“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.”