Chains and Memory (11 page)

Silence. It lasted for long enough that I finally looked up. Julian was still in the doorway, one hand on the frame, eyes closed. He only did that when he didn't trust himself to keep his emotions in check, hidden from view. I bit my lip, feeling the distance between us grow.

Then Julian shook his head and opened his eyes, and I saw what he'd given up on concealing.

Anger.

At himself.

“I am a gods-damned idiot,” Julian breathed.

I didn't know how I'd expected him to react, but this wasn't it. I rose from the couch, not sure whether I should approach or give him space. “Julian—”

“Wait. Please.” His mouth twisted in something like a smile. “You're right. We're taught from childhood to avoid touching bloods and baselines, since it has such a bad effect. And not everybody at the Center is a wilder, you know—a lot of the people around us aren't. So we learn to keep our distance.

“But Kim . . . we're still human. Mostly. And we still need human contact, just like anybody else.”

I thought about how isolated I felt these days, with everyone avoiding me—Julian included. I spent half my time at Toby's with Hitomi in my lap, just for the warmth of another living body. “So with Neeya . . .”

“Not just her. We touch all the time,” Julian said. “Casual stuff, mostly, but it's constant. You see it with Neeya because she was my little sister, and because she's fresh out of the Center. I didn't even notice it until you said anything. Normally we're less demonstrative in public. But when it's just Fiain, and we're by ourselves—” He grinned, a sudden lightening of expression, though the anger wasn't gone. “Exactly the opposite of what everyone else sees.”

Like theatre people,
I thought, remembering some high school friends of mine, their casual attitudes toward contact.

Julian hesitated, grin fading. Then he came forward and took me by the hands. Gentle pressure led me back to the couch; he sat close enough that our knees touched. Which was wildly out of character for him—except that apparently I'd been wrong all this time about what his character really was.

“I owe you an apology,” he said, still holding my hands. “Ever since you got to D.C., before you even met Guan and Neeya, I've been telling the others that I accept you, that as far as I'm concerned you're one of us. But they can see the truth. Whatever my mouth says, my behavior's been telling them the exact opposite.”

Because he didn't touch me. Now I understood the self-recrimination. He'd been undermining me all this time, without meaning to. Worse: it was proof that on some subconscious level, he
didn't
accept me yet.

I swallowed, trying to ease the sudden lump in my throat. His grip was tight on my fingers, as if by sheer force he could undo the error of these past weeks. “It isn't all you,” I said. “Every time I think about touching
you
—even casually—I've been holding back, because I thought it would make you uncomfortable.”

Julian looked down. Then he went still, and I knew he'd noticed the same thing I had: that it was the way he would react around a non-wilder, avoiding their gaze. He drew in a slow breath, then looked up and met my eyes.

All the breath went out of me. I'd suspected that Julian was sometimes lonely at Welton; he had no real friends there beyond me, Robert, and Liesel. But now I saw another layer to that loneliness, one whose existence I never guessed at. It was the hunger for simple contact, the starvation of someone cut off from the only people in the world who didn't flinch away from him.

“Don't hold back,” he whispered.

Reluctance still dragged at me, the habit of years. I told habit to go to hell, and kissed him.

The difference was immediate, and electrifying. Julian was still awkward; I was the only person he'd ever kissed, and the distance between us these past months meant he hadn't gotten much practice. But I
felt
him give himself over to it, dropping all the barriers that had restrained him before. Not just the metaphorical ones, either, the instinct to pull back. His mind brushed mine, and I lowered a few of my own shields to let him in.

I had guessed at the hunger. Now it came in a wave, drowning me. His isolation, his love for me—they'd been eating at him all this time, but Julian was too used to controlling himself, to the point where he didn't even let himself realize how badly he craved this. One moment we were sitting next to one another, knees touching; then, with almost no transition, I had molded myself to him, touching not just with lips but shoulders, hips, rising and turning to kneel over him and cup his face between my palms. Julian's hands explored my back, one rising to bury itself deep in my hair. His breath was hot against my cheek as I broke away to kiss his throat.

Then my shirt slid up, and Julian's hand touched bare skin. He froze.

I drew back. The look in his eyes was one I'd never seen before: a new kind of fear. He was on a precipice, one step away from falling, from letting go of control. And that was the one thing he never let himself do.

I'd gone this far once, with a boyfriend in high school. Never any further. But one of us had to be the first to take that step.

“I'm ready,” I said, almost soundlessly. “If you are.”

For a moment I thought he would refuse, pull back, turn away. It was too soon; this honesty between us was too new.

But then his hand returned, drifting down to rest on my hip, and he nodded.

I kissed him again, then slid off the couch, catching his hands in my own. “Follow me,” I said, and led him to the bedroom.

~

Julian lay on his back, staring at the dark shadow of the ceiling, and tried to separate himself from the panic that threatened to overwhelm him.

At his side, Kim lay peacefully asleep. He thought he'd kept his reaction from her; he hoped he had. There was no good way to say that this had been one of the most wonderful nights of his life . . . and also one of the most terrifying.

His gut twisted with remembered pain. Every time he lost control, let instinct take over, there had been one response: the deep shield. This wasn't magic, but he couldn't separate the two. He didn't think he could have let go even now, except that Kim had wrapped herself around him, body and mind, and carried him with her. Just thinking about that sheer vulnerability made his breath come faster. He forced it to slow, repeating a calming exercise over and over again, shaping it silently with his lips.

He craved contact so badly . . . and that was the problem. Two and a half years at Welton, training himself to stand alone, without other Fiain to lean on. Then Kim, and his feelings for her—feelings he had tried to renounce, except she wouldn't let him. And as he had said earlier tonight, he was still human. The starvation of the past two years took the simple response of his body and multiplied it a hundredfold.

The others would know. Julian didn't think he could hide this from them if he tried; they would see the difference in how he behaved around Kim. He
wanted
them to see the difference. They were never going to accept her if he didn't do it first.

And it would take more than one night to do that. He had to unlearn the habits of years: not just the basic protocols of his childhood, but all his interactions with Kim since he met her. He'd thought he was succeeding, until Kim pointed out the truth.

Neeya.
Julian knew how she would react. Us versus Them; to her, Kim was Them.

He couldn't leave it for her to guess. That would only make things worse, leave her feeling betrayed. They'd see each other again at Toby's the next night — but that wouldn't be private enough. If he wanted to explain things before everyone else found out, he had to do it now.

Moving quietly so as not to wake Kim, he slid out of bed, pulled on his jeans, and went out to the living room. There he sat cross-legged on the floor, centered himself, and reached out for Neeya.

She was still awake, and studying.
Sorry again about the bloody nose,
she said once their minds were joined, and then—
whoa. Something's happened.

Yes,
Julian said. It was the paradox of the psychic powers they had inherited from the sidhe, that feelings, which interfered with most kinds of magic, could also be carried by empathy. It made them hard to contain.
Neeya, I owe you an apology. I told you about Kim when I met her, told you that we became friends. You know what happened last fall. But I never came out and said, I love her.

Neeya had to be devoting significant attention to her shields, for him to feel so little from her right now. The sheer length of the silence before she responded, though, told him plenty.

Okay.

It wasn't okay. Not yet. He hoped it would be, though, once Neeya had time to adjust.
I'm not saying that makes her one of us. But it does mean she's going to be with me, whether they gut her or not. She's important to me, Neeya.

He sent that last thought as more than just words, letting his sister read the associations. Shock flared in their connection.
You slept with her, didn't you?

The question came with a gleaming edge of curiosity. Wilders rarely paired up at the Center; the constant monitoring, the drumbeat of self-control, and the sheer familial closeness they shared all weighed against it. Even once out, they weren't very good at forming romantic relationships. The nature of how they were raised meant some of them wound up with attachment disorders, despite the best efforts of their caretakers. Those with stable partners usually found them among the Fiain, especially those from other Centers. For someone like Neeya, only just now beginning to find her way in the outside world, it was like asking for gossip from a foreign country.

I did,
Julian admitted. And then, because he couldn't really put it into words, he shared with her the complex knot of understanding that had come to him this evening, the ways in which he had and had not accepted Kim as a fellow wilder. Still didn't, because understanding alone couldn't get rid of the entire problem. But he was trying.

Neeya received it passively, giving no hint of her reaction. It might be a sign of improved control on her part, but he feared it meant she was retreating, locking herself down rather than coping with what he'd just shown her.
Neeya?

Her reply, when it came, was carefully neutral.
I should get to sleep.

Which was her way of saying she wanted privacy in her own head. He bit his lip, wondering if he should say more. Maybe it would have been better to catch her tomorrow, before they went to practice; then Neeya would have had the space she needed to react. But mind-to-mind, he would see too much. If he pushed, she would either shove him out, or let loose on him — and he had a feeling he didn't want to see just what she was holding back. Not until she'd had some time to process it.

He did his best to wrap her in the telepathic equivalent of a hug.
I'll see you tomorrow night,
m'aithinne
. And this time I'll guard my face.

She cut the connection. Julian opened his eyes and stared at the dim outline of the window, wishing he could have done that better. But the problem wasn't with how he'd shared the news; it was with the news itself. There was nothing to do now but wait for Neeya to work through things, and wait for her next move.

In the meanwhile, it was getting quite late. He went back into the bedroom and looked down at Kim, curled on her side and breathing softly. Learning to sleep with another person in the bed had been hard; he'd had to lie still, not straying from his own side, lest the accidental contact of a foot or hand jar him awake. Now . . . he didn't know whether to hold himself apart, so that his own restlessness wouldn't disturb her, or give in to his impulses and curl himself around her body.

He knew which one Kim would tell him to choose. Easing himself back under the sheet, Julian fitted himself against the curve of her back, draping one arm over her waist. She murmured something indistinct and shifted against his chest, but didn't rouse. The warmth that grew within him was only partly from the contact.

Even if he didn't end up sleeping at all, it was still a good way to spend the night.

~

The whole way to Toby's the next day, I kept laughing for no particularly good reason. People on the Metro must have thought I was crazy. Or maybe they assumed Julian was telling me telepathic jokes. There
was
a joke, but it was entirely physical: his hand in mine, his shoulder brushing against me every time the train rocked. Julian was too disciplined to lose his cool the way I kept doing, but I could see the edges of the smile he wasn't giving into. Happiness radiated off him, a quiet contentment I wanted to wrap myself in. And that made me laugh, too, for sheer delight.

If anybody had told me a year ago that I would be this close to Julian, physically and emotionally, I would have laughed in their face. And I was a diviner: seeing the future was what I
did
. But we got blind, the closer to home things got.

Gods, I couldn't
wait
to tell Liesel. She was on a retreat in the Black Forest right now, and I couldn't just type this up for her to read when she got home. Some things deserved to be told in person, or the closest technological substitute — if only so I could watch her reaction.

Julian and I had to uncouple at the townhouse; going up the stairs hand-in-hand was too inconvenient. After Toby's roommate Marcus opened the door, though, Julian ushered me through with one hand on the small of my back, nudging me toward the living room. Rumor said there would be some kind of major announcement on the news tonight, something to do with the sidhe. I wasn't sure I wanted to be surrounded by other people when the announcement came . . . but I
was
sure that if I had a community these days, it was the wilders who came to Toby and Marcus' townhouse. And this, Julian had said, was his chance to show the community that I belonged.