Bookish and the Beast (Once Upon a Con #3)(64)

He wraps his arms around her legs and presses his face into her middle. “I must not lose you. I cannot. It will tear me asunder, ah’blena.”

“It will not,” she replies, cupping Ambrose’s face in her hands. He turns his gaze up to her, and she memorizes the cut of his cheekbones, the glow of his white-blond hair, the way he looks at her with those eyes, so sky-blue they make her want to fly.

“I have made so many mistakes,” he whispers, closing his eyes. “Oh, Sol curse me, conscript me, make me forget.”

“Then you’ll forget me, too.” She runs her thumb across his cheek. “Sometimes the universe deals us fates that make us happy, but sometimes it simply deals us fates that make us. I love you, Ambrose, but you need to love yourself first.”

Then she lets go of his face and steps out of his embrace, and even though she knows he wants to hold on, he lets her slide out of his arms, and then she turns away from him, and leaves him kneeling in the empty room of the Starless Throne.





I DIDN’T DO IT.

I keep mouthing those words as I stare up at the poster of General Sond on my bedroom ceiling. I didn’t do it. I didn’t. But it doesn’t matter, because he thinks I did leak the video. He thinks I’m that kind of person—the nerve of him! It’s almost enough for me to hate him. Him, and this stupid sleepy town, and Homecoming—I hate all of it. I don’t see why it even matters. Why any of it matters.

I don’t know what I’m hoping for—that Vance appears at my door? That he smiles at me with that kind of smile he keeps tucked away so no one can see, and tells me what the hell happened? That yesterday was just a terrible fever dream and that he knows I didn’t do it, that we’ll figure it out? Or did he close the door because it was the other way around—that now that someone shined a light on his little vacation here in nowhere, he wants nothing to do with me?

Was that all I was—just a vacation? That’s depressing. And sad. And it makes me feel so terribly small.

I roll over in bed when I hear my phone buzz, and I check it even though I know who it’s going to be. Today is the day of the Homecoming Dance, after all.

    ANNIE (2:13 PM)

—hey, talk to us?

QUINN (2:15 PM)

—Please?



I don’t want to talk to anyone. I don’t want to admit that I was a fool, and that I screwed up. That when he looked at me in the sea of paparazzi, the Vance I had come to know—the one who kissed me in the library, who drove me home and let me read to him all my favorite passages and called me weird with that secret sort of smile—that Vance disappeared in the blink of an eye, and the one I had met at the beginning comes back, his lips set into a thin line, his blue eyes distant, his face impassive—like a curse returning.

He looked at me like he didn’t even know me.

And that hurt the most.

I know I’m fooling myself, but for a moment it felt like I was living some unimaginable story, some impossible fairy tale. It was kind of impossible, wasn’t it? A girl from the middle of nowhere meeting the guy she fell in love with at a comic-con, only to find out that he was a jerk of an actor, and yet…

And yet.

Forget it. It doesn’t matter. Though even as I tell myself that, it feels like a part of me has broken.

I can never sit on the barstool in the kitchen again as Elias cooks dinner. I can never walk into the library again. I can never run my fingers along the aged spines of hundreds of books. I can never look up the expanse of stairs to the second floor. I can never see Vance at the top of them again. I can never pet Sansa again. I can never read The Starless Throne while lounging on a pool chair in the backyard, or read it to him, or have him read Sond’s lines in that distinctly silky voice.

I can never, never, never again.

One moment it was all there, at the tip of my fingertips, part of my life in a way nothing has ever been before, and the next—gone.

All of it, gone.

I hug my pillow to my chest and try to keep the well of sadness inside me, but I can’t. This doesn’t hurt as much as losing Mom. Nothing will ever hurt that much, but it hurts all the same. Tears spill down my cheeks, and I bury my head into my pillow.

You knew it wouldn’t last, I think. It should’ve never happened to begin with.

A part of me wishes I could go back to who I was before the library, before the rainstorm, before the kiss, before all of it. I wish I could dig up the starstruck love I had for that boy in that midnight mask, when the world was simple and straightforward. I was happier with the stranger in my head, instead of Vance. Because knowing the real one stings too much. Knowing that he could have been someone different, that for a moment he seemed like he wanted to be someone better.

I would much rather have been in love with the phantom in my head.

Afternoon light spills into the room, and it reminds me of all the afternoons I spent in that library, sunlight falling through the windows, shining off the dust particles in the air like flecks of stars. Dad won’t be home for another few hours, and I don’t have leftover food to heat up that Elias gave me, and I don’t have a book I snuck out of the library to read underneath my covers.

I just have me.

As I roll over in my bed again, I hear a strange sound. It’s music, blasting from—from the parking lot? No, not just music…