Bookishly Ever After (Ever After #1)(84)

“Awesome. Let’s make this loud and proud. Ready?”

Cups and trays rattled as the campers started stomping their feet under the table. “Team eight, team eight, team eight is really great. We’re great in the morning, we’re great at night, we’re better than dynamite!” Thank God most of them were still too innocent to get any possible innuendo from that.

I cringed as the chant set off similar ones throughout the mess hall until I could barely think through all the noise. One-and-a-half more days. And then I could hide from him again.

The Hidden House series book 1: Hidden PG 86

I clutch at the bundle of lace and flowers in my hand as I make my way up to my room. If Cyril’s not going to talk to me in modern terms, I’m going to talk his language21. Mirror or not, this thing has dragged on way too long. My hands shake a little too much and some of the hydrangea petals flutter down to the carpet.

I push into my room and hold the little bouquet behind my back with one hand while smoothing the skirt of my dress with the other. “Cyril?”

No matter how many times I see him, my heart still does a little flip when he walks into the mirror frame on his side. His eyes grow wide when he sees me, and I grow warm as he looks me up and down in a way that he never does when I’m wearing my normal clothes. “You are dressed very—”

“—old fashioned,” I finish for him, resisting the urge to tug at my blouse’s high neck or untie the bow at my collar. My black skirt is still short, but from midthigh up, I can probably pass for a girl from his time. I don’t know how girls back then kept from overheating, especially when dressed like this around guys like him.

He smiles and nods. “Perhaps. But in my time, you’d never have an empty dance card.”

The smile comes naturally to my face and, like that, my nerves disappear. “Would you be one of the names22?” I ask in my flirtiest—but Victorianish—voice.

“Marissa.” His tone is guarded and, from the look on his face, I know he’s going to jump into his “we can’t talk about feelings and stuff ” speech.

Before he can, I pull the bouquet out from behind my back and hold it up so he can see all the flowers in it, hours of research on the internet and hours more of babysitting money spent at the florist all rolled into a bundle a little bigger than my fist. “I made something for you.” A yellow tulip, red rose, and some lilac are clumped in the center of the bouquet, with hydrangeas circling them. I hope the whole thing says “I’m hopelessly in love with you and I won’t give up” and not “did anyone die of consumption today23?”

He freezes on his side of the mirror and I can assume from his expression that I got it right. “You made that?”

I capture his gaze and nod. “It’s called a tussie-mussie, right? It took me a little bit to research the right flowers to say what I wanted to. I know I can’t really give it to you, but I can put it right in front of the mirror for you if you want.” My smile falters and I lean forward to tie the bouquet to the mirror frame, my face inches from the silvered surface. “I need you to know how I feel,” I whisper.





49


“Sometimes, fear like this can be a gift. It means you’re growing beyond any artificial boundaries you thought you had.”Daymeon, Starbound

I pressed the pulp into the screen, looking up to check that all of the other campers at my table were doing the same. Most of them watched my movements and tried to imitate the way I dipped my screen and wiggled it in the water to catch the pulp. It wasn’t like I knew anything more about papermaking than they did, but I picked it up like it was second nature. My pulp sheets were thin, rectangular, and sort of uniform as I flipped them out onto the felt to dry, unlike the campers’ and Dev’s clumpy blobs. After the mud thing, a little part of me thrilled at being better than him at something other than archery.

Working the afternoon shift at the rope bridge had been the most uncomfortable five hours of my life. Dev and I didn’t talk to each other the whole time beyond what was absolutely necessary, but he was still his awesome, joking self to the kids. Dinner was impossible—we sat on opposite ends of the table. The dark cloud from our sort of-fight still hung heavy in the air, and even the kids seemed to sense it. Even now, the tension between us was like a too-taut rope. Pairing us up had been the worst idea Em ever had.

I looked up to find Dev studying me from across the room like he was trying to figure something out. For a second, our eyes met and I froze. It was only a heartbeat before he dropped his gaze back to the mound of paper clumping on his screen. Confusion tangled with an intense need to just throw myself at him and I fumbled, dropping my screen into the pan of pulpy water.

I steadied my fingers and dug the screen out of the pan. Forcing myself to sound light, I demonstrated—again — how to dip and float just enough pulp on the surface of the screen to make a perfect sheet.

“And then you just wiggle it really carefully to distribute the pulp, just like the teacher showed us. See?” I set my screen down to drain and stood back to watch everyone else try.

Dev’s eyes met mine again and this time I was the one who turned away, acting like I had been focusing on the boy next to him.

“Make sure you hold that screen parallel, Lee.” But I felt my ears getting warm.

I gently rolled the surface of my paper, flipped it out, and mechanically went back into the pulp. The watery sludge swirled around my fingers and I pretended to be deep in my work. At the rate I was going, I’d have enough pages for a high fantasy novel.