Bookishly Ever After (Ever After #1)(40)

I swung my legs, my heels making a metallic sound against the old radiator. “Em told me you’re leaving early for winter break.”

“Yeah, my cousin’s getting married in Mumbai, so the school’s letting me take my midterms early.” He said Mumbai in the same offhand way I would have said Massachusetts.

I blinked, forgetting how close we were sitting. “Whoa. Mumbai, as in India?”

A grin flitted across Dev’s face. “That Mumbai. We’re leaving Monday and I’ll be back on the thirtieth.”

“That’s, um, a long flight, isn’t it?”

“Eighteen hours straight from Newark.”

The choir stopped singing and the chime of hand bells playing their own version of “Silver Bells” piped into the room. Ten more minutes before it was our turn to go on. My heart jumped into my throat to choke me, and it had nothing to do with Dev. “Wow.” I managed to say. My fingers nervously tapped out the notes on the flute’s keys.

Dev’s gaze drifted down to my fingers. Amusement danced across his features. “Nervous?”

I forced my fingers to still, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. The spicy-soapy scent just made my heart beat even faster, like I had pressed the accelerator on an already speeding car.

“No.” I tasted the lie and tried to come up with something to say that wasn’t about me. “You’re going to spend Christmas over there? It must be really different.”

Dev blinked at me. “Uhm, I guess, sort-of. I’m not Christian, so no birth of a savior or Silent Night or anything like that for me.” Oh, crud. “But I guess you could say I celebrate Santa Claus day.” He winked. “And I’m sure my uncle will be putting up a tree like he usually does.”

I opened my mouth, closed it, and opened it again. “Ohmigosh, I didn’t mean to assume anything.” But I had. And automatically wished I could melt into the vents like a wet wicked witch from Oz.

It didn’t seem to bother him, though. The dimple in his cheek grew larger. “My mom’s Hindu and my dad is Christian, so I was raised Hindu. I don’t celebrate Christmas, really, but Diwali and Holi make up for it.”

Holi. Right, the festival of colors. That had been in a Bollywood film Em and I had watched last summer.

“Holi must be awesome, with all the color and stuff.” The handbell/madrigal choir started some old song. Five minutes left. Over Dev’s shoulder, I saw Em mouthing “ask him out” and pointing to an invisible wristwatch. I pulled straight from one of Maeve’s lines in Golden. “That means we won’t have time to hang out before you leave, will we?”

“Actually, I was thinking—”

But before he could finish, Osoba hurried into the room and clapped her hands. “Get organized into your lines, now,” she shouted over the general din. Everyone started talking again. “Now. Without a peep.”

Dev jerked his chin towards the other clarinets and whispered, “I’d better get over there before she threatens to throw me into the orchestra pit.” He reached over and squeezed the hand still clutching my flute. “Relax.”

Em reached me while I was still watching Dev push through to the clarinet section and poked me in the arm.

“Okay, if you’re going to do this ridiculous thing,” Em whispered, “which I still think is crazy as hell, go right after we tune. I’ll bring your flute and sheet music. Osoba usually doesn’t check our lines.” Her whisper was hidden by a blare of tuning oboes.

I brought the flute up to lip-level. Osoba would be over soon to tune us. “You’re right, this is stupid.”

She waited until the clarinets hit their C in unison. “Yeah, it is.”

I took a deep breath. “But I can do it.” I still felt the ghost of his fingers on mine, and where his pants had brushed my tights. My skin tingled, like it was stretched a little too tight in those places. It was impossible to even imagine concentrating on anything but those feelings. “I’m Maeve. I’m not afraid of anything.”

“You are completely and totally insane.”

After we tuned, I hurried backstage, pushing past stagehands as they finished setting up our seats and stands. Maeve would be so much more stealthy than this. Marissa would probably charm a stagehand into doing it for her, but I was Phoebe. Clumsy, not stealthy, and too short on time to play superspy.

Dev was the third chair from the end on the front row, almost exactly opposite Em. I hurried around the edge of the stage, trying to keep to all the shadowy areas. The curtain was touching the first seat of the front row, so I slipped into the second row to keep from bumping into it.

Keeping to the shadows, Maeve crept through the castle hall, her every movement a whisper. As she got closer to her target, she quietly nocked an arrow and held her bow at the ready. She only had one chance to get Carman’s scroll and couldn’t mess it up.

When I was positive no one was around, I slipped around the second-row music stands and leaned over the back of the Dev’s chair, stretching as far as I could to reach the stand. I almost lost my balance in my stupid heels, but, like Maeve on Carman’s windowsill, I caught myself last minute and touched the lip of the stand without knocking it over. Exhaling, I slipped the socks onto his stand and ran out, almost crashing into Em as the flutes started filing on stage.