My gaze moves back and forth between his eyes and mouth. I see myself reflected in his darkening irises, his dilated pupils. I look away. Because I don’t want to lose myself in him—God knows that would be easy.
“I’d say there’s hope for us, Miss Merchant.”
“Hope is the worst of all evils,” I whisper. “It prolongs our torments.”
“You’re quoting Nietzsche?”
“Loosely.”
“Here, all we have is hope,” he says.
“Well, isn’t that ironic?”
“The irony of hope in Hell on Earth?”
I shrug. “‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’—isn’t that written on the gates of Hell?”
“In the Inferno.” He smiles, and his bright eyes meet mine. “Do you have any idea how much it turns me on when you quote Dante and Nietzsche within seconds of each other?”
I’m about to laugh when he, at last, presses his lips to mine. I’m on my tiptoes, so I stumble a little until he wraps his arms around me, steadying me. How this happened, how we’ve crossed the chasm that seemed greater than the distance between Hell and Heaven, is a testament to either our humanity or our divinity here. We’re either completely weak and foolish or part of something bigger. This kiss is part of something bigger.
“My Anne,” he whispers into my hair, near my ear, as he pulls gently away, leaving me in shivers. “We tried to outsmart the devil, and we screwed it up royally, didn’t we?”
“Like Charles and Camilla,” I say. He laughs a little. “Royally. Get it?”
He leans back. “That’s pretty bad.”
“You could’ve done better?”
“Working with ‘screwed it up royally’?” He thinks about it. His hands are on my lower back. I pray we’ll never, ever move. Let the rain freeze us in place. “Maybe something like, ‘Like a lightbulb in Buckingham Palace.’”
I wrinkle my whole face.
“Not good?” he asks.
“Worse than mine.”
His grin grows. But as our shallow breaths come and go, as rain collects on us, and as his eyes darken, it fades. At least his arms stay around me. And mine around him.
“I heard your dad’s working with my dad now,” he says. “So we were right about what Mephisto wanted with you.”
“I’ve never wanted to be wrong so much.”
“Always the A student,” he says. “I assume your dad’s new job was your punishment?”
“That plus two cherries on top.”
“Two? Lucky you.”
“Harper is my roommate.”
“Ouch.”
“And Pilot is my new Guardian.”
“Double ouch! Damn, I thought I had it rough.”
“What’s your sentence?” I ask him. “You’re being forced to produce twenty more soulless copies of the Dance of Death sculpture?”
His smile is weak. “You’re wearing it.”
I glance down at his blazer. He’s always worn a school blazer; it’s part of the reason I’d assumed he was a senior. But I understand his meaning in little time.
“They made you a student,” I guess.
He doesn’t respond; that’s response enough. I stumble out of his hold and steady myself against a tree stump, which we soon sit on, side by side. In silence. I drop my chin onto my hands and stare ahead, piecing together the implications of Ben’s punishment. The reason he looks like he’s twenty-one now is because the curse that kept him young has been lifted; he’s now cursed with a fraction of the life he could have had.
“Tell me you’re a junior,” I say hopefully.
He shakes his head. “Cania’s newest senior.”
So much for hope! Ben’s only got a little over eight months until graduation at the end of May, when they’ll award the Big V to one senior—and kill all the others. Eight months in which to prove himself. Not impossible, but most seniors started the competition in their junior year and, thus, have a whole extra year on him.
“I can’t believe this is the fallout of what we did. You’re going to need the most insanely motivated Guardian to help you win this late in the game, Ben.”
“Let’s be real. Winning is unlikely,” he says. “You don’t know who my Guardian is.”
“Oh, God, who?”
He raises his gaze to mine. “You saw her kiss me on the cheek a half hour ago.”
“They gave you Garnet?” I jump to my feet and start pacing as he looks on. “She’s your Guardian?”
“Did you think I was helping her move her own boxes into the guys’ dorm?”
“Is that why she kissed you?”
“That’s why I let her.” His voice is a whisper as I stomp back and forth. “I thought you were gone. Sucking up to her is—was— my only chance of being with you again. She was, as heartless as it sounds, a means to an end.”
“She’ll be fighting for you?”
“Ha.”
“Ben.”
“And you’ll never guess my PT.”
“I don’t want to know.” I stop pacing and roll my head up to the sky. “You will succeed in life by giving crazy ex-girlfriends second chances. You will succeed in life by making out with girls formerly known as Lizzy who sold their souls to be with you.”
“It’s to make sacrifices,” he says. “That’s my PT.”
I sigh. And give it some thought. “Well, that doesn’t sound that bad.”
But he’s a step ahead of me, explaining before I can speak. “She wants me to be with her. The first sacrifice, if she had her way, would be you.”
I close my eyes. The rain is letting up, but it feels heavier and colder than ever. I was this close to being with Ben. This close. And now she’ll have him again. I’ll have to walk the halls and see them holding hands, eating lunch together, and kissing. I’d tear my eyes out rather than watch that.
“So that’s the last nail in the coffin. In our coffin,” I say, resigned to our doom.
“No, Anne, listen.” Ben joins me and cups his palms around my face so I can’t help but look into his beautiful eyes and watch his lips—lips that were juuust about mine. “It’s you I want.”
I shrug out of his hold. I can’t pretend that being with Ben makes sense. Not if his life will be even shorter because of it.
“You have to give Garnet what she wants if you’re going to win.”
“Who said I wanted to win?”
“You’ve been hanging around Pilot Stone too long.”
“Har har.”
“She’s a wily one, Ben—I’ll give her that. She figured out how to separate us. No wonder she won the Big V last year.”
“She may be clever, but she misjudged my feelings for you.”
His feelings