Chapter 192 192

Chapter 192 192
Emma's POV:
I found him on the back porch later. Cold air, hands between his knees, looking at the dark.
I sat next to him. Shoulders touching.
"How's your novel going?" he said. Out of nowhere.
"What?"
"Your novel. The dragon one. You were stuck on the fire system. Chapter seven, right? Well, now you've seen how the fire actually works, so. Is that helpful or traumatic from a writing perspective?"
I stared at him. "You're asking me about my novel right now?"
"I figure it's either really good research or really bad for your mental health."
"Both."
"Yeah. That tracks."
We sat there. A car went by on the street, headlights sweeping across the yard.
"I'm not okay," he said. Not looking at me. Looking at the dark. "I want to be. I'm trying. But I keep seeing his face. Right before. He reached for Evie and I saw his hand move toward her and everything after that is just red and gold and noise, and then it was over and he was against the wall and he wasn't a person anymore."
I put my hand on his knee. He put his hand over mine.
"I was fifteen the first time," he said. "At the facility. Swept my tail and two guards hit a wall and I sat there after, staring at my hands, and Kaelen asked if I was good and I said 'Kael, I was a fucking dragon' and that was it. I was fifteen. It was chaos. I didn't fully understand what I'd done in that moment."
His hand tightened on mine.
"But I do now. I understand everything. He was scared, Emma. He was reaching for Evie because he was scared of me and I killed him anyway because he was reaching for Evie and both of those things are true and I don't know how to hold both of them at the same time."
"You don't have to figure that out tonight."
"What if I never figure it out?"
"Then you just carry it. Like your whole family carries all the bad things those people have done to them." I squeezed his hand. "You carry it and you let people help. That's all anyone can do."
He stood in silence for a minute.
"I knocked over Marlen's water glass," he said.
"I saw."
"First time downstairs in a week and I knocked over a water glass."
"The roll went on the floor."
"Dad put it back."
"He's built different, I guess."
I leaned my head against his shoulder. He leaned his against mine.
"Emma?"
"Yeah."
"Thank you for not leaving."
"Where would I go? I've already seen you turn into a dragon and set a pillow on fire during sex. I'm in too deep."
He laughed. Small, more breath than sound, but real. The first real one in a week.
"Also, you still owe me a pillowcase."
"I owe you two pillowcases," he said.
"And a fitted sheet."
"The sheet barely counts."
"Damage is damage, Ellsworth."
He turned his head. Kissed my hair. Quick, light, warm. The first time since before the building.
"I'm going to be different," he said. "Something changed. I can feel it. I can't go back to who I was before."
"I know."
"You're okay with that?"
"I'm okay with you. Whoever you end up being."
Quiet. Evie's voice from inside, something about the gold Sharpie and whether it counted as gold crayon for the purpose of artistic accuracy and Marlen saying for the fifth time that a Sharpie was better than a crayon because it didn't break every five seconds.
He didn't say anything for a while. Then, quieter: "The man in the building. The one in charge. He told me things, Emma. About my parents' blood. About what they did with it while they had them at the facility. He said they've been making medicine from it. Clinical trials. Real pharmaceutical stuff, not some black market thing. He said people are getting better because of what came out of my mother's veins."
My stomach turned. "Lucian..."
"And he didn't just want me. He wanted all of us. Mom, Dad, Kael, Marlen. Even Annabeth and Marcus. A partnership, he called it. Like we'd volunteer for it."
He was looking at the dark again. His jaw tight.
"I need to tell Marcus. He needs to know the Order isn't just remnants, that they're organized, that this is bigger than we thought. But not tonight."
"Not tonight," I said.
He was quiet for a bit. Then: "I want to go back to class on Monday," he said. "Sanders has an exam Wednesday and if I miss another one he's going to fail me and then I'll have to explain to my parents that I'm flunking out because I turned into a dragon and had an emotional crisis."
"That's a very practical reason to rejoin society."
"I'm a practical guy."
"You're the least practical person I've ever met."
"Fair." He squeezed my hand. "Will you be there? Monday. After class. The usual spot."
"With terrible coffee."
"The coffee's not that bad."
"The coffee is an insult to coffee."
I smiled against his shoulder. He felt it.
"Yeah," I said. "I'll be there."
Kalessi called us in. Something about dessert. He stood up and offered me his hand and I took it and we went inside. The kitchen with Kalessi's voice and Erik's steady hands and Marlen on the counter with her phone and Kaelen and Annabeth talking to each other and Evie at the table with the gold Sharpie making wings wider and wider until the dragon barely fit on the paper.
He wasn't okay. He'd said it. The boy who knocked over water glasses and wrote terrible poems and forgot to ask girls to be his girlfriend was still in there, but he was sharing space now with something harder that knew what it was capable of, and that was going to take time. Maybe more time than either of us had planned for.
But he was here. At the table. Eating dessert. Stealing bites off Evie's plate when she wasn't looking, which she always noticed and always pretended not to. Sitting across from me with the almost-smile getting closer to real every hour.
On Monday we'd go back. Sit in Sanders' lecture. Drink terrible coffee and walk through Emberdale like two people who hadn't lived through what we'd lived through. And that was going to have to be enough.
For now, sitting there, it was enough.