Chapter Eighteen: Cotton Candy and Silver Eyes
3204 Words
It started that night.
After the party. After Shawn's voice on the pavement and the walk home and the shirt pulled from the pillow with hands that had done it so many times the motion was muscle memory now.
She held it.
Breathed in what was left.
And something that had been held very tightly for a very long time —
Let go.
She didn't decide to cry.
That was the thing about the kind of crying that had been waiting — it didn't ask permission, didn't announce itself, didn't give you time to prepare a dignified version of it. It simply arrived. All at once. With the full weight of everything that had been accumulating since April behind it.
Since before April.
Since a forest in the rain.
Since I'm never coming back.
She sat on the bed with his shirt pressed against her face and she cried the way she hadn't let herself cry — not the controlled kind, not the quiet dignified kind that she'd been managing since the pavement and the thin bond and the months of him fighting her battles and then leaving to save her from them.
The other kind.
The kind that came from the bottom of surviving everything and finally, on a graduation night with the gold ring on her finger and the shirt smelling less like him every day, finding the one thing she didn't know how to survive.
His absence.
Not death. Not loss. Something harder than either of those things in some ways because he was still out there — she knew he was still out there, the bond was silent but it hadn't broken, she knew somewhere north-east of her in whatever dark he'd chosen he was still breathing and still choosing to be away —
And it made no difference.
Gone was gone.
The shirt against her face.
The ring on her finger.
The silence in her chest.
She cried until she had nothing left.
And then she lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling.
And the memories came.
Ice cream.
A Sunday afternoon with no attacks and no war and no obligations and Jace appearing in the kitchen doorway with his jacket on saying come on with the specific tone of someone who had made a plan and found it good.
Where are we going, she'd said.
Out, he'd said.
That's not—
Elara. Come on.
She'd come on.
He'd taken her to a place three blocks from the house — small, warm, the kind of ice cream shop that had been there for decades and had no interest in being trendy about it. The kind with too many flavours and handwritten labels and a person behind the counter who had been there long enough to have opinions.
She'd stood in front of the glass case for a very long time.
He'd watched her.
You're taking this very seriously, he'd said.
It's ice cream, she'd said. It matters.
It's ice cream, Elara.
Jace. Flavour selection is a window into a person's character. Take your time.
He had laughed.
The real one — the full one, the one that didn't happen often enough and lit up the parts of his face that the arrogance usually occupied. She had looked at him laughing and thought — there. That. That's the one I want to keep.
She'd chosen dark chocolate.
He'd chosen something with caramel that he'd pretended was practical.
They'd walked home eating ice cream like it was the most reasonable thing in the world and she'd held his hand with the one that wasn't holding the cone and the bond had been so warm she'd felt it in her toes.
She pressed the shirt against her face.
The movie.
March. A rainy Thursday. The kind of evening that had no agenda and was comfortable about it.
He'd found something — she'd never quite worked out how, given that Jace's relationship with cinema was approximately a thousand years old and had the specific gaps you'd expect from someone who had come to it late and curated their knowledge through what Mason recommended — and he'd said there's something I want you to see with the quiet enthusiasm of someone who rarely admitted to enthusiasm and was making an exception.
She'd said okay.
He'd set it up in the sitting room — the good blanket, the specific arrangement of the sofa that had evolved over months into the configuration that accommodated both of them, the lights off and the rain against the windows and his arm around her before the opening credits finished.
She hadn't watched much of the film.
She'd watched him watch it.
The way his face moved through the story — subtle, controlled, because he was Jace and Jace didn't perform reactions — but present. Actually present. The thousand year old wolf who had seen everything genuinely surprised by a film, genuinely moved, his silver eyes doing things he wasn't aware they were doing because he thought she was watching the screen.
She hadn't been watching the screen.
At the end he'd looked at her.
Well? he'd said.
It was good, she'd said.
You weren't watching it.
I was watching something.
He'd looked at her for a moment.
Then he'd pulled her closer.
Said nothing.
The rain had kept coming down.
The blood oath.
Not the memory of making it — that was too large, too foundational, she'd been living inside that memory for over a year and it had become less a memory than a fact of her existence.
The moment after.
When they'd both looked down at their joined hands — his right, her right, pressed together and bleeding together — and the bond had surged for the first time, new and enormous, neither of them prepared for the scale of what they'd started.
She'd looked up at him.
He'd been looking at her.
What was that, she'd said.
The oath, he'd said. Like it was simple. Like he hadn't also just felt something enormous move through him.
It's— that's not normal, she'd said. Even for a blood oath that's not—
No, he'd agreed. It's not.
Jace.
Elara.
What did we just do.
He'd looked at her.
At their joined bleeding hands.
At whatever expression was on her face.
And he'd smiled.
Not the arrogant one. Not the controlled one. The real one — rare and warm and belonging only to moments that surprised him enough to pull it out.
Something irreversible, he'd said.
Is that good.
I think, he'd said, it's the best thing I've done in a thousand years.
She pressed the shirt harder against her face.
The ring.
The flower field. The winter morning. The impossible flowers that bloomed when they shouldn't.
Him going down on one knee.
The pure gold ring catching the grey light.
Will you marry me, Elara.
The way he'd said it — steady, certain, every word chosen and meant — and the way she'd felt it through the bond simultaneously, felt what asking her cost him and what it meant to him and the specific quality of a thousand year old wolf who had decided something so completely that the deciding felt like relief.
Yes, she'd said.
One word.
The only word.
And his hands sliding the ring onto her finger with hands that were almost steady.
Almost.
She turned the ring now.
On her finger.
In the dark of the bedroom.
Still there.
Still warm.
And then the last one.
The one she'd been avoiding.
The forest. The rain. The density of the trees and the light that had almost given up.
His face.
She'd said it before — to Mason, to herself, to the ceiling on a hundred nights since April — that he hadn't wanted this. That the forest and the rain and I'm never coming back had been the hardest thing he'd ever done and that she knew it.
She knew it academically. In the way you know things that are true but exist at a slight remove from the full weight of them because the full weight is more than the moment can hold.
But now, in the dark, with the shirt and the ring and all the memories preceding this one —
She let herself look at it directly.
His face.
In the rain.
The silver eyes — she'd said they were sad, had catalogued them as sad, but that wasn't precise enough. Sad suggested something passive. Something being done to him.
This was different.
This was the face of someone making the hardest choice they'd ever made and making it with full knowledge of the cost. Not breaking. Not lost. Choosing. Every second of it a choice — to say the words, to stay in the clearing, to step back when every part of him was pulling toward her, to walk into the trees when walking away from her was the last thing in a thousand years he'd wanted to do.
She could see it now.
Clearly.
Completely.
He had been in as much pain as she was.
He had chosen it anyway.
For her.
This is me keeping that promise.
She pressed her face into the shirt.
She cried for all of it.
For the ice cream and the movie and the blood oath and the ring and the forest and a thousand year old wolf who had loved her enough to leave her and had looked like it was killing him to do it.
She cried until morning.
The second day was quieter.
Not better — quieter. The kind of quiet that comes after something has been fully expressed and the body has nothing left for volume. She lay in the bed and held the shirt and the memories played on a lower setting and she let them play.
She turned the ring.
She pressed her hand to the silence.
She didn't get up.
The third day Shawn knocked on the door.
She heard it from the bedroom — three knocks, unhurried, the specific cadence of someone who had decided to knock and was comfortable with whatever came next including no answer.
She didn't move.
He knocked again.
Three more. Same cadence.
She stared at the ceiling.
He knocked a third time.
She got up.
She looked — she was aware of this, caught a glimpse of herself in the hallway mirror — like someone who had been crying for two days and sleeping in between and had not prioritised anything that didn't involve a shirt and a ring and the ceiling.
She opened the door.
Shawn stood on the step.
Dark curly hair. Storm grey eyes. His usual jacket. His usual expression — that cold surface that kept producing warmth at unexpected moments.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
"No," she said.
"I haven't said anything," he said.
"You're going to say something," she said. "About going out or fresh air or exercise and the answer is no."
"It's not exercise," he said.
"Then what."
He looked at her for a moment.
"Get dressed," he said. "Something comfortable."
"Shawn—"
"Elara." His voice was quiet. Not pushing. Just — present. "Get dressed."
She looked at him.
At the storm grey eyes that were doing the careful reading thing — taking in the two days visible on her face and the shirt she was still holding and the ring and all of it — and not reacting to any of it with pity or discomfort or any of the things that made grief harder to be around people with.
Just — present.
She went to get dressed.
He took her to the carnival.
She hadn't known there was a carnival. Hadn't been paying enough attention to the city's offerings to notice — had been operating in the specific tunnel of grief that contracts the world to the size of a bedroom and a shirt and a silence in your chest.
But there it was.
On the edge of the park — lights strung between structures in the early evening dark, the specific warm gold of carnival lighting that existed nowhere else, the smell of fried things and sugar and the particular excited noise of people who had come somewhere for the express purpose of being somewhere bright.
She stood at the entrance and looked at it.
Shawn stood beside her.
Said nothing.
"A carnival," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"You took me to a carnival."
"I did."
She looked at the lights.
At the Ferris wheel turning slowly against the evening sky. At the game stalls with their impossible prizes. At the children running and the couples walking and the general committed brightness of it all.
"Come on," he said.
He bought her cotton candy.
She hadn't asked for it — he'd simply stopped at the stall and returned with the pink cloud of it on its paper cone and held it out with the same expression he held everything. Like offering cotton candy to a grieving vampire at a carnival was a completely unremarkable thing to do and he had no feelings about it either way.
She took it.
Looked at it.
"I'm a vampire," she said.
"You liked the ice cream," he said.
She looked at him.
"How do you know about the ice cream."
"Aaron," he said simply.
She turned back to the cotton candy.
Took a piece.
It dissolved on her tongue — that specific texture, sugar and air and nothing, the taste of something that had no substance and was entirely about the experience of it.
She took another piece.
They walked.
He was not Mason.
That was the thing she kept noticing — the way he occupied space beside her was entirely different from the way Mason had. Mason filled silence with warmth and noise and the specific generosity of someone who believed the world was better loud. Shawn filled it differently. With presence. With the specific quality of someone who had decided to be here and had nothing to prove about being here and was simply — here.
It required less of her.
That was what she hadn't known she needed.
Something that required less.
They passed the game stalls.
She looked at one — the ring toss, the specific impossibility of it, the rings that were calibrated to miss and occasionally didn't.
"Don't," she said before he could stop.
"Don't what."
"Try to win me something," she said. "It's a trap. The physics are designed against you."
"I know," he said.
"Then why are you stopping."
He picked up three rings.
Paid for them.
Looked at the bottles.
Threw all three.
She watched them arc through the carnival air — clean, unhurried, with the specific confidence of someone who had done the physics in their head before their hand moved — and land.
Three bottles.
One each.
She stared.
"That's—" She looked at him. "How."
He looked at the prizes.
"What do you want," he said.
She looked at the wall of prizes.
At the enormous ridiculous stuffed animals and the smaller more reasonable ones and the specific category of prize that existed only at carnivals and nowhere else.
She pointed.
"That one."
A small wolf. Grey. With the slightly derpy expression of a stuffed animal that had been manufactured without a great deal of attention to anatomical accuracy.
Shawn looked at it.
Something moved in his expression.
He took it from the hook and held it out.
She took it.
Looked at it.
At the grey stuffed wolf with its slightly wonky eyes and its too-large ears.
And something happened.
Not the crying — she was past crying for today, had emptied herself of it the night before and the night before that. Something else. Something lighter than crying and completely unexpected.
She laughed.
It came out small at first — a surprised sound, barely anything, her own body catching her off guard with it. Then it kept coming — warm and real and entirely undignified, the kind of laugh that had no performance in it because she hadn't seen it coming and hadn't had time to manage it.
She stood in the middle of a carnival holding a slightly derpy stuffed wolf and laughed.
She pressed her hand over her mouth.
The laugh kept coming anyway.
She looked at Shawn.
He was looking at her.
And something had happened to his expression that she hadn't seen on it before.
Not quite a smile — or rather, the very beginning of one, the specific precursor that existed in the fraction before a smile commits to being a smile. Like the storm grey eyes had found something they hadn't expected to find and were quietly pleased about it.
He looked at her laughing.
And he felt — she could see it, clearly, in the storm grey eyes and the almost-smile and the way he'd gone slightly still —
Good.
He felt good.
Like something had been accomplished that mattered.
She pressed her lips together.
Tried to stop laughing.
Failed.
"The eyes," she managed. "They're so—"
"Wonky," he said.
"Profoundly wonky," she said.
"Yes," he said.
She looked at the wolf.
"I love him," she said.
"Good," Shawn said quietly.
She looked up at him.
At the almost-smile.
At the storm grey eyes that were warmer than she'd ever seen them — still not warm the way certain people were warm, not Mason-warm, not the kind that flooded rooms. But warm. The specific warmth of something that had been cold for a long time discovering it was capable of more than cold.
"Thank you," she said softly.
"For a stuffed wolf."
"For this," she said. Meaning the carnival. The cotton candy. The ring toss. The laugh she hadn't known she still had in her.
He looked at her for a moment.
"Don't thank me yet," he said.
She looked at him.
"You keep saying that," she said.
"Keep meaning it," he said.
She turned back to the carnival.
Held the stuffed wolf against her chest.
Walked.
He walked beside her.
And for the first time since a forest in April on a rainy day —
The silence in her chest was something other than empty.
Not full.
Not the bond — nothing was the bond, nothing would ever be the bond, the gold ring on her finger was a fact she carried in every cell.
But something.
Something small and new and careful.
Like a door in a dark room finding the very beginning of light.
She put the stuffed wolf on the nightstand when she got home.
Next to where she kept the ring when she slept.
She picked up the shirt.
Held it.
Breathed in what was left.
Looked at the stuffed wolf.
At its wonky eyes.
At the ring on the nightstand.
She turned off the light.
Lay in the dark.
Pressed her hand to the silence.
Thought about storm grey eyes going warm.
Thought about silver eyes in a forest.
Thought about don't thank me yet.
Thought about this is me keeping that promise.
She held the shirt.
She held the wolf.
She closed her eyes.
For the first time in weeks she fell asleep before the crying came.
- Writer
