The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(45)

A pair of starlings.

Inside the drawers, I found pen caps and bobby pins, ponytail holders, a mirror shard, and the odd sock. But there was something else, too, a little black rectangle. A cassette. I drew it out. The ink had faded to sepia; the writing was slanted, sloppy, and male:

You’re my favorite blue. Love, Lyric.

Outside the room came a sound. I shoved the drawer closed and looked around Indigo’s bedroom. With my shoes still in my hands, I crouched on the other side of the bed. I knew this sound. It was the unmistakable tread of Indigo’s heels clanging on the iron staircase.

I had dreamt about the moment when I would discover her secrets, but I had never considered the nightmare in which I might be caught. Indigo had once told me that she knew she loved me because she was frightened of me. I knew I loved her, too, for when the door opened and her footsteps creaked on the wood, I felt a rush of something acute and exquisite.

Fear.





Chapter Nineteen

Azure




The first time Indigo kissed me, she drew blood.

“There,” she said, leaning back and swiping her thumb across my bottom lip. She sucked on her finger, and I tasted copper in my mouth. “First kiss done. Now whoever comes after has no claim on us.”

We were in her bathroom, two stools drawn up to the gilded vanity mirror as we did our makeup for the evening. Outside the windows, autumn embroidered the world with gold and red, and our Otherworld was sweet with woodsmoke and fallen apples.

“It will all be over with soon,” Indigo said, her chin jutting out in defiance of some imagined enemy.

According to Indigo, we had less than a year left on this side of the world. For Tati’s sake, she had agreed to graduate high school, which we saw as finishing our mortal penance. After graduation, I’d turn eighteen. Indigo said that the moment we both came of age, moonlight would run through our veins and wings would unfurl from our shoulder blades and we would step inside the lands we were always meant to rule. But until then, there were certain mortal experiences we needed to collect.

After the trip we didn’t take, Indigo and I divided the summer between our Otherworld and the seashore. In the mornings, we cut out stars and pasted them on our bodies so that by the end of the evening, we could peel off the stickers and see how the sun had baked constellations onto our skin. We watched our classmates hurl themselves against the freezing waves and wondered which of them—if we had to—we might deign to kiss.

We understood that a kiss could be a key. A press of lips could wake the princess from deathlike slumber or shake off the bristling furs of a beast to reveal the prince underneath. But the one who kissed you could also claim you, and since we refused to belong to anyone but ourselves, we entrusted that first and sacred touch only to each other.

At the shore we overheard classmates talking about the warehouse wharfs and the autumn concerts, and decided one of these would be our starting point, the place where we would kiss and be kissed, where we’d press against other limbs and allow the music to shudder through our bones. We’d gather every moment to pay our passage into the Otherworld.

My hand trembled at the thought, and Indigo caught it, smiling.

“It’s okay, Azure,” she said. “There’s nothing to be scared of.”

What I felt wasn’t fear exactly. I couldn’t quite name it. I smacked my lips, thinking of Indigo’s kiss. Her mouth had been cold and smooth as a serpent. When she parted my lips with her tongue, I tasted sugar before she bit down, and pain lit up my mind.

Indigo chewed absently at her lower lip. I noticed her teeth worried the same place where she’d bitten me. She rummaged through her drawer. “What color lipstick should we wear? Coral? Red?”

“Red.”

Like war paint, I thought.

“Good choice,” said Indigo, uncapping the tube.

She swiped glitter onto our eyelids and cheekbones, smudged kohl into the roots of our lashes and added touches of mascara. We combed our hair until it fell in identical black sheets down our backs. That night, we wore matching knee-high boots, lace tights, patent-leather skirts, and blouses that opened at the neck.

As we walked downstairs and headed for the door, I saw Tati in the parlor. She sat with her feet curled under her, combing through skeins of brunette hair that rippled to the ground. Tati had grown quiet since our failed trip overseas. Sometimes, I caught her staring at me. I didn’t know what she was looking for in my face. I thought she would look up from her work when we called out our goodbyes, but she kept right on combing the hair.



The wharfs smelled of salt and carcasses. Even though it was too dark to see, I knew the water was shallow and brackish, thick with cigarette butts and bottle caps. Seagulls wheeled overhead, and a crowd—mostly students our age or college kids from the mainland—formed a tattered circle around the pleated aluminum walls of the warehouse. Indigo wrinkled her nose as someone spit on the ground next to us. She folded her arms across her chest and frowned when her eyes landed on the face of a classmate.

“Don’t choose anyone we know,” she said, under her breath. “Don’t choose anyone who would try to keep us.” Indigo shuddered. “I hate this place already. Don’t you?”

I was spared from answering by the grating metal of the doors creaking open. The crowd surged, and we were carried forward. I had never been around so many people. We had kept ourselves apart for so long that I smiled when the zipper of someone’s leather jacket caught on my hair and an elbow dug into my ribs. Whenever anyone looked at me, I felt it like a hand cupping my cheek, and heat pooled in my belly.