The Boy with the Hidden Name (17 page)

touching it is like closing my hands into a bramble of thorns.

I gasp in surprised pain, and I see Ben’s narrowed eyes shift

to me, worried for a split second of distraction, before I shake off the pain, pretend it’s not there, and tug backward.

His mother isn’t expecting it, and she stumbles away from

him, giving him enough room to duck away. She keeps trying

to pull her dress out of my grasp, but I am hanging on grimly.

My hands feel as if they are on fire, but I refuse to let go, and she tries to whip me around. I collide painfully with the wall,

and for a moment, the room spins around me.

Ben throws his mother aside. At least, it seems to me that’s

what he does, in the hazy spinning of the room. Her dress

rips, my hands still caught in a tangle of vicious fabric that is 141

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no longer connected to his mother. He thrusts his coat at me,

and I realize that he went to retrieve it. I drop the fabric and grab the coat automatically.

“Selkie Stewart,” he says hurriedly, under his breath. “I

renounce this coat and give it to you. I want you to have it.

Will you take it? Say yes.”

I don’t need the prompting. I am already saying yes and

nodding my head for extra effect.

Ben gasps, and I wonder for a second if I’ve done some-

thing wrong. I hear an answering gasp from his mother, and

then Ben takes the most enormous breath, closing his eyes

briefly. When he opens them, they are a light and clear blue,

pale like the trickle of a brook. He sends me a brilliant smile, and his hands find mine underneath the coat I am clinging

to, and then we are gone.

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w e are outside, sitting on hard, unforgiving ground.

The sky overhead is a brilliant blue, but the tempera-

ture is crystalline cold and I am shivering almost immediately.

Ben tugs the coat out of my hands and pulls it around me

then stops, staring down. He looks…horrified.

“What…?” I start to ask— and then look down myself. My

hands still hurt, but I hadn’t
looked
at them. They’re covered in blood, streams of it running down my wrists, dripping

onto the dirt, and they are swollen and almost purple.

“What
happened
?” Ben asks, his voice low with concern.

“Your mother’s dress…” I start to explain.

Ben takes my hands carefully in his, holding them gently,

and I find myself holding my breath. The look on his face is

so intimate and loving. I am feeling light- headed and a little

bit dizzy, and Ben seems utterly capable of taking care of me

for a moment. I want to just let him, the temptation sweet

in my mouth.

I study his face as he looks at my hands, the bruise of

his dark eyelashes against his pale cheeks, the concentrated

bow of his mouth. He is absurdly beautiful, and I had

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forgotten. It’s not like I’ve had much time to sit and admire

Ben recently.

My hands stop throbbing, and he looks up at me from

underneath his eyelashes. “Better?” he asks. His thumbs are

rubbing soft circles over the pulse points in my wrist.

“Much,” I croak breathlessly, because it’s all I can get out.

His lips curve crookedly, and I figure he can probably
feel

my pulse increasing under the brush of his thumb. “Good.”

He glances around us. “Oh, St. David’s Ruin. Cottingley. Not

quite where I was aiming, but I
was
under a bit of duress.” He looks back at me. “And my favorite part of Cottingley, actually,” he beams at me.

I can’t tell if he means I’m his favorite part of Cottingley

because he kissed me here, or if he means nothing by this at

all. “Did you use some of my energy to make that jump?” I

ask instead. His thumbs are still tickling at my wrists. I wish

he’d stop. I wish he’d never stop.

“Yes. I had to. We’d never have gotten out of the Unseelie

Court alive if I hadn’t. Why?”

“I feel a little bit dizzy,” I confess.

His smile widens, and he ducks his head closer to me. “That

could be an energy drain,” he says, his eyes filling my vision.

“It could be other things too.”

I am struggling to maintain some logic and sensible think-

ing. “Can we get back to Boston?”

“Yes,” he responds. “I need a minute to breathe.” He drops

my hands, and I hover between relief and disappointment,

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but not for very long, because then he lifts his hands until

he is cupping my head in them, his fingers in my hair and

along the back of my neck, rubbing into the skin behind my

ear and shivering at my jawline. “Or a century,” he murmurs.

“Depending on the time you’re keeping.”

I stop thinking, and then he kisses me.

Which doesn’t help the thinking thing.

My thoughts are all scattered, but somewhere in there, I

have the vague idea that even though I’ve been denying it, I

really have been sick with worry over him. I thought it was

possible I’d never see him again, never mind kiss him, and I

told myself I would have been fine with that, but now that

he’s kissing me, I know that was all a lie, and I find myself

kissing him back.

Kissing Ben is almost like being blindfolded, turned three

times in a circle, and then being told to try to figure out where one particular person is sitting in a crowd of thirty thousand

scattered all around you. It’s
that
disorienting. Although far more pleasant. But that is the only excuse I have for the fact

that when Ben finally draws back, panting for breath, I am

somehow flat on my back and he is leaning over me.

When
did
that
happen?
I wonder dizzily, looking up at him.

“Thank you,” he says and draws a finger down my nose,

which shouldn’t be sexy yet somehow manages to be.

I want to draw him back in for another kiss, but now I’m

confused, so I say, “For what?”

“For saving me. Again.” He brushes his thumb over my

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lower lip, which feels heavy and wet from Ben kissing all

rational thought out of me, and I freeze up as it crashes down

on me,
saving
him, again
.

I think of the tidal wave of ice that had poured into me

on Boston Common when he left me standing there, left

me without a second thought.
Stay
because
you
love
me
, I’d begged, and he had looked away, and he had left. And after

all that, I still rescued him. Again. Yes, I had wanted to get

to this mother and ask about the fays, but really, underneath

it all, if I’m totally honest, wasn’t I just trying to save his life?

What is
wrong
with me?

I make a noise and squirm incoherently, pushing at him.

He gets the gist of what I’m trying to communicate, letting

me up, but he looks bewildered.

“What— ” he begins.

I hold up a hand to cut him off. I am dizzy again, and it

takes a second for the ruined building to stop swimming up

and down around me. I wonder exactly how much of my

energy Ben had to use to get us out of the Unseelie Court.

“Don’t do that again,” I tell him.

He continues to look puzzled. “Thank you?”

I give him a look that I hope is withering, swaying to my

feet. “Kiss me.”

He looks surprised. “Oh, I…oh. I thought…” He looks

even more confused now.

I am furious with him, sitting there on the ground, looking

quite at home and quite delicious and oh, yes, I am
furious

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with him. “You think I’m going to forget that you left me,

and I’m not going to.”

“Selkie,” he says warily. “I didn’t mean to— ”

“Oh, you meant to,” I spit out. “You left
very
deliberately
.

You left even though I begged you not to go.”

“Selkie,” he says. “I had to— ”

“It was a
trap
, Ben. You walked right into a
trap
.”

He looks rueful. “I know. And if I had listened to you— ”

“
You
should
not
have
listened
to
me
because
it
was
a
trap!
” I shout at him, and my words ring around the ice- encrusted

surfaces of St. David’s Ruin.

Ben gapes up at me. He is very plainly shocked. It is clear

he expected nothing like this from me.

“You thought you would leave me,” I accuse, “and then

you’d come back, and I’d still be here waiting for you, this

lovesick little girl who’s loved you her whole life.”

“Selkie.” He finally scrambles to his feet, looking anxious.

“That’s not what I thought. I thought, when I left you that

day, that I was giving up every chance I might ever have with

you. I never thought…I never thought I’d be able to fix it.”

I have put the coat on fully, and it feels like protective

armor as I cross my arms and take an insulating step away

from him. “And you went anyway.”

“I had to go. Don’t you see? I
had
to go.”

“I do see. If Will’s right— and I think he is— you were

manipulated your entire life to that moment, and you could

have saved us so much trouble if you’d just kept your promise

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to me. We’d still be in Boston right now. Nothing would have

gone awry. There’d be no pieces to pick up. We’d be with my

aunts and sure my father was with us and okay. We’d be plan-

ning our attack, and we’d be
happy
. But you couldn’t.”

“Selkie,” he says firmly. “I’m sorry. I am. I’m very sorry.

But we’ll fix it, okay? We’ll go back to Boston, and we’ll

find your aunts and your father, and we’ll plan our attack

and— you came after me. You came…You came to
save
me.

You’re the only being I’ve ever met who ever wanted to
save

me before, Selkie.”

He looks amazed at this, amazed at
me
. I want to weep, half from sorrow and half from sharp and painful anger, because

he’s looking at me like he loves me, like I am the most aston-

ishing creature in the Otherworld or beyond, like he really

does think it’s true that no one other than me would ever

lift a finger to save him. And I don’t want to think that that

might be true, because then I would forget about the fact

that he lied to me and betrayed me, and I would just cuddle

him and tell him that
of
course
I would always save him.

And it’s true, I think with a sinking feeling of inevitabil-

ity— I would, much as I should no longer feel that way. Even

with everything he’d done to me, there was a part of me that

could so vividly imagine the idea of raw pain in Ben’s star-

light eyes and no one being there to comfort him, no one

there to push his unruly curls off his forehead and hug him

close and make him feel better.

The unerring, shameful truth about me is that I have

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always wanted to be there for everything about Ben. I lived

a life without him, when he enchanted me into forgetting

him, and I remember how much I missed him without even

knowing who he was, how much I wandered through Boston

Common looking for him without knowing what I could

possibly be looking for. I never stopped looking for him,

everywhere I went, and that was before I
knew
him.

And yet, together with all of that, I can’t help but remem-

ber that he
left
. We could have been perfect, he and I. We could have been our own little faerie tale. And he
ruined
it.

“You promised me that you would never leave me.” I am so

annoyed that my voice is choked up when I say it. “You prom-

ised me. And then you did. As if it was nothing. As if that

promise meant
nothing
to you. Those were just words you

told me, to keep me near you a bit longer, to manipulate me.”

“That’s not true,” he interrupts swiftly, but I interrupt him.

I refuse to stop now that I’ve started.

“And I trusted you, Ben. All anyone ever told me was that

I shouldn’t;
you
told me yourself not to do it, and I did. And then you…then you…” I can’t even say it, because I’m scared

if I do, I’ll start crying.

Ben stands across from me, the vision of him swimming a

bit in front of my eyes. I don’t know if it’s because I’m crying or because I’m so dizzy. His eyes look…
hurt
. Which isn’t fair, because he hurt
me
. He hurt me worse than anyone ever has before, Seelies and Unseelies included. He is not allowed

to be hurt.

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