Tell the Wind and Fire(45)

“I never said that,” Ethan protested. “I never said anything like that. I said you made it look . . . I know how hard you try.”

That didn’t make it any better. I wanted how hard I tried to be invisible but appreciated all at once: I wanted what I could not have and I wanted Jarvis to be safe and I did not know how to stop being angry.

“And it suits you for me to try, when you need me to be strong. But not when you want to feel better about yourself and what you did—who you sent to his death. When you want to feel like a big strong man consoling a weak, weeping woman, things are different. Then you act as if I am something to be protected, like I’m a piece of china to be kept in a glass case. Maybe you want me to be breakable, so you can shield me. But I’m not. How can I be fragile and do everything I have to do?”

Ethan’s hands clenched into fists when I said “death.” He did not interrupt me, but with every word his face grew paler and paler. We stood as far apart as that richly decorated corridor would allow us to stand, and I wished we could be even farther.

“You’re the one who always tries to protect me,” said Ethan, and he was shouting suddenly back at me, as he’d never shouted before. “As if I’m the fragile one, as if I can’t understand anything. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to love someone who will not let you help them?”

“I treat you as if you can’t understand anything because you can’t understand anything. You’ve lived your whole life in the Light. You’ve never been hungry or cold or left bleeding in the Dark. You think I’m wrong? You think you do understand? Tell me, Ethan Stryker,” I said, and I wielded the name as if it was a blade, and saw him flinch as if it had been one. “How can you?”

“Just because we’ve had different lives doesn’t mean we can’t try to understand each other,” Ethan said. “Just because I’ve lived a life of privilege doesn’t mean that I can’t sympathize, that I don’t have a heart to feel or a mind to know that what you suffered and what other people are still suffering is terribly wrong. The laws against the Dark are disgusting and cruel, and the whole system needs to change.”

I felt myself tense all over, and I looked toward the door behind which Mark Stryker and his council sat. When I looked back at Ethan, he was still watching me. It did not even occur to him what danger could be coming.

“It is a privilege to say—to even think—that the system is cruel,” I said in a low, furious voice. “What you are doing is talking treason, and you could be killed for it.”

“So what’s the alternative, Lucie?” Ethan demanded. “Do nothing, because someone hurt you once? Let other people be hurt and killed, let the cities burn, and keep smiling and doing absolutely nothing?”

“What’s your suggestion?” I asked. “Send someone else to do something? And when that someone you sent is killed, you will do what? Oh, that’s right. You do absolutely nothing except talk. You couldn’t make yourself shut up at the council meeting, you talked on the television, and you accomplished nothing. Don’t tell me about what I’ve done and what you’ve done. I saved a man. You sent one to die.”

Ethan was white as paper.

It had always been understood between us that we did not hurt each other. It had been like a treaty written and signed by both of us, the agreement that let us be able to love and able to live with each other despite our differences. Only now we had spoken the forbidden words. I felt as if I had taken our agreement and burned it before his eyes.

I was terrified suddenly, as scared as I was angry and sick over Jarvis. I remembered how I had felt in the days before I met Ethan, how I had not felt that I could ever leave the darkness behind. I had felt like I was made of opaque black stone, not able to let in light. Until he had come, and I had learned to let his light in.

The whole city of dazzling lights had not been enough to make me feel alive, but he had.

“I thought I understood,” Ethan said in a distant voice. “When you hid how you felt or what you had been through from me. I hid things from you as well, anything that I thought would scare or hurt you. I thought . . . that this world is terrible sometimes, and we were both trying to protect each other. But if the truth is that you despise me . . .”

“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, sometimes. And if you’re hiding things from me, you despise me, too.”

I had not thought about it as despising him before, but what else was hiding the truth from someone because you thought they were too weak to deal with life as it really was? It was a statement that you could not trust them, that they were not worthy of trust.

He did not think I was worthy of trust either.

If he had been hiding things from me, how weak did he think I was? How weak had he always believed I was?

Maybe he was right. I had not spoken up for Jarvis. I had let him be sent away. I had been a coward again, deserting him as I had deserted my mother. I hated myself, and it almost made me hate Ethan.

Fear, grief, and sickness all seemed to twist in me, burning and alchemizing. I thought of my Aunt Leila, years ago: she had never hesitated and never, ever wept. She had been angry, and she had acted. She had known what to do, and what I should do. I wanted to be just like her. All I wanted to feel was fury.

“I don’t despise you,” Ethan protested. “I love you.”