Tooth and Nail (33 page)

“There are a lot of things Graham Wright could ask me,” Avery said, standing, “but I think I’m pretty safe from the topic of the freaking tooth faerie.”

“You’re awfully quick to mock beliefs on my show tonight, Mr. McCormack,” I said in Graham-speak. “What about people who worship a different God than you do? Would you be so quick to mock their beliefs?”

“Jesus, Gemma.” He picked up his suitcase and tossed it back onto the bed, bouncing me a little.

“Jesus, Allah, whoever.”

“I stand for the right for every American to believe—and not believe—in any way or in anything he or she chooses.”

“Except for the ‘freaking tooth faerie.’”

“The tooth faerie,” Avery said, rolling up a pair of boxers and shoving them in the bag, “is not a religion. It’s a story we tell children to ease the pain of coming into adulthood.”

“So all these parents are telling lies to their kids?”

“Where are you going with this, Gemma?” Avery asked. “Because I’ve got enough on my mind as it is without you badgering me with complete and total lunacy.”

“I’m not Gemma, I’m Graham,” I said. A vein in my temple was throbbing now. Mom had said I needed to be honest with Avery. I had said I wouldn’t tell him about me, but really, deep inside, I’d hoped that one day, I could. That the man I loved—and who apparently loved me enough to marry me someday, I now learned—would have the strength come around to something that practically no one else could.

But he was human after all. And it broke my heart, and I wanted to lash out. “What if your girlfriend, whom you just claimed you love so much, believed in the tooth faerie?”

Avery threw up his arms and went into our small bathroom. I followed him, and hung in the door frame as he packed his electric razor and a washcloth into a little black nylon pouch. I reached a hand over my shoulder to scratch at my itching, burning back. “I mean, what if Gemma really believed with all her heart and soul?” I asked. “If she said, ‘I know for a living, breathing
fact
that the tooth faerie is real’?”

He turned to leave the bathroom, but I was blocking his way. “Back off with this craziness, Gemma,” he said quietly, prying my hand off the wall and slipping past me. “Please. I don’t know what we’re doing here, but now is not a good time.”

“I
have
to know,” I demanded. “What would you say to her? To me?” My breathing was rapid and panting, and my shoulder blades quivered violently. “Would you love me enough to believe me?”

He stared at me, bewildered and angry. “All right, here’s your answer,” he said. “And I hope that after this, this insane subject is closed. I
would
love you enough—to make sure you got the psychological and pharmaceutical help you needed to get out of your delusional world and back into the real one.”

I stepped back as if I’d been slapped. My two realities crashed together inside my chest and I couldn’t choose, because I was both. I needed to be both, now, in my own home, with the man who loved me. But he would never believe me, and he would never fully understand me, and I wished I’d never known what I was, and I couldn’t accept …

And I couldn’t breathe …

My wings exploded out of my back, their power pushing me to my knees on the cold tile. I looked up, and Avery stood there, his eyes wide and filled with sheer terror.

“Avery,” I said, trying to crawl on aching knees over to him but he scrambled back, sliding on the sock I’d thrown at him earlier and half-landing on the bed. “Oh, my God, Avery.”

He pushed himself up and his frantic gaze darted around the room, as if expecting more terrible things to appear, or as if searching for an exit.

“It’s me, Avery,” I said, lifting myself to my feet, swaying as I adjusted to my new form. He cringed. I held out my hands, palm up. “I’m me. I’m the same me. I love you. Please. Let me explain.”

For the briefest moment, his eyes met mine, and I tried as hard as I could to project all the love in my heart to him, shining it out of my gaze, my fingertips, every part of me.

But the next moment, his eyes rolled up in his head and he crashed to the floor, unconscious.

CHAPTER 20

C
haos raged inside me, which was why when Avery awoke a few minutes later, my wings hadn’t retracted, and I was still a fearsome apparition.

Luckily his head had hit the fluffy bath mat. I sat on the floor beside him holding his hand in both of mine, willing the impossible to occur—for him to give me a chance to make him understand.

He blinked over and over, as if he could make the sight of me fall away like sleep dust from his eyes. But I remained, and he stared over my shoulders at my pale gossamer wings. “What,” he rasped, “are you?”

“Fae,” I said.

He shook his head, not comprehending.

“Fae, like faerie,” I clarified for his human mind. “But only half. I’m half human. I didn’t even know. I thought I was human until the other week when they found me and …“

“Don’t tell me,” he said, and rolled away from me. He stood, unsteady, and put out both arms for balance. “I don’t want to know. I want to get out of here.”

“I wanted to tell you,” I said. Weakness spread throughout my body. My shoulders slumped, my hands lay inert in my lap, my head hung down. “But I knew it would sound—that you would think I’m…“

“Crazy?” Avery said, with clear hysteria. “Crazy, I could do. Crazy, I can cope with. But this? What the hell
is
this?”

“You know what faeries are,” I said. “You’ve heard about them all your life. You just didn’t know they were true. You didn’t know that,” I hesitated, “that I’m one. Everything else is the same. When I found this out, and I was scared, my mother told me to remember that I’m the same person I always was, that the only thing that changed was my self-awareness. And I eventually realized she was right. I’m still Gemma the boxer and Gemma the ex-pollster and Gemma, your girlfriend. There’s just something extra that we have to get used to.”

Sometime in the middle of my small speech, Avery had started shaking his head and he kept it up. “No. No. This is—I don’t know what this is.” He covered his face with his hands and rubbed. “I haven’t been getting enough sleep. I’m overtired. I’m having a nightmare.”

I stood and reached out a hand. “Avery, please.”

He jerked away. “Don’t touch me,” he shouted. “Just—don’t touch me.”

Hot tears filled my eyes and I wouldn’t blink them away, instead letting them slide tracks down my face so that he could see I was human too, that this was hurting me too.

But he turned away. He turned his back and grabbed two fistfuls of his hair, his shoulders folding in. He said nothing for several minutes.

I sat on the bed, pulled my legs cross-legged and I breathed. I breathed into my heart, and I breathed into the space between Avery and I, and I breathed into the place on my back where my wings connected to the rest of me, and then I felt them retract into me. I shivered through the torn back of my tank top.

Then I heard Avery mumbling. I leaned a little closer to him to hear. “This isn’t real. This isn’t real. I have a campaign to do. I have a show to do. I’m dreaming. I—”

“Avery?”

He spun around and startled, realizing my wings were gone. He opened his mouth, closed it again, and then said, “I’m really tired.”

A tear rolled over my upper lip and I tasted the salt. “I know.”

“I have to get out of here.”

“No,” I said, “you don’t.”

“I’m going to be on TV.” His voice was eerie, hollow.

“You’re not leaving until morning.”

“I’m leaving right now.” He rushed over to the suitcase, zipped it up and dragged it into the living room. I followed, trying not to get too close to him but desperate to make him stay.

“It’s late,” I babbled, “and you just said you’re tired. Go to sleep. I’ll stay down here. I can wake you up early for your flight.”

He dropped the bag with a clatter and whirled around. “No,” he said, “I can’t wake up to this. I just woke up a moment ago and saw you…” He put up his trembling hands, opening and closing them. “I can’t wake up to you like that. This—you, us—is what I counted on to get me through.” His voice broke. “This is what I knew was true.
Us
. This is what
I
believed in. How can this be falling apart? How?”

“It’s not,” I begged. “It’s not. We can get used to this, get past this. I have so much to tell you, so much I wanted to tell you and now I can…”

He stuffed his feet inside a pair of sneakers and stood there in his sweats, bedraggled and panicky, with only one plan—to leave.

“Don’t go,” I said, and fell to my knees. “Avery, don’t go. I believe in us. It won’t fall apart.” I broke down, my sobs coming fast and hard and agonized.

“I have to go,” he said, backing away from me to the front door. He pulled a hooded sweatshirt off the coat rack and tugged it on, reaching in for his cell phone. “I’ll call a cab.”

“You’re coming home,” I said between sobs. “You’re coming home on Sunday.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing, Gemma,” he said, and opened the door.

“Don’t leave me,” I said, crying harder. “I love you. I love you.”

He looked at me, and I tried to catch my breath. He was the man I slept with, laughed with, made plans with. I knew everything about him. And now he knew everything about me.

I couldn’t read his expression at all. Hate, pity, fear, love, remorse. It could have been all of them, or none of them, or a thousand other things. But I had no idea.

Then he left, closing the door gently behind him.

“Avery!” I screamed in a voice that wasn’t mine. I pounded my fists on the floor, then collapsed onto my side, crying, curling into a fetal position, clutching at myself, mourning what I’d known all along I was destined to lose.

>=<

I didn’t want to knock and risk no one answering. I was already alone, and I couldn’t stand to be even more so. Instead, I intended and walked through the closed door.

He was there, sitting at the cramped desk. He took in my ragged hair, my sweatpants and ripped tank top, my untied sneakers. “What the hell happened to you?” Svein asked.

“He left,” I said. My empty voice echoed in my own ears. It had been years since I’d cried over anything or anyone, and two straight hours of weeping had left me drained, hopeless and incoherent. “My wings came out. He ran away. He ran away from me and us.”

Svein rose and came around to where I stood by the door. He encircled me with one arm and I leaned against him as he walked me around the Archives office’s desk and settled me into the chair. I fell back and blinked my eyes very, very slowly.

Svein perched on the desk and regarded me. “Where did Avery go?” he asked softly.

I shrugged. “Don’t know. He has a TV show in New York tomorrow night. Probably got an earlier flight to get as far away from me as he could.”

“Is he coming back?”

I didn’t want to say the words, give them validity. “I don’t know.”

He reached over and took my hands in his. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I have to ask. Is there a chance that he’ll…”

I set my jaw. “You’re going to ask, is there a chance that he’ll tell the world that faeries are real and that he just realized his girlfriend is one?” I tasted the bitterness of my own laugh. “No. The last thing he wants to do is sink his campaign by appearing mentally unstable. No matter what he’s thinking about me, what he’s feeling, it’s his secret, at least for now.” I narrowed my eyes. “So don’t worry. I haven’t given us all up.”

“I’m not worried,” he said.

I let my head flop back. “Why did I do this?” I asked the ceiling. “Why?”

“You know why.”

“I’m an idiot. When did I start being an idiot?” I closed my eyes, then raised my brows, smiling mirthlessly. “Oh, yes, that’s it. The dream. The goddamn dream where all my teeth fall out. That was it. That’s how it always starts. I should have left town that night, just gotten the hell away from my life so that fate wouldn’t step in to fuck it all up the way it always does after the dream. But you know what? I fooled myself into thinking that it would be okay this time, and then Frederica showed up and my mother told me the truth and I transformed. Right here, in fact.” I popped my eyes open and sat up straight, yanking my hands away from Svein’s and staring poison daggers at him. “Then you. What’s your
deal
, anyway? One minute you think I’m a screw-up who should have never been recruited, and the next minute you’re shoving your tongue down my throat. You like me, you don’t like me. Which is it, already? I’m sick of tap-dancing around innuendoes. Let’s get this out in the open for a change.”

Svein met my gaze, daggers notwithstanding. “It’s not a matter of liking or not liking you. It’s not on that level.”

“Yes, please,” I said. “Be enigmatic and obtuse. Because that’s going to really help me right now.”

In an instant, he was off the desktop and leaning over me, his face very, very close to mine. His breath whispered against my cheek. “Regardless of what you might think,” he said softly, “my feelings where you’re concerned are hardly black or white. Tonight is not the time to dissect them. Let it go.”

I grabbed the back of his neck and crushed my lips to his. I twisted my fingers into his hair as I persuaded him with my lips to part his and I pushed my tongue inside his mouth, tasting him, trying to feel anything, anything, to make me forget. Forget about Avery.

But I couldn’t.

I pulled away and dropped back into the chair, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I just—sorry.”

Svein searched my eyes with his. “I understand.”

“How could you when I don’t?”

“You’re here,” he said, resettling himself on the desktop, “because I’m the one man who knows what you are, both sides of you, and accepts you. I understand you, and that’s what you need right now. You kissed me because you’d rather believe you deliberately drove Avery away than believe he left you because of who you are and what you can’t control.”

I sighed. “I didn’t even think of going anywhere else. It’s not like I couldn’t go to my mother’s. I didn’t want to be at home all alone. I waited two hours and he’s not coming back tonight. I just came straight here. I wasn’t even thinking.”