Almost reluctantly, his hands drop away, and I feel more than hear him take a step back. “Ready?”
With a silent nod, I follow as he leads the way to the front door. The living room is empty, so we don’t pass by anyone else, and then Slade pulls open the door, stepping aside for me to go first.
I look up as I take my first step out, mouth dropping open at the giant stalactites hanging from the ceiling. The cave itself is massive, so much bigger than I could’ve envisioned, with so many pockets and crevices and cracks that it would take years to map it all. But what’s most enchanting of all are the veins of blue that run throughout the rock, like frozen waves of a glowing sea.
I pass beneath an archway of stalactites, their points wet with gathered water, the slick ground reflecting the cerulean fluorescence. It’s almost hard to blink in a place like this, because I don’t want to miss anything. My head swivels and my body turns, and I keep myself as quiet as I can, because the cave seems so ancient and apart—a hallowed wonder in the middle of a village that shouldn’t exist.
“It’s beautiful,” I whisper.
Soundlessly, Slade comes up to stand beside me, though I don’t move my craned neck. “What the Grotto lacks in daylight, it makes up for tenfold with this.”
Nodding in agreement, I let my lungs wash through the air that somehow feels both fresh and timeworn. “It’s peaceful.”
I’m not sure how long Slade walks around with me, but I eat up every moment of it. Everything—from the darkness of the cave to the veins running through it, from the mysteriousness of the endless crevices to the stark reveal of each hanging point—reminds me of him. There is a depth here that feels fathomless and untouchable, and all I want to do is stay here beneath its shadowed glow.
But then Slade steps beneath one of the brightest fluorescent fissures in the cave, the underbelly of the mountain glowing so brilliantly that it lights up his face, illuminating his eyes.
“We need to talk, Goldfinch.”
My chest instantly goes tight. “No.”
I start to turn away, but he reaches out and grabs my hand, stopping me. “We have to speak about this.”
I jerk my palm away. “I want to go back inside.”
He shakes his head in frustration. “You want to cook dinner, you want to see the cave, you want to go back inside…you can’t keep running from this, Auren.”
“I’m not running.”
“You are, and you’re stronger than this,” he says firmly, the dark green of his eyes hidden beneath the illuminating blue.
“Oh, so you think I’m being weak, now?”
He runs a hand down his face. “No, that’s not what I’m saying, but I—”
“I’m not talking about it yet.”
His jaw muscle jumps. “Yes. We are.”
My anger is so thick I can taste it burning on the back of my tongue. “Go ahead and talk then, but I’m going inside.” I turn on my heel and start to walk away, tossing my next words over my shoulder. “You can think I’m a coward all you want, but I’m not going to stand here and talk about how thoroughly I fucked up.”
I can’t.
Not yet.
Already my body is shaking, but not from anger—from fear. Fear to face what I did, fear over how spectacularly I lost control. It’s like getting black-out drunk and having no recollection of what you did except for jumpy fragments that pop up unwanted, none of the memories good.
“You didn’t fuck up,” Slade calls behind me. “I did.”
I whirl around, stopping just beneath the tail-end of the mountain’s blue vein. “If you’re going to try to make some male chauvinistic claim that everything I did was really somehow your doing, then you can save it, because that was all me. I don’t care if you’re trying to say that to be noble or because you think it will help assuage my guilt, but—”
He gives me a tortured look and bites out, “I fucking rotted you, okay?”
His words don’t just cut me off—they splice right down my middle, making me sway. My mouth opens and closes as I try to come to terms with what he just said.
“What?”
He stalks forward, booted steps echoing on the rock, while cold air presses up against my back like a frigid bystander. When he’s right in front of me again, one side of his face is lit up with blue, the other cast into shadows.
“I rotted you,” he repeats, but hearing it again doesn’t help. “What do you remember?”