Cecelia Ahern - Perfect

I hear Crevan amid all the branding chamber panic. Brand her spine! We have never seen anyone so Flawed to their very backbone.… Until his voice dies out and I can’t hear him anymore. He’s gone from my head. Cleansed.

“Six,” Carrick and I whisper in unison.

TWENTY-THREE

IT’S CLOSE IN THE CABIN, the small window doesn’t allow any air in on the still, hot night. We’re tangled in the covers, my leg draped over Carrick’s, my head against his chest. My left hand is resting on his chest, guarding his brand, and his left hand is holding mine, his finger circling my palm. I don’t know if he notices that this is the natural position we’ve both adopted.

“So I guess two Flawed make a perfect,” Carrick says, and I giggle. “I don’t do jokes well,” he says with a small smile.

“You don’t need to. You just be serious and mean and sexy.” I kiss his jaw.

Art was funny, it was what I adored most about him. He always made me laugh; he lightened every tense atmosphere with his well-timed observations. He also managed to be appropriately inappropriate, which is a feat. Guilt envelops my mind, and I stiffen.

“Okay?” Carrick asks.

“Mmm-hmm.”

But it’s as if he can read my mind. “I was thinking, we do have a way to get to Crevan. You have more power over him than you know. Apparently he’s close to his son, particularly now. Crevan would do anything for him.”

I freeze. Use Art?

I’m so disgusted by the suggestion, by the tactless timing and the way it was raised, that I clamber off Carrick, clumsily, trying to untie my body from his, but he’s so strong and it’s tricky. I eventually get away from him and off the bed, but only because he gives up the fight, and I hurriedly start putting my clothes back on.

“Come on, Celestine.” He sits up, bedsheets low on his hips, revealing the tattoo of a weather vane on his hip, the one he says he got when he was sixteen on a school trip away and won’t tell me why.

“Is that why you slept with me?” I snap. “To make me fall for your plan? So you could use me to get to Art, to get to Crevan?”

“No,” he says, annoyed but calm. He doesn’t raise his voice, doesn’t get dramatic like me. He just says steadily, “Anything we can do to get our lives back, we should do.”

“ Without hurting the people we love.”

Pause.

“You love him?” he asks, revealing nothing.

“No! I mean, no.”

“You’re still wearing the anklet he gave you.”

“How do you know he gave me that?”

“The chamber.”

I remember now. I’d refused to take it off. The guard who branded me was the very same blacksmith who had made it. It had shaken him to see it on me, branding a girl Flawed who he had only days previously thought was perfect, even if he didn’t know me.

“So you’ll protect Art no matter what he’s done to you?” he asks.

“What exactly do you think he’s done to me?”

Art ran away after the branding, he hid out, only letting Juniper know where he was, which hurt me deeply. But I’ve since realized he wasn’t trying to hide from me, he didn’t want to hurt me. He was trying to stay away from his dad, whom he hated for what he’d done to me, and anyway, Carrick wouldn’t know anything about that. He wasn’t around, and I didn’t tell him. “Carrick, what are you talking about? What do you think Art has done to me?”

“Nothing,” he says, his face unreadable.

“Carrick, no secrets, tell me everything.” I’m aware of my hypocrisy, seeing as I haven’t told him about not actually possessing the footage.

Deadpan face again, revealing nothing, but then it breaks. “If I were him, I wouldn’t have left you like that on the bus. He let them take you away from him. I wouldn’t have let them take you without a fight. I would have made them take me, too. I would have stood beside you on the bus and in court. I would have told the media the truth. Everybody wanted to hear from him, and he chose not to say anything.”

“He did try to speak for me in court…” I say quietly.

“His last-minute hissy fit? It was too late. It was more of a tantrum against his dad than anything else. I just wouldn’t have let it happen,” he says simply.

I start to realize what exactly Granddad meant when he said Art had cut me loose. I never thought about it the way Carrick phrased it. I kept understanding Art’s perspective; his fear, his situation, but maybe Carrick’s right—perhaps Art could have spoken up for me more.

“You were there for me in court every day,” I say, remembering. Carrick was loyal to me; Carrick showed the support that my boyfriend at the time didn’t. “But you hated me when you first saw me.” I smile, sitting back down on the bed.

“ Hated you,” he agrees.

“Hey!” I slap him playfully on his arm. He catches my hand and pulls me close.

“You were hugging Crevan,” he says. “I remember you all, huddled around the table with your parents and him, trying to come up with a way out of it, your fancy clothes all laid out like they were going to fix it all.”

I picture my story from his angle, and I don’t blame him for hating me. It was pathetic.

“When did you stop hating me?” I ask.

He fixes me with an intense stare. “Approximately fifteen minutes ago.”

I shake my head, trying to hide my smile. “You’re right, you don’t do jokes very well.”

“It was when I saw you in court for the first time.”

“Judge Sanchez announced they weren’t letting me home for the trial. You realized the Guild wasn’t on my side then.”

“No. It was before that. The minute you stepped inside the courtroom you looked so terrified—I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so scared. I wanted to be glad. I wanted to be pleased by what everyone shouted at you in the courtyard; I wanted to feel like you deserved it, but as soon as I saw you in court I thought to myself, This girl doesn’t think that it will be all handed to her on a plate . You were afraid from the start, which makes your bravery all the more striking.”

I feel shy all of a sudden, from his compliments.

“Sorry for losing my temper.” I sigh.

“I understand,” Carrick says. “My timing sucked.”

“Can we just rewind five minutes?”

“Let’s rewind more.” He smiles. “Thirty minutes? I want to try the combination code again if I can remember it. What was it? One, two, three…? I should have written it down,” he murmurs as he kisses my branded skin again.

His head disappears up my T-shirt.

“Found one,” he says, voice muffled.

I can’t help but laugh.

And then an alarm rings out.

TWENTY-FOUR

CARRICK’S HEAD APPEARS from under my T-shirt and he leaps out of the bed at top speed to dress. Thankfully I’m already dressed, so I search for my sneakers.

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know. Nothing good.”

The door to the cabin bursts open. It’s Lennox, who takes no heed of the fact I’m in Carrick’s cabin at this hour and he’s half-naked. “Whistleblowers at the gate.”

“Oh my God.” My stomach sinks. My haven has been sprung.

The east wing, which houses the Flawed, is in pandemonium. Everyone is running around in a panic, half-asleep, trying to gather themselves. The Flawed workers who were on shift are running toward the cabins, terror in their eyes. There are at least a dozen more Flawed whom I haven’t met yet.

Eddie arrives, the stress crawling up from his neck to his face in a red rash.

“What’s going on, Eddie?” Carrick asks.

“I don’t know, but let’s be clear about one thing: I never knew anything about you guys, okay?”