Moonbound Mate

The candles were still burning when I found him. Eighteen of them, shaped into a heart on top of the cake I'd baked myself the night before, dripping wax onto my white bedsheets while Grant Miller pulled a blonde cheerleader closer against his bare chest like I wasn't even standing in the doorway. For a second, my brain refused to load the scene properly. I stood there with my hand still on the doorknob, my party dress still smelling like the perfume Priya had sprayed on me an hour ago, and I thought, stupidly, maybe I had the wrong room. Then Grant looked up, and his face went the color of old paper. "Mira..." He sat up so fast he knocked the rest of the cake off my nightstand. It hit the floor with a soft, ugly thud. "This isn't what it looks like." "It looks like my boyfriend is in my bed." My voice came out flatter than I expected. Steadier than I had any right to feel. "On my birthday. With Ashley Prescott." Ashley grabbed the sheet, my sheet, the one my grandmother had given me before she passed, and yanked it up over her chest like that would somehow undo the last ten minutes of my life. "I can explain," Grant said, already reaching for his shirt on the floor. "Can you?" I tilted my head at him. "Because I'm having a hard time imagining an explanation for you being naked in my room." "We were just..." "Don't." I held up a hand, and something about the calm in my voice made him actually stop talking. "Don't finish that sentence. I don't want to know what you were just." I didn't cry. I didn't throw anything, though God knows a small, ugly part of me wanted to. I picked my car keys up off the dresser where I'd left them that morning, feeling almost like I was watching myself do it from somewhere outside my own body, and walked out of my own dorm room without another word. I closed the door so hard behind me that a framed photo of me and my mom fell off the hallway wall and the glass cracked straight across my own face in the picture. I didn't stop to pick it up. Priya caught me at the bottom of the stairwell, out of breath like she'd sprinted the whole way from the party downstairs. "I texted you like ten times. I tried to stop him from going up..." "You knew?" I stopped walking. "I found out maybe two minutes before you did, I swear on my life, Mira." She grabbed both my hands, searching my face like she was trying to read a language she'd never learned. "Your face. Oh no. You're doing the calm thing." "I'm fine." "The calm thing is the scary thing. You only do the calm thing when you're about to fall apart or about to do something insane." "I said, I'm fine, Priya." I pulled my hands free, gently, and forced something like a smile onto my face. "I'm going to the bonfire." "The bonfire?" Her eyebrows shot up. "Mira, that's the wrestling team's party. That's a whole different level of insane decision-making happening right now in your brain." "Exactly." I don't fully know, even now, what I thought I was chasing that night, walking across the dark quad toward the glow of the fire on the north field. Maybe I wanted proof that I was still someone worth looking at. Maybe I just wanted one single hour where I didn't feel like the punchline of my own birthday. The bonfire was already loud when I got there, full of people who didn't know my name and didn't care that my life had cracked in half upstairs an hour earlier. Someone handed me a plastic cup with something in it that burned all the way down my throat. I drank it anyway, standing at the edge of the firelight, watching sparks spiral up into the black sky and disappear. That's when I saw him. Kael Draven didn't stand with the crowd the way everyone else did, shoulder to shoulder, laughing too loud at things that weren't that funny. He stood a little apart from it all, like the noise and the heat of the fire were something that happened around him instead of to him. He was tall, taller than I expected up close, later, with broad shoulders under a black jacket that looked too warm for a bonfire but somehow suited him anyway. His dark hair was pushed back like he hadn't thought about it in days, and when the firelight caught his eyes at just the right angle, I could have sworn, for one impossible half-second, that they flashed silver instead of grey. I'd heard the stories, same as every girl on campus had. Kael Draven, captain of the wrestling team, feared by half the school and worshiped by the other half, never dated anyone twice, never explained himself, never apologized. Girls warned each other about him in whispers in the dining hall and chased him anyway, like the warning itself was part of the appeal. Tonight, standing there with my grandmother's cracked photo frame still somewhere on my hallway floor and Grant's stupid, panicked face still burned into my mind, I didn't care about warnings even a little. Two girls near the fire were whispering behind their cups, not even bothering to be subtle about it, glancing his way every few seconds like he might notice them if they stared hard enough. He didn't. He hadn't looked at a single person around that fire the whole time I'd been watching, not once, like the entire party was background noise to something only he could hear. I thought about Grant's face when I'd walked in. I thought about Ashley's hands yanking my grandmother's sheet up to her chin. I thought about every single person at this party who would know my name by breakfast tomorrow, know exactly what had happened, look at me in the dining hall with that same soft, pitying tilt of the head people give you right before they whisper about you the second you're out of earshot. I was so tired of being the girl things happened to. I walked straight up to him, legs shaking the whole way even though my face didn't show it. "You're Kael." He looked down at me slowly, unhurried, like he was deciding whether I was worth the two seconds it would take to answer. "Everyone knows that." "I need a favor." One dark eyebrow lifted, just barely. "People don't usually ask me for favors." "I need you to help me forget something." My voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word, and I hated myself for it in that exact instant. "Just for tonight. That's all." For a long moment he didn't say anything at all. He studied me the way you'd study a page written in a language you almost, but not quite, understood, like there was something written on my skin that he could read and I couldn't. Something shifted behind his eyes. "What happened to you?" he asked, quieter than I expected. "Does it matter?" "No." He held out his hand. "Come on." I should have been afraid. I wasn't. Walking beside him away from the noise and the fire and the wreckage of my own birthday, toward the dark treeline at the edge of the field, I felt something for the first time all night that I hadn't felt once since I'd opened my own bedroom door: steady. We didn't talk much after that. His apartment, a few blocks off campus, was dark and clean and strangely, almost eerily empty for someone so full of presence when he walked into a room. No photos on the walls. No mess. Just a bed, a window, and him. He was rougher than I expected, and somehow, impossibly, more careful than I expected too, like some part of him was holding itself back the entire time, on a leash I couldn't see. Afterward, I lay staring up at his ceiling, waiting for guilt to come crashing down on me the way it always did after I did something reckless. It didn't come the way I braced for. "You're still here," I said, surprised, when I felt him settle onto the bed beside me instead of getting up to leave the room the way I expected. "It's my apartment," he said, like that explained everything. "Guys like you usually leave right after. Or make the girl leave." Something flickered across his face, there and gone before I could name it. "Guys like me," he repeated, low, almost to himself, like the words tasted strange in his mouth. "You don't know anything about guys like me." "Then tell me." He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me for a long, quiet moment, the streetlight through the blinds cutting thin silver lines across his face, and for the very first time that whole night, the cold, controlled thing behind his eyes cracked open, just a little, just enough for me to catch a glimpse of something underneath it, something that looked almost like grief, though I couldn't have said grief for what. "You're not what I expected tonight," he said quietly, half to himself. "What did you expect?" "Someone is looking for a story to tell her friends tomorrow. A dare. A distraction." His eyes searched my face like he was looking for a lie and couldn't find one. "Not someone actually hurting." "Does it matter which one I am?" "It matters more than you know." "Go to sleep, Mira," he said instead of answering. "Tomorrow you'll wish you never came looking for me tonight." I didn't believe him. I should have. Because the very last thing I saw before my eyes finally closed was his hand hovering an inch above mine on the sheet between us, close enough to hold, close enough that I could feel the warmth of it without him ever actually touching me, like he wanted to and was refusing to let himself. I fell asleep wondering what, exactly, a boy like that had to be so afraid of. Somewhere in the middle of the night, I half-woke to the feeling of him getting up, careful and quiet, and standing at the window for a long time with his back to me, looking down at the street below like he expected something to be watching from the dark. I was too tired to ask him about it. I told myself I'd dreamed it. By the time morning light came through the blinds in thin grey stripes across the floor, I'd already convinced myself the whole strange night belonged in a box labeled Don't think about this again. I lay there a moment, listening to him move around somewhere in the apartment, and made myself a promise: whatever this was, it ended the second I walked out that door. One reckless night to survive my birthday. Nothing more. I should have known, even then, that promises like that would never survive contact with a boy who watches you the way Kael Draven had watched me across a bonfire. I woke up the next morning with an answer I never could have guessed.