Courtney Summers - Defy the Dark

He barks a laugh. “King,” he corrects.

“But your father was the king, so. My prince.”

Rose interrupts, “You’re both such pups!” and she kisses us full on the mouths, one after the other.

As she kisses Hal, his knee presses into mine under the table. It thrills me into knocking my tumbler too hard against the wood as I suddenly set it down.

When Rose leaves for her next song, I slide along the round booth and say to Hal, whose eyes are bright and lips swollen, “Let’s get out of here.”

“And go where?” He shoots the last of his whiskey.

I only smile and hand him his soft black gloves.

Outside it’s filthy dark and a wet, cold wind cuts under my collar. I dash across the street, loving how easy it is to run with no skirt to fight, no delicate slippers that will ruin in rain. Hal comes after, ducking with me between an old boardinghouse and a shut-down corner pub. The damp street cobbles glint like strings of black pearls in the moonlight. There’s a slim public garden tucked on the other side of the block, which I discovered last month when I stumbled out of a cab that dropped me off in the wrong place.

I push through the creaky gate into layers of fallen leaves. A satyr fountain stands silent on the small lawn, spilling no water from its pursed mouth.

“O, this is gorgeous,” Hal says in a hushed tone. “It’s like the whole city vanished outside.”

Emboldened by the moon, the full, madness-approving moon, I grab his hand and turn him under my arm into a waltz. It’s no easy feat from my shorter stature, but he smiles and falls into the woman’s steps, hand firm on my shoulder.

We dance around the satyr, to the music of the wind and the rhythm of the blood in my ears.

“O,” he whispers as we slow.

I put my hands on his face and kiss him. At first it’s only a hard press of lips, his cold nose shocking beside mine. Then Hal grabs the lapels of my jacket. He drags me onto my toes and opens his mouth under mine.

It is more than a kiss. I spill out of myself, and the garden spins in dizzy circles. I strip my gloves off and dig my fingers into his hair. As he kisses me, I can feel the muscles of his jaw stretch and contract beneath my thumbs.

A moan grows out of my throat as he runs his mouth down my neck, and his hands sink to my hips. One finger flips aside my jacket and hooks around the belt on my hips.

I tear away.

The violent shove trips me and I land on the cold, frosty grass, panting. I’m a girl! I cover my burning mouth. One more inch and he’d know it, too. Shaking, I stare up at him. Against the moon, Hal is a dark ghost.

“O?” he whispers, crouching before me.

“Hal.” I reach out and touch his bottom lip with a bare finger. My gloves are discarded somewhere like so many dead leaves.

“You’ve never been kissed before,” he guesses, his voice low and full of something I don’t understand.

I snatch back my hand. “Was it so bad?”

But Hal smiles. “No, kitten, it made me feel like I’d never been kissed before, either.”

My fingers hover over my own mouth, and as he watches me the garden opens up. I can see the entire galaxy of stars, of lives and loves, of families and cities and graveyards, of forests and foreign mountains, the oceans and plains.

And here is Halden King in the center of it all. My center.

No one but my brother notices the shift in my daylight melancholy. Instead of merely being distracted, I’m afflicted by smiles at inappropriate moments, prone to fewer snide observations, and given to sighing happily when Daddy plays a new ragtime record after supper Sunday night. The music is so delightful, my memories of Hal so consuming, I pull Lars to his feet to dance with me. My serious brother manages to enjoy himself, afterward chasing me to my bedroom. He follows me inside and bars the door with his body.

“Phe, what has gotten into you?”

I flit about, unclipping my hair and smiling over my shoulder, wishing I could tell him. Instead I say, “Life, brother! My life is wonderful.”

He narrows his eyes, but I see the very moment he decides he’d rather have me happy even if I keep the reason for it a secret. The understanding lifts his eyebrows just a tick. My brother shakes his head, sits on my bed with his legs stretched out over the quilt, and asks me to read to him from whatever novel I’ve lately been enjoying most. It’s a love story, of course, filled with passionate declarations and racing to stop boats from leaving the docks and tragic betrayal.

Lars falls asleep against the headboard before I’m through a single chapter.

Hours later, Hal escorts me home at the end of our third night. After drinking and dancing, after secret kisses in the satyr’s garden. We avoid main thoroughfares, though at this time of morning no one’s in our way but fellows as eager for shadows as we are—or the police.

I’m sober and cold by the time we’re a block from my family’s townhome, but my insides feel clean and light while my hand is in his. I walk as if my feet lift off the ground of their own accord and catch myself smiling too widely. When I pull Hal against a building, he smiles, too. The first hint of purple in the east reflects in his eyes. “I’m going back to school tomorrow.”

In Ohio, I think. Wittenberg University, where his mother’s father endowed several scholarships for farmers’ sons as he himself had once been. “So far.”

“You must be going to university soon. Apply to Wittenberg.”

I smile bitterly. My brother goes next year, but me? “My father would never.”

Hal kisses me softly. “I’ll have to come home more often, then.”

What are you doing? I want to cry—and I don’t know if my desperate question should be addressed to him or to myself. Hal is the heir to an estate that might as well be a kingdom and that comes with responsibilities like marriage. How can he speak as though he and I have any future?

A tiny voice reminds me that he could marry me, but the thought pricks my eyes with tears. I don’t want to be his dress-wearing, child-bearing hostess-wife. I want this! Suits and dark gardens, wild kisses that I can choose, that I can initiate. This mad power.

“Don’t cry, O.” Hal brushes my eyelashes.

If only I could explain the different ways men look at me when they believe I’m one of them.

Instead I say, “I’ve never felt this way. Don’t go.” I put force into my voice. I square my shoulders. I am strong.

“God,” he breathes. “If anybody found us now, like this”—his fingers slide behind my ears—“they’d murder us.”

I kiss him, jerk him against me. Into his ear, I order him, “Write to me, Hal King. Tell me everything there is to know about the man I’m in love with.”

My head tingles with my own boldness, my sudden declaration.

“It’s been a whole life in three nights,” he says, putting his arms around me. I fold my own arms over my breasts, trapping them between us, hiding my truth.

It’s mid-November, two weeks since my Hal has been back at school, when Mrs. Shay brings the post into the sitting room at teatime. She hands Daddy several letters, Mother her Parisian fashion magazine, and Lars two letters: one with the scrawling hand of his friend Markham, and the other smaller and blue. The address reads Mr. Polonius, the Younger . With a curious frown, he doesn’t wait for the silver opener but slides his finger under the flap instead. It’s one sheet, folded in half, and from the settee beside him I can’t see enough to recognize the writing.

But Lars’s frown only becomes more pronounced, so much so that Mother asks, “Whatever is the matter, dear?”