks down at it, face scrunched. “I hate it.”
I nod quickly. “I hate it too.”
His eyes flicker over me again, and he looks troubled. “You look like you’re his,” Peter tells me as his brow bends in the middle, and I wonder if I hear a tiny bit of insecurity in his voice.
“But I’m just yours.” I slip my arms around his neck.
He nods quickly and swallows. “Swear?”
I nod back. “I swear.”
Speaking it into being, I suppose… I might not be yet, but I will be soon.
Soon I will rid myself of everything good I have ever thought or felt about Jamison Hook.