you saw with Garnet, it wasn’t real. She doesn’t know that yet, but trust me.”
I slip his jacket off and hold it out to him. “You can understand how that might be a little tough for me.”
“I really can’t.”
“Well, then there’s even less hope for us than I’d thought.”
We both eye his coat, this symbol of something much bigger than polyester lining, itchy wool, and the Cania crest. He surprises me by taking my bare, freezing arm and sliding it, clumsily, into the sleeve. He shuffles behind me to drape the coat, and he bends and shifts my other arm into the other sleeve, trying to be delicate, until I think my shoulder might pop out of its socket.
“Could you make this any harder?” he says under his breath. “This is why I work with clay.”
Trying not to smile, I shift my shoulder and shape my hand so he can pull his coat up and over me. He adjusts it a little. Rolls a cuff. Unrolls it. And stands back to admire his handiwork. Girl in a school blazer. Major success.
He tugs the collar up. And, in doing so, pulls me onto my tippytoes. Close to his face, close to his lips. Not close enough to be close, but close enough to make me believe that we could close the gap in little time.
Am I wrong to think his jaw is more defined than it was just yesterday? Or that small lines now run in thin rivers at the corners of his brilliant but sad eyes? Or that his shoulders are broader and he’s at least an inch taller? Ben looks the part of the twenty-one-year-old guy he is, the guy who was trapped in a teenager’s body and doomed to live forever as an unaging, beautiful sixteen-year-old boy, the eternally youthful boy Teddy scorned.
“You think there’s no hope for us?” he asks me, still holding me by the collar. “Is this part of your dark, brooding mortician’sdaughter façade?”
“Is stringing along multiple girls part of your hot-guy-in-school façade?”
“Is that what you think of me?”
“That you’re a philanderer?”
“That I’m a hot guy?”
I smirk. Was there ever any doubt? I’ve been a gelatinous mess since he first uttered my name.
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
