Page 46 of Grand Romantic Delusions and the Madness of Mirth, Part One

“What?!” I cry loudly before I can stop myself, drawing the attention of everyone enjoying the pastries and coffee.

“I let you win, Sully,” Bolan drawls lazily, his gaze resting on me with actual weight. “Mirth would never forgive me if I marred that pretty face.”

Christoph snorts, choking slightly on his tea. The china cup and saucer are too tiny in his large hands .

Sully flashes Bolan an edged grin.

“I organized it.” Elias pointedly offers me the envelope.

I take it, exceedingly confused. It isn’t sealed or addressed. I tug a single printed piece of paper from it, instantly recognizing a donation receipt from the Read With Me literacy charity. The amount is a staggering 1.2 million euros. In my name.

Not that I need the tax write-off, but I assume that Elias not claiming it for himself is part of the gesture.

Isla shifts forward eagerly, practically plastering herself across Elias’s lap to peer at the donation receipt. “Oh! That was you?” She laughs, laying her hand on Elias’s shoulder. “You created a bit of buzz with that stunt.”

The earl’s energy contracts sharply, and he angles himself toward me. To avoid being brushed by Isla’s breasts, I assume. “Did I?” Elias says coolly. It’s not a question.

Elias clearly doesn’t enjoy being touched.

My own anxiety spikes.

If I didn’t have my essence on complete lockdown, I would assume that to be an empathic reaction on my part. Notwithstanding that I’m not that kind of empath.

I reach across Elias myself, practically shoving the receipt into Isla’s hand. She takes it eagerly, grinning down at the amount as she straightens away from the earl, spinning to show it to Noah. Her awry chosen smiles, more at her reaction than the donation amount.

“Isla is on the Read With Me board,” I say quietly.

“I know,” Elias says stiffly.

As I settle back in my seat, but before I completely withdraw my hand, he touches the underside of my wrist, fingertips sliding across my palm and fingers.

So … he’s just choosy about who he touches.

A gentle warmth blooms in my chest, followed by a genuine smile. I lean slightly closer to continue our conversation. I could talk about my literacy work for hours, and I —

Bolan scoffs, completely disgruntled. Practically slamming his coffee mug on the table between us, he heaves himself off the settee. “Mirth doesn’t want, or need, any of this pretty shit,” he declares to the room as he swaggers away.

He’s leaving. I have no idea why he even showed up in the first place, but my heart stupidly constricts nonetheless. My throat closes up so much that I’m not sure I can take my next breath as he saunters off.

But then Bolan bends down and snags a battered guitar case from behind a cluster of large potted plants. Spinning back, he levels a wide grin on me.

I know that case.

I know the well-worn, well-loved acoustic guitar that he pulls from it — a Brazilian rosewood Martin with a spruce top, herringbone binding, and mother-of-pearl fretboard inlays.

I know what he’s doing. But I don’t know why he’s doing it.

He plays up to the room — everyone in it instantly transforms into his audience. As always. Bolan knows how to engage an audience, no matter how small. He loops the guitar strap over his head, casually strumming a chord across its strings.

“I spent the last month …” Bolan angles his head, allowing the perfect smirk he’s practically patented to spread across his face.

“Except for the few hours Sully decided to take his own shit out on me, I spent the last month at my mother’s.

And look what I found tucked in the attic …

” He runs his hand up and down the guitar’s neck, caressing the fucking thing as he grins at me .

Grinning as if he expects me to participate in his performance.

The attic, he calls it. Bolan’s childhood bedroom, when he couldn’t stand bunking with his eldest sister any longer, was in the attic of his mother’s house. The walls and built-in bookshelves are now a shrine maintained by his family, plastered with photos and articles from early in his career.

When Bolan was still Oliver, he used to play this guitar and sing for us.

The guitar was a gift from us on his fifteenth birthday — after much pleading to parental figures for the necessary funds, because it was crazy expensive.

A gift from me and Armin. Sometimes other friends gathered in one of the common rooms at school.

Sometimes it was just the three of us. But each time, he would banter like this, tell some story as if his audience needed warming up. We didn’t.

Bolan’s smile falters for a moment, possibly because I’m just staring at him, barely holding on to my perfect-princess composure. He dips his head and his gaze as he plucks a few more warm-up practice chords.

I know those chords.

I know what song they precede.

It’s imbedded in my soul.

And not in a good way.

Bolan recovers the smirk as he starts tapping his foot. He teases more of the opening of the song from the guitar, with the fingers I’ve fantasized about having on me, in me …

So many nights of lying awake and desperately wanting. Even after he shoved me away after that one kiss.

“Not many people know the full story behind this song,” Bolan says. His voice is melodic … enchanting. Because Bolan isn’t just a shifter. He’s more . He’s always been more.

As I’ve always been less than I should be .

“I wrote it for Mirth.” He hits me with a heated gaze, but his words — and the utter lie embedded in them — instantly chill me. “Inspired by Mirth, to be specific. She was the first person I wanted to play it to when I knew I’d finally finished it.”

Pressing the guitar against him with one hand, Bolan leans down and plucks a milk-chocolate toffee bar out of the guitar case. He sets the bar on the low table separating us, giving me a playful wink.

The chill in my chest expands, slowly and insidiously spreading up my neck, through my arms. Hands carefully folded and held in my lap, ankles perfectly crossed, back straight, I’m frozen in place. My heart, my soul, are icing over.

Fingers flying over the guitar now, Bolan opens his mouth, and the opening lines of the acoustic version of the Blitz’s first massive hit pour from him.

How could I wait one second longer

This could be my finest hour

Heroes are just those who take action

And there’s a princess held high in a tower

He’s utterly beguiling. Everyone tightly gathered around— excepting me, Sully, Elias, and Christoph— actually leans in as if they need to be closer just to listen, enraptured.

The melody and lyrics to this song have been refined over years of our life together. When we were younger, Bolan carried a small black-leather notebook with him, constantly jotting down lyrics in a cramped, barely discernible hand.

So I climb the wall, clawing stone after stone

Every finger is bloodied almost down to the bone

Bolan, who was still Oliver at that point, played a solo concert for me a couple of weeks after my fifteenth birthday. I still can’t remember where Armin was that late evening. It was only a few days before summer break.

Bolan tempted me away from studying for the last of my end-of-year exams with my favorite milk-chocolate toffee bar. I have no doubt he wandered into town for some other reason and nicked it as an afterthought.

That same brand of toffee bar sits on the low table between us now.

So he remembers that night in detail. Though he’s never mentioned or even hinted at it in the eleven years that stretch between then and now.

I’m so frozen that I’m not even certain my heart is beating. I can’t fathom why it ever beat for this person at all.

Did Bolan come to court me just so he could hurt me? Hurt me again?

Every muscle is screaming, every breath’s an assault

Then I’m struck by her beauty in spite of it all

Bolan’s then-white-blond hair fell over his brow as he lured me, giggling like the lovesick teen I was, hand in hand and stumbling through the dark, to the boathouse.

His cobalt-blue eyes were lit from within that night, his eyesight far better than mine.

The Prague Phrontistery is situated on a lake, near enough to the residences that Bolan insisted that using flashlights would just get us detention.

Tucking his guitar case safely in the bow, the boy I desperately but quietly loved took us out in a rowboat, teasing me about withholding the toffee bar.

I know now that it wasn’t some romantic gesture.

Just like the song isn’t really a love song. Though legions of Blitz fans think it is.

And I fall

And I fall

Bolan needs an audience. He also needed someone to record the song — using both of our phones, situated in spots tested and deemed perfect by him on the boat. Because he wanted to hear what he sounded like, singing and playing on the open expanse of still water on the lake.

Armin told me some time later that Bolan used that recording to secure his first major gig, then his first record deal.

But I thought … I thought …

When Bolan reached into his guitar case after putting away the guitar, and finally handed me the toffee bar … and my fingers brushed his taking it … and the moonlight and under the stars … I thought …

I stood up, carefully so as not to tip the boat.

I placed my hands on his shoulders.

My hair fell down all around us.

He had tilted his head back …

He had tilted his head back, right?

I kissed him.

My first kiss.

Not his first.

He sang that song, and I kissed him.

He kissed me back.

I swear even now that he kissed me back. That he parted his lips under mine. That he pressed up against me.

Then he shoved me away. The boat almost tipped over as he pushed me back into my seat.

He shoved me away, grabbed the oars, and rowed us back to the boathouse, not meeting my eye.

His rejection splintered something in me — literally.

My essence chose that moment to exert itself.

At the time, it felt like … it felt as if a hunk of my soul had been hewn asunder.

On the ground, I awaken surrounded by maidens

Each one attending my needs

They’re all pleading for me to regale them with storie s

Like a hero with all his good deeds

I ran before Bolan even had the boat tied up. I think he shouted after me, but I … I refused to cry in front of him. I wanted to retreat to my room, but I couldn’t keep that energy inside me contained.

Somehow, even through my teenage angst, I realized that something was very wrong. So I holed up in one of the caretaker sheds, curled up, and waited until Armin came looking for me. Instead of exposing the entire dorm to what was happening.

Armin eventually found me.

Then everything went sideways as he tried to get me to safety. Or rather tried to make sure the school was safe from me.

By the end of which I had killed three people, including one of the guards assigned to us at school. Each of them died laughing as their brains melted.

I killed three people in the time it took for my brother to realize that only he was immune to whatever was happening to me, then to try to keep me safe and contain that power until our father could collect me.

After that, it took me six months to get my essence under control enough to go back to school.

I found the milk-chocolate toffee bar, which I thought I’d accidentally dropped in the lake when Bolan shoved me away, in the bags Armin packed when he emptied out my dorm room.

And some part of me … some desperate part of me hoped, utterly stupidly, that Bolan had tried to find me that night and left it in my room.

From above, I see her viewing my sordid state

So I leap toward the tower, climbing faster than fate

Listening to Bolan now, unable to look away from him as he pretends to serenade me, that chill, that icy numbness, splinters inside me.

And it hurts.

It hurts.

Why is he hurting me?

Why does he want to hurt me?

Sully, still seated on the floor next to me, wraps his hand around my ankle. The warmth of his touch grounds me just enough that the terrible, icy pain that’s cracked open around my heart begins to heat, to boil.

Suddenly I’m fucking furious.

I stand, glaring at Bolan.

He rears back, frowning. But he keeps singing and playing because he is the ultimate performer.

And when I reach her window, I will kneel, beg, and crawl

On my honor, I’ll swear I’ve forsaken them all

I pivot free from Sully’s grip. Anne rises to meet me as I do, concern etched across her face.

That gives me just enough pause that I’m able to throw a polite, “Please excuse me for a moment. I have a dreadful headache,” to the gathering in general.

Bolan falters on the closing chorus of the song.

And I fall

And I fall

A few discordant notes follow me from the room, fading before I reach the hall.

Anne is at my side. It’s her pace that makes me realize I’m actually running. Running away from everything Bolan has forced me to remember, to feel.

I’ve been mostly numb since I lost Armin.

I run until my hair streams behind me, achingly thankful that I’m wearing flat-soled shoes. Both Anne and I ignore the staff sliding to the side of the corridors and out of my way. Out of the way of the energy spiking off me.

Fleeing Bolan.

For the second time in my life.

I might have faltered in the aftermath of Armin’s death. I might have hesitated when informed of my father’s matchmaking plans.

But I’ve never fucking fled anyone, or any situation, except fucking Bolan.