It was cozy, and still Cordelia wanted to shiver. Everything in her wanted to avoid hurting him now, tonight. The rest of her knew this wasn’t going to get easier, and the longer she waited, the worse it would be.
“Thank you for sending the Thieves to look after me the other night,” Matthew said. “It was a true act of kindness. And—” He looked at her closely. “I am getting better, Daisy. Christopher has me on this regimen, a bit less every day, and soon enough he says my body will no longer depend on the stuff. I will be able to stop.”
Cordelia swallowed. In all that speech, she thought, he had not once said the words “alcohol” or “drink.” She wanted to say: It will be good when your body no longer wants the stuff, but you will still want it. Every time you are unhappy, you will want to blunt that pain with alcohol; every time you are bored, or feel empty, you will want to fill that hollow, and that will be the hard part, so much harder than you think.
“I remember this dress,” Matthew said, touching her sleeve lightly. There was a little unease in his voice, as if he wondered at her silence. “You worried it was so plain that it wouldn’t suit you, but it does,” he said. “With your hair, you look like a dark flame, edged in fire.”
“You talked me into it,” Cordelia said. She let herself remember the gilded shop, the streets of Paris, the elegant rooftops rising and falling like musical notes. “And I am glad you did. You have Anna’s skill; you see the beauty in potential.”
Matthew closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were fixed on her; she could see every detail in his irises, the bits of gold mixed among the green.
“Do you think of Paris, as I do?” His voice was a little rough. “Even now, when I open my eyes in the morning, I briefly imagine a whole day lies ahead of adventures in Paris with you. There is so much we did not get a chance to do. And after Paris, we could have gone to Venice. It is a palace of water and shadow. There are masked balls—”
She laid her hands against his chest. She could feel his sharp intake of breath. And, this close to him, she could smell his cologne, clean as ocean water, unmixed for once with brandy or wine. “We cannot always be traveling, Matthew,” she said. “We cannot always be running away.”
In answer, he kissed her. And for a moment she let herself be lost in the kiss, in the tender gentleness of it. There was nothing of the fire that there had been the first time, born out of desperation and yearning and incoherent need. There was Matthew in the kiss, who she loved: his bright cutting mind, his vulnerability, his beauty and fragility. There was love, but not passion.
Raziel, let her not hurt him. Not badly. She stood with her hands against his chest, feeling the beat of his heart, his lips brushing hers with the softest pressure, until he drew away, looking at her with confusion in his eyes.
So he had felt it too, the difference.
“Cordelia? Is something wrong?”
“Matthew,” she said. “Oh, my dear Matthew. We must stop.”
He went rigid under her hands, his graceful body suddenly stiff as wood. “Stop what? Stop traveling? I understand,” he added, more calmly. “I did not mean we abandon the fight here in London. We must stay, defend our friends and our city, separate you from Lilith—”
“And then what? What if it were all dealt with? Then what happens?”
In a halting voice, he said, “I know I seem—awful now. But Christopher says I will be well in a fortnight. This will be behind me, I can move forward—”
“Stopping the physical craving isn’t enough,” said Cordelia. “You will still want to drink.”
He flinched. “No. I hate it. I hate what it makes me. You know,” he added, “the reason I started in the first place. You can help me, Daisy. You can go with me to tell my parents what I did. I know it won’t fix everything, but it is the wound at the heart of all that has happened since.”
He was almost breathless; she could feel his heart racing. After a moment, almost impatiently, he said, “What’s wrong? Please, say something.”
There was a brittleness to the question that terrified Cordelia. She had to comfort him, she thought. She had to let him know she would never abandon him. “I will go with you to speak to your parents, Matthew,” she said. “Whatever happens, I will be there every time you feel guilty, to remind you that you are a good person who is worthy of forgiveness and love.”
“Then—” His eyes searched her face. “If you will always be with me—”
“When I married James, it was only supposed to be for a year. It was all I thought I could have,” Cordelia said. “Everyone thought I was being selfless, but I was not. I told myself if I could just have a year with James, just a year, it would be something I could hold on to for the rest of my life, and treasure, that time with the boy I had loved since I was fourteen years old—”
“Daisy.” She could see the words had hurt him, wished she had not had to say them. But he had to see, to understand. “You should never—you are worth more than that. Deserve more than that.”
“And so do you,” Cordelia said in a whisper. “Matthew, what I feel for James hasn’t changed. It has nothing to do with you. You ought to be adored above all things, for you are wonderful. You ought to have someone’s whole heart. But I do not have a whole heart to give you.”
“Because you still love James,” Matthew said flatly.
“I always have loved him,” Cordelia said, with the ghost of a smile. “I always will. It is not a choice; it is part of me, like my heart or my soul or… or Cortana.”
“I can wait for you to change your mind.” Matthew sounded as if he were drowning.
“No,” Cordelia said, and felt as if she were breaking something, some fragile, delicate thing made of ice or glass. “I cannot and never will love you in the way you wish to be loved, Math. The way you deserve to be loved. I do not know what I will do about James. I have no plan, have made no decision. But I do know this. I know I must not”—and there were tears in her eyes—“let there be false hope between us.”
Matthew raised his chin. There was a terrible look in his eyes, the sort of look her father had when he had lost a great deal at the gambling table. “Am I so hard to love?”
“No,” Cordelia said, in despair. “You are so easy to love. So easy that it has caused all this trouble.”
“But you don’t love me.” There was real bitterness in his voice now. “I understand, you’ve made it clear enough; I’m a drunk and always will be—”
“That is not true, and not what this is about,” Cordelia said. “My decision has nothing to do with your drinking, nothing at all—”
But he was already backing away from her, shaking his blond head. Scattering green-gold leaves. “This is unbearable,” he said. “I can stand it no longer.”
And with a few strides, he was gone through the door, leaving Cordelia alone, her heart hammering in her chest as if she had just run a hundred miles.
* * *
Thomas had expected that the moment they arrived at the party, Alastair would peel away to join his usual cohort: Piers Wentworth, Augustus Pounceby, and the other boys who had graduated with him from Shadowhunter Academy.