Cassandra Clare - Clockwork Prince

“You did not even know me. Will—”

“Ask Magnus. He’ll tell you. After that night on the roof, I went to him. I had pushed you away because I thought you had begun to realize how I felt about you. In the Sanctuary that day, when I thought you were dead, I realized you must have been able to read it on my face. I was terrified. I had to make you hate me, Tessa. So I tried. And then I wanted to die. I had thought I could bear it if you hated me, but I could not. I realized you would be staying in the Institute, and that every time I saw you it would be like standing on that roof all over again, making you despise me and feeling as if I were choking down poison. I went to Magnus and demanded that he help me find the demon who had cursed me in the first place, that the curse might be lifted. If it was, I thought, I could try again. It might be slow and painful and nearly impossible, but I thought I could make you care for me again, if only I could tell you the truth. That I could gain your trust back—build something with you, slowly.”

“Are—are you saying the curse is lifted? That it’s gone ?”

“There is no curse on me, Tessa. The demon tricked me. There never was a curse. All these years, I’ve been a fool. But not so much a fool that I didn’t know that the first thing I needed to do once I had learned the truth was tell you how I really felt.” He took another step forward, and this time she did not move back. She was staring at him, at the pale, almost translucent skin under his eyes, at the dark hair curling at his temples, the nape of his neck, at the blue of his eyes and the curve of his mouth. Staring at him the way she might stare at a beloved place she was not sure she would ever see again, trying to commit the details to memory, to paint them on the backs of her eyelids that she might see it when she shut her eyes to sleep.

She heard her own voice as if from very far away. “Why me?” she whispered. “Why me, Will?”

He hesitated. “After we brought you back here, after Charlotte found your letters to your brother, I—I read them.”

Tessa heard herself say, very calmly, “I know you did. I found them in your room when I was there with Jem.”

He looked startled. “You said nothing to me about it.”

“At first I was angry,” she admitted. “But that was the night we found you in the ifrit den. I felt for you, I suppose. I told myself you had only been curious, or Charlotte had asked you to read them.”

“She didn’t,” he said. “I pulled them out of the fire myself. I read them all. Every word you wrote. You and I, Tess, we’re alike. We live and breathe words. It was books that kept me from taking my own life after I thought I could never love anyone, never be loved by anyone again. It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt—I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamed. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted—and then I realized that truly I just wanted you. The girl behind the scrawled letters. I loved you from the moment I read them. I love you still.”

Tessa had begun to tremble. This was what she had always wanted someone to say. What she had always, in the darkest corner of her heart, wanted Will to say. Will, the boy who loved the same books she did, the same poetry she did, who made her laugh even when she was furious. And here he was standing in front of her, telling her he loved the words of her heart, the shape of her soul. Telling her something she had never imagined anyone would ever tell her. Telling her something she would never be told again, not in this way. And not by him.

And it did not matter.

“It’s too late,” she said.

“Don’t say that.” His voice was half a whisper. “I love you, Tessa. I love you.”

She shook her head. “Will . . . stop.”

He took a ragged breath. “I knew you would be reluctant to trust me,” he said. “Tessa, please, is it that you do not believe me, or is it that you cannot imagine ever loving me back? Because if it is the second—”

“Will. It doesn’t matter —”

“Nothing matters more!” His voice grew in strength. “I know that if you hate me it is because I forced you to. I know that you have no reason to give me a second chance to be regarded by you in a different light. But I am begging you for that chance. I will do anything. Anything .”

His voice cracked, and she heard the echo of another voice inside it. She saw Jem, looking down at her, all the love and light and hope and expectancy in the world caught up in his eyes.

“No,” she whispered. “It isn’t possible.”

“It is,” he said desperately. “It must be. You cannot hate me as much as all that—”

“I don’t hate you at all,” she said, with great sadness. “I tried to hate you, Will. But I could never manage it.”

“Then, there’s a chance.” Hope flared in his eyes. She should not have spoken so gently—oh, God, was there nothing that would make this less awful? She had to tell him. Now. Quickly. Cleanly. “Tessa, if you don’t hate me, then there’s a chance that you might—”

“Jem has proposed to me,” she blurted out. “And I have said yes.”

“What?”

“I said that Jem proposed to me,” she whispered. “He asked if I would marry him. And I said I would.”

Will had gone shockingly white. He said, “Jem. My Jem?”

She nodded, without words to say.

Will staggered and put his hand on the back of a chair for balance. He looked like someone who had been suddenly, viciously kicked in the stomach. “When?”

“This morning. But we have been growing closer, much closer, for a long time.”

“You—and Jem?” Will looked as if he were being asked to believe in something impossible—snow in summertime, a London winter without rain.

In answer, Tessa touched with her fingertips the jade pendant Jem had given her. “He gave me this,” she said. Her voice was very quiet. “It was his mother’s bridal gift.”

Will stared at it, at the Chinese characters on it, as if it were a serpent curled about her throat. “He never told me anything. He never said a word about you to me. Not that way.” He pushed his hair back from his face, that characteristic gesture she had seen him make a thousand times, only now his hand was visibly shaking. “Do you love him?”

“Yes, I love him,” she said, and she saw Will flinch. “Don’t you?”

“But he would understand,” he said dazedly. “If we explained it to him. If we told him . . . he would understand.”

For just a moment Tessa imagined herself drawing the pendant off, going down the hallway, knocking on Jem’s door. Giving it back to him. Telling him she had made a mistake, that she could not marry him. She could tell him, tell him everything about herself and about Will—how she was not sure, how she needed time, how she could not promise him all of her heart, how some part of her belonged to Will and always would.

And then she thought of the first words she had ever heard Jem speak, his eyes closed, his back to her, his face to the moonlight. Will? Will, is that you? The way Will’s voice, his face, softened for Jem as it did for no one else; the way Jem had gripped Will’s hands in the infirmary while he’d bled, the way Will had called out James! when the warehouse automaton had knocked Jem down.

I cannot sever them, one from the other, she thought. I cannot be responsible for such a thing.