“Moment’s over.” I shrug “Window’s gone.”
He breathes out this staggered breath, then wipes his eyes gruffly. He nods slowly, then glares over at me.
“I should hae let him hae ye.” He shakes his head. “I should hae let ye drown.”
Piano.
Do you know, he doesn’t even flinch as he says that, and it completely takes my breath away. Empties me of all air.
He doesn’t renege, doesn’t take it back, doesn’t reach for me.
There might have been a ticking hand of a clock counting down the seconds when he could have taken it back, when he could have said sorry and he didn’t mean it, but the hands spin out of control, and the clock breaks open. Kind of like how my heart feels now.
I back away from him and he lets me, and it feels like I’m fighting against invisible rubber bands, trying to snap me back into his arms, but I ignore them.
My eyes drop from his.
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.