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TWENTY

DANNI

My heart is a fucking traitor. I know it is, because even though my mind knows damn well that space from Rose is a smart move, I’ve never felt as high in my life as tonight, now that she’s sought me out.

Even worse, my heart’s actually trying to convince my brain that the situation here is more nuanced than my brain figured. Because even though this morning it seemed really obvious that the distance has been doing me wonders (for example, it’s now been forty-nine hours since I last visited Alfie’s profile to look at photos of him and count the ways he’s better than me), and I should tell her I have a date with a med drama tonight and I’m too busy to see her, I can’t. Because now that Rose is here, and I remember the richness of her voice, and the way her eyes crinkle when she looks at me, and the timbre of her laugh, I’m done for. I’ll do whatever she wants. I’ll do anything to feel happy like this. Especially after some of the lowest weeks I’ve ever lived.

The school’s ice rink is right by the edge of the forest, far enough away from the closest building that it’s kind of eerie to head over to it in the dark. It’s hard to be too freaked out when Rose’s bodyguard—the shorter one, who Rose told me once is her favorite—is hanging out a stone’s throw away from us, at least. He stops outside of the door to guard it, and Rose and I head on inside, where she flicks a switch and floods the small rink with light.

“I’m surprised we’re allowed to be in here,” I say as Rose passes me a pair of skates in my size. They’re made of leather, and they look a hell of a lot more beat up and cheap than Rose’s personal pair, but they’re still a step up from the plastic rental ones I used the couple of times I tried ice-skating as a little kid. “We are allowed to be here, right?” I ask, suddenly suspicious.

Rose glances up at me as she ties her laces. “Yes, Danni,” she says. “The rules are a minimum of three students have to be here at all times if there’s no adult supervision.”

I know I said I’m fine. And I am, I swear. But my stupid freaking heart skips a beat when she says my name.

“Three?” I echo.

“Yes. Presumably one to collect the severed limbs from the hypothetical skating accident while another runs for help and the third loses consciousness.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I say. “It’s just the two of us.”

Rose gestures behind her, at the door with her guard standing on the other side.

“But he’s not in here,” I say, “so we’re breaking the rules. What if something happens and we can’t get his attention?”

“Danni, he’s not even fifty feet away.”

“It could happen, though. Rules exist for a reason.”

She gives me a triumphant look and shoves a hand in her jacket pocket. “That’s what my panic button is for.”

“You have a panic button?”

“Of course I do.”

Right, panic button, duh. Silly me.

I slump onto the bench beside her and start putting on my skates. She watches me lace them for a little while before she kneels in front of me and looks up through her lashes. “Let me help,” she says. “You should lace them back on themselves, like this.”

I think maybe I was overestimating my ability to be normal around Rose. I force myself to look at the ceiling, and the walls, and the rink—anywhere except for her. And when she softly places her hand on the side of my calf, I tell myself not to care, or notice, that she leaves it there for way longer than I think she needs to. I mess both directions up immediately. I’m gritting my teeth so hard it hurts.

She pauses until I look down at her. “Do you want Theodore to come in?” she asks. I guess she’s noticed my body language, and is trying to figure out why I’m so on edge.

If he comes inside, there will be zero tension, right? It’s impossible to imagine chemistry that doesn’t exist while some random guy stares you down. What an awesome idea.

“No, it’s fine,” I say.

My brain groans at me.

Rose doesn’t even slow down as she steps onto the ice, like there’s no difference between walking and gliding for her. Her hair whips around as she skates, and she’s alight as she turns backward to look at me. I wonder if she knows how beautiful she looks like this. Like, maybe she wanted to bring me here not so she could teach me, but so someone could witness her being completely, totally perfect.

As for me, I sort of drag myself along while clutching at the barrier for dear life. I manage to keep myself upright doing that for ten whole seconds, but then my legs shoot out in different directions out of nowhere and I go down hard.

Rose doubles over laughing at me, and I would hate her a tad for it, but my elbows and tailbone hurt too much for me to focus on anything else. At least she apologizes when she helps me back up.

“I’m going to make you learn snowboarding,” I grumble as I try to straighten my wobbling legs. “And I’m gonna laugh at you the whole time.”

“You should, I deserve it. But I’ll warn you now, I’m a fast learner.”

“I’ll find something to laugh at,” I promise. My back is straight now, and both of my hands are in Rose’s. She’s wearing a pair of woolen gloves, and they’re fuzzy against my bare skin. She holds eye contact with me, and it’s like when she touched my leg. A little too soft, and a little too long. And it burns, just a little too hot.

“I’ll make sure I give you something,” she says. “Just to be fair.”

My nerves are fucking frayed. I hope to god she can’t tell.

“But seriously,” she says. “I do want to hold you to that ski race sometime. If you can bear the thought of being cooped up in a chalet with me.”

“Totally! Put me on the list next time you all plan a trip.”

Something weird crosses her face, and it takes me a second to realize I’ve said the wrong thing. I just don’t know what.

“Our friends aren’t big skiers,” she says, and it clicks. She wasn’t inviting me to a group snow trip. She was asking me to join her sometime. Alone. In a chalet. Together.

I don’t trust myself to reply without stammering, so I opt to keep my mouth shut.

She starts to move backward, pulling me in large circles around the rink. Bit by bit, I graduate from slipping and sliding around to sort-of-kind-of skating. She lets go of my hands a few times to see how I do, but I barely last a few seconds before I start to overbalance. Every time I do, she swoops in to catch me with steady hands. At first, I’m worried I’m going to pull her down with me, but I don’t actually think I can. She’s stronger than she looks. I’m pretty sure she could lift me by the waist right now if she wanted.

Eventually, with her encouragement, I manage to skate more than a couple of steps without her. Thank Christ, because I was starting to feel self-conscious about how amazingly terrible I was at skating. Anything I learned as a kid was clearly lost. But now, I’m starting to remember. It’s fun, even,

“Next stop, the Olympics,” Rose crows as I find my rhythm. “Can you imagine the crowd cheering?”

“I’d prefer not to,” I say. “It’s kind of my nightmare.”

“What, being cheered?”

“Being center stage.” I realize I’m about to fall seconds before it happens, but it’s too late to stop myself, and Rose is too far away to interfere. I hit the ice and slide, hissing with pain. Why the hell doesn’t this sport have padding? Any other sport where people throw themselves hard at the ground has helmets, and for good reason.

“Here, here, here,” Rose says in a low voice as she crouches down to look me over for permanent damage. When it turns out all my limbs are still attached, she helps me back up, but this time she sticks closer to me. I’m a liability, I guess. God forbid she has to use the panic button. I’d die of shame.

She grins sideways at me as we skate. “Wait, so you’re a wildly talented pianist, yet you don’t like the spotlight? How do you handle performing?”

“By doing it as little as possible,” I say. She gives me a confused look, and I go on. “I mean, I’ll do it for people I trust, or to audition, or whatever. But I have really bad stage fright.”

“Oh. How will you pursue piano if you can’t perform, though? Or don’t you intend to?”

I shrug. That is a great, excellent question. One my mom’s asked me about a million times. “I don’t know. I keep promising myself I’ll get used to performing, but every time I chicken out. And I do want to pursue it if I can. I mean, I’ll probably never be a concert pianist, but I think I’d like to be in an orchestra. Like Caroline was. If I can be that brave. If not, maybe I’ll just play for myself.”

Rose does a little one-eighty shuffle so she’s facing me going backward again. Show-off. “But you have so much talent. Surely you can learn to overcome any stage fright?”

“Not all of us grew up in the spotlight,” I remind her wryly. “I can’t even perform in front of the school. What are the chances that I’ll magically be performing for a sold-out crowd in a few years?”

She gives me a knowing look. “Spend enough time around me, and you’ll get used to attention. Trust me.”

As the words leave her mouth, some of her brightness dims. I wonder if she’s thinking of my deal with Molly. And just how little time I’ve spent with her since I made it.

Should I bring it up? To apologize, or explain, or even to tell her I’ve missed her? I’m honestly not sure. She’s been smiling at me around school, and saying hi and stuff, so it’s been hard for me to tell if she cared at all that I asked for space.

It’s not easy to tell much of anything with Rose.

I stumble, and she automatically holds a hand out for me to grab onto. Her fingers curl around me firmly, and I wish she wasn’t wearing gloves, and I could feel the skin separated from mine by this stupid scrap of material.

“What about you?” I ask. “What happens after next year? Do you go to college—I mean, university—or get a job? Sorry,” I add. “I don’t know how being a princess works.”

Rose snaps back to the present. “I can go to university,” she says. “It’s encouraged, actually. I’ve thought I might like to study philosophy, or maybe anthropology. But it doesn’t matter what I study, or whether I choose not to. All roads lead to the same destination. I’m not allowed to hold any other jobs,” she clarifies.

“Right, gotcha. And is that what you want?”

Rose looks pensive. She still hasn’t let go of my hand. “What I want is to leave the world better than I found it. Being queen will give me more than enough resources to do that, if I don’t waste them. I just… hope I don’t waste them.”

“Well, that’s in your control, right?”

Something about her expression tells me she disagrees. She doesn’t elaborate, though. She doesn’t even reply.

My feet are killing me by this point, and even though I don’t really want to wrap things up, I eventually crack and tell Rose I have to get off the ice. Once my borrowed skates are dried and returned, I hover, waiting for Rose to suggest we head back to our rooms. Instead, she says, “If your feet are numb, we should go for a bit of a walk. It’ll help with the blood flow,” she adds, and I’m suddenly extremely thankful to human biology for giving me some extra time with Rose.

Now I’m here, I’m remembering how much I like being around her. So much that I’ve half forgotten why I ever wanted to take a step back to begin with.

It’s been raining more often than not over the last week, and the woods are muddy and slushy and soggy as we trudge through them. We’re moving slow, because we only have the moonlight and Rose’s phone flashlight to help us see where we’re going in the dark. Theodore is following way behind us, so distant that he could almost be some guy doing his own thing if I didn’t know any better. Even if I glance at him, he’s not looking at us. I guess he does that so Rose feels like she’s living a semi-independent life. And it’s not like he’s so far away he’d miss it if something went wrong.

“Oh, by the way,” I say, because if I leave it much longer it’s going to be weird to bring it up. “Congratulations.”

“On?” Rose asks.

“On Alfie. That whole… thing. It’s awesome.” I add the last lie because even though I mean the congratulations to sound real, it sort of comes out bitchy against my will.

She looks at me blankly for a while, like she’s forgotten who Alfie is or what I’m talking about. “Oh, that’s not… it wasn’t what it looked like. Alfie’s my friend.”

I snort. “Really? ’Cause I don’t do that with my friends.”

She stares at the ground furiously, and I stop smiling. She takes a deep breath, then looks back up, and there’s something desperate in her eyes that catches me off guard. “No, I actually don’t like”—she catches herself, tips her head back to expose her neck, and then steadies—“Alfie. I like someone else.” I blink at her rapidly, trying to process this brand-new information, and then she looks right at me and finishes with a casual, “Some other guy.”

My stomach sinks. Out of the fireplace and into the frying pan, huh? Maybe, just maybe, I should stop assuming impossible things the second I get the slightest reason to hope. One of these days, I’ll get on top of that habit, right?

“Yikes,” I say. “Do you think he saw the photos?”

“Who?”

“The guy you like.”

Rose blinks, then shrugs, like she couldn’t care less.

I clear my throat. “You know it’s okay to be vulnerable, right?” I ask.

She stops in her tracks, and looks at me like I just said the single most offensive thing possible. “Excuse me?”

“I dunno. You just close off when you’re talking about scary stuff sometimes. I just want you to know this is a safe space. If you’re worried I’m gonna judge you if we talk about personal stuff, I’m just not.”

We walk aimlessly in silence for a while. I’m pretty sure she’s at least taking what I said into consideration, because she doesn’t change the subject. But she doesn’t offer any more information on this mysterious crush, either. Eventually, she stops in front of a tree and leans her whole body against it, scraping her fingers through the hair at the nape of her neck. She squeezes her eyes shut like she’s too freaked out to speak if she can see my face, then she says, “Danni, do you think my eyes are empty?”

It’s not exactly what I expected her to say. “What do you mean?”

She blinks her eyes open. “I had someone say something similar to me recently. That I have no emotions, and my eyes are empty. Is that… is that true? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

Well, they sure aren’t empty at the moment. She seems so lost, so hurt, that I wish I could go back thirty seconds and take my words back. “No. That’s not what I meant at all.”

Rose’s is purposely not looking at me. I think, maybe, this is her being vulnerable. And maybe eye contact is a little too much for her while she’s doing that. So, I trail my hand along the trunk of the tree and follow it around to lean against it to Rose’s left side. Side by side, with neither of us looking at each other. All I can see is the dark, moonlit forest, and the star-filled sky above our heads, and the mist my breath is forming in the cold. I know we aren’t strictly by ourselves out here, but the darkness and trees have given us privacy, I think. As long as neither of us calls for help.

We’re basically alone, I realize.

“I think you have really nice eyes,” I say. “Sometimes I look at them and I don’t know what you’re thinking. But other times you have this sort of, almost secret look. Like you’re laughing just a little, and whenever I notice it, I have to smile, too. They’re not empty at all.” And then, before I can stop myself, I add, “I think you can see everything in them.”

She breathes heavily through her nose. Every part of me wants to move and put an arm around her, to comfort her and convince her to believe what I have to say. But I force myself to stand my ground and give her space.

“What did you mean, then?” she asks finally.

“I guess, I mean that I never see you sad, or angry, or embarrassed, or anything like that. And I just wasn’t sure if that was because you didn’t feel like you could be those things. So, I wanted you to know you can.”

“I can’t,” she whispers.

“You can, I promise. You can with me.”

“I can’t .”

I give up. I’ve said my piece, but I can’t force her to feel safe enough to share that stuff with me. All I can do is encourage her. But I wish she did. I wish I knew how to make her feel safe.

“Danni?” she asks into the darkness.

“Yeah?”

“Do you remember when you told me you thought I could be good?”

“Yeah.”

“How?” she asks, her voice cracking.

Jesus. I know I promised myself I’d give her physical space, but I can’t help it at this point. It’s hurting my heart to hear her talking like this. I need to get closer for me just as much as for her. So, with my back against the tree still, I take a step to the side so our arms are pressed together from shoulder to fingertip. If she pulls away, I won’t follow.

But she doesn’t pull away.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I know it’s not what you want to hear, I just… I think you are a good person. I really do. So I don’t have any advice.”

She whispers her reply. “Then maybe you don’t see me clearly.”

“Or maybe you don’t,” I say. “Because I’m pretty sure I see you clear as anything, Rose.”

We stand in silence for ages, with no sound filling the air but our own breathing. Suddenly, I’m hyper aware of the sensation of her skin against mine, and the faint smell of her perfume.

“Danni?” she says. “I know they saw the photos.”

My brain must be lagging behind, because I’m lost. “Who?”

“The person I have feelings for. I already know they saw the photos of Alfie and me.”

I’m not allowed to read into this. I promised myself. She said guy, specifically, which means this isn’t going anywhere. Why is my heart racing like this? Stop racing.

I close my eyes and will myself to breathe. “How do you know?”

She takes ages to reply. Long enough that I think she’s decided not to. Long enough that, when her voice finally cuts through the heavy silence, I’m surprised to hear it.

“I started to say it, but then I panicked, and I lied. And now I’m going to tell the truth, and if you hate the truth, can we please pretend I kept lying?”

I don’t reply, because I can’t possibly get a single word out right now. I’m not sure I even remember how to speak at all.

“I know they saw the photos, because they congratulated me on them about ten minutes ago.”

I try to keep breathing, but everything stops, and all I can do is let my mouth fall open while my insides cave in and my whole world implodes. It’s not possible she said what she just said. I misheard it. I’m misinterpreting it. Somehow. I can’t think how, but I must be. Any second now she’s going to continue, and it’s going to be clear I was imagining things, like I always am.

But for the life of me, I can’t think of any other way she could have meant it.

So, I let my heart race. I manage to suck in a lungful of frozen air, and I let my mind fog, and I let my head turn to finally look at her. And she’s looking right back at me.

A part of me wants to take a step back still. A hard lump clogs my throat. I fully expect her to laugh, or worse, ask me what I’m looking at.

But she doesn’t. She just watches me through dimly lit, green eyes. Her forehead creases, and I realize I need to say something. Anything. Because if she really just said what I think she just said, then…

“I said it was awesome,” I murmur. “You and Alfie. But I meant it was the worst thing I’d ever seen.”

Rose steps in front of me, grabbing my head between two hands and, when I respond by tipping my chin up and parting my lips, she pulls me roughly in to kiss her.

As our lips meet, she makes a small, strangled sound. Something like surprise and relief all in one. And wanting. Her fingers trail down my cheeks to rest at my neck, and her chest meets mine. And in the darkness, under the cover of the woods, I press my body flush against hers and kiss her with a desperation I didn’t know I could feel.

All at once, she breaks away and steps back from me. I gasp from shock and adrenaline, and lean forward to rest my hands on my knees. Meanwhile, Rose touches her mouth with her fingertips, staring into the distance. “What are we doing?” she asks.

Good question, I think, trying to focus. She kissed me. Rose kissed me. And I’m awake.

Rose kissed me, and now she’s pacing back and forth. “What are we doing ?” she asks again. “Oh my god. I’m so sorry I did that. Oh my god .”

I watch her go forward and backward, blinking, while I let myself fall back against the tree.

Rose kissed me, Rose, Rose, she—

She stops short and opens her mouth. Then she apparently thinks better of it, because she throws her hands up into the air. I think it’s my turn to say something.

“You okay?” I ask, mostly because she very obviously isn’t.

“Yes. No. Maybe?” She clasps her hands in front of her, and she sort of looks like she’s praying. “What should we do? Should we go back? Maybe we should go back.”

Does she mean to school? Or back in time? “Do you want to go back?” I ask.

She hugs herself, and her fingernails dig harsh dents into her jacket sleeve. “I—I, um. No? No.”

She looks like her thoughts are a whirlwind. But for me, the world is crisp, and clear, and simple.

“Neither do I,” I say, and she finally meets my eyes. And I see everything in them. Everything.

She approaches me with a fierce look, and I stare her down, steady and totally sure. She rests her forehead against mine first, her breath trembling. I think she’s expecting me to pull away, or tell her this is a bad idea. I don’t do either of those things. I just wait for her to figure out her next move. Every second she spends like this tightens the pit of my stomach more and more, until it feels like I might die if I can’t taste her again.

Then, finally, she breathes out and presses her lips against mine again.

And I’m done for.