City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3)(96)

She sat up straighter, letting the bedclothes fall down around her hips. “Why can’t you sleep? Did something happen?” she asked, and immediately felt stupid. What hadn’t happened?

Jace, however, barely seemed to hear the question. “I had to see you,” he said, mostly to himself. “I know I shouldn’t. But I had to.”

“Well, sit down, then,” she said, pulling her legs back to make a space for him to sit at the edge of the bed. “Because you’re freaking me out. Are you sure nothing’s happened?”

“I didn’t say nothing happened.” He sat down on the bed, facing her. He was close enough that she could have just leaned forward and kissed him—

Her chest tightened. “Is there bad news? Is everything—is everyone—”

“It’s not bad,” said Jace, “and it’s not news. It’s the opposite of news. It’s something I’ve always known, and you—you probably know it too. God knows I haven’t hid it all that well.” His eyes searched her face, slowly, as if he meant to memorize it. “What happened,” he said, and hesitated, “is that I realized something.”

“Jace,” she whispered suddenly, and for no reason she could identify, she was frightened of what he was about to say. “Jace, you don’t have to—”

“I was trying to go … somewhere,” Jace said. “But I kept getting pulled back here. I couldn’t stop walking, couldn’t stop thinking. About the first time I ever saw you, and how after that I couldn’t forget you. I wanted to, but I couldn’t stop myself. I forced Hodge to let me be the one who came to find you and bring you back to the Institute. And even back then, in that stupid coffee shop, when I saw you sitting on that couch with Simon, even then that felt wrong to me—I should have been the one sitting with you. The one who made you laugh like that. I couldn’t get rid of that feeling. That it should have been me. And the more I knew you, the more I felt it—it had never been like that for me before. I’d always wanted a girl and then gotten to know her and not wanted her anymore, but with you the feeling just got stronger and stronger until that night when you showed up at Renwick’s and I knew.

“And then to find out that the reason I felt like that—like you were some part of me I’d lost and never even knew I was missing until I saw you again—that the reason was that you were my sister, it felt like some sort of cosmic joke. Like God was spitting on me. I don’t even know for what—for thinking that I could actually get to have you, that I would deserve something like that, to be that happy. I couldn’t imagine what it was I’d done that I was being punished for—”

“If you’re being punished,” Clary said, “then so am I. Because all those things you felt, I felt them too, but we can’t—we have to stop feeling this way, because it’s our only chance.”

Jace’s hands were tight at his sides. “Our only chance for what?”

“To be together at all. Because otherwise we can’t ever be around each other, not even just in the same room, and I can’t stand that. I’d rather have you in my life even as a brother than not at all—”

“And I’m supposed to sit by while you date boys, fall in love with someone else, get married …?” His voice tightened. “And meanwhile, I’ll die a little bit more every day, watching.”

“No. You won’t care by then,” she said, wondering even as she said it if she could stand the idea of a Jace who didn’t care. She hadn’t thought as far ahead as he had, and when she tried to imagine watching him fall in love with someone else, marry someone else, she couldn’t even picture it, couldn’t picture anything but an empty black tunnel that stretched out ahead of her, forever. “Please. If we don’t say anything—if we just pretend—”

“There is no pretending,” Jace said with absolute clarity. “I love you, and I will love you until I die, and if there’s a life after that, I’ll love you then.”

She caught her breath. He had said it—the words there was no going back from. She struggled for a reply, but none came.

“And I know you think I just want to be with you to—to show myself what a monster I am,” he said. “And maybe I am a monster. I don’t know the answer to that. But what I do know is that even if there’s demon blood inside me, there is human blood inside me as well. And I couldn’t love you like I do if I weren’t at least a little bit human. Because demons want. But they don’t love. And I—”

He stood up then, with a sort of violent suddenness, and crossed the room to the window. He looked lost, as lost as he had in the Great Hall standing over Max’s body.

“Jace?” Clary said, alarmed, and when he didn’t answer, she scrambled to her feet and went to him, laying her hand on his arm. He continued staring out the window; their reflections in the glass were nearly transparent—ghostly outlines of a tall boy and a smaller girl, her hand clamped anxiously on his sleeve. “What’s wrong?”

“I shouldn’t have told you like that,” he said, not looking at her. “I’m sorry. That was probably a lot to take in. You looked so … shocked.” The tension underlying his voice was a live wire.

“I was,” she said. “I’ve spent the past few days wondering if you hated me. And then I saw you tonight and I was pretty sure you did.”