The Veil (24 page)

“Oh, Addy,” he managed to gasp out before surrendering to howling laughter once again.

I crossed my arms fiercely over my chest. “Well then
what is it
? That wasn’t a stupid guess—you’ve been acting weird ever since Luc
and I got together. You act like you hate him. Like you’re jealous of him or something!”

He stopped laughing and turned to me, suddenly serious. “Addy, has it ever occurred to you Luc may be more my type than you are?”

I gaped at him as my thoughts raced. Nate. Nate, who’d never had a crush on a girl; he’d never told me about one anyway, and I always thought it was because he was too shy to talk about it, even with me. But maybe I was wrong.

“You’re—you’re
gay
?”

He nodded.

“But—” I stalled for time, trying to get my thoughts in order. Before I could think of the perfect thing to say at that moment, an imperfect thing slipped out. “But you hate Jest Jewels!”

Nate looked at me quizzically, a hint of amusement playing over his furrowed brow. “Addy, I’m gay. I’m not a
girl
.”

“Oh, right.”
Stupid
. I felt like kicking myself. “How long have you known?” There, that was a much more appropriate question.

“I’ve always sort of suspected, but recently . . . I don’t know. Now I just kind of know I am. I can’t explain it.”

“And Luc . . . ?”

“Oh, I was kidding about him. He’s not my type. I was just using him for dramatic effect. Plus, I’m pretty sure he’s straight.”

“Yeah,” I said, not realizing until too late he had been trying to make a joke. “So that’s what has been bothering you lately?”

“It hasn’t been
bothering
me, not exactly. I’ve just been trying to figure out how to tell people—my parents, mostly. And you. Terrance has been a big help. He went through this last year.”

“Terrance is gay?” Had I known that?

“Only his parents know,” Nate said quickly. “He decided not to tell anyone at school, except me. We started talking one day when he gave me a ride home from school. He’s a good guy.”

“So, are you and Terrance . . .” I let the question hang.

“No. He’s not my type either. He’s just a friend. I needed somebody to talk to, especially after you . . .” he trailed off.

“Oh, Nate!” I threw my arms around him and, after only a second’s hesitation, he hugged me back. “I’m so sorry. I should have been there for you. I will be from now on.”

“It’s not your fault,” he admitted, folding me into another hug before letting me go. “I mean, yeah, you sort of ditched me for Luc, but then again I wasn’t very supportive of you guys. I think I was sort of pushing you away on purpose—I needed space to think.”

“So you’re okay with Luc and me now?”

He looked away, and started fiddling uncomfortably with the sleeve of his shirt. “Not totally, Addy. I still think there’s something weird going on—something you’re not telling me. Now that I’ve told you my secret, it’s your turn.”

He looked over at me, and his expectant expression made me want to cry. Here he was spilling his guts to me, and I couldn’t tell him he already knew my secret. We were talking—really talking—for the first time in weeks, and now I was going to have to lie to him all over again and ruin it.

“I can’t tell you,” I told him miserably. “Can’t you just respect that? Maybe I need space—just like you did.”

He didn’t look happy about it, but he nodded anyway. “You’ll tell me eventually?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“Okay.” He still sounded uncertain, but then a smile came over his face; it was the most Nate-like expression I had seen in weeks. “Can your gay best friend buy you some coffee?”

I let out the breath I’d been holding. Things were okay again—not perfect, not while there were things I couldn’t tell him, but good enough for now.

“Sure,” I said, hugging him again.

He hugged me back, then pushed me toward his empty chair and jumped behind the espresso machine. “Tell Luc to get in here.
I’ll make him every kind of coffee on the menu until we find one he likes.”

——

Luc and I spent the morning at Sully’s. Even when it got busy and Nate would sometimes disappear behind a cloud of steamed milk for half an hour at a time, I couldn’t keep the grin off of my face. Here I was, holding hands with Luc (for real!) and chatting with my best friend, exactly the way we used to. Luc even drank most of the caramel macchiato (extra foam with two generous pumps of caramel) Nate pushed on him, and I’m pretty sure only I could tell he didn’t actually like it.

If I hadn’t had the possibility of a rapidly approaching death sentence hanging over my head, it would have been the perfect morning.

Around noon, Luc and I finally left. All the coffee in the world was not going to keep me from falling asleep soon; I’d hardly slept since yesterday afternoon, and the time since then hadn’t exactly been uneventful.

I didn’t tell Luc about Nate reading my journal. I was pretty sure I’d managed to convince Nate it was all fiction, and I just didn’t see any point in worrying Luc and spoiling such a great morning.

Luc dropped me off at Gran’s so I could take a quick nap, and came back around dinnertime to share in the pasta feast Gran had made the day before. Her ten boys joined us, and between all thirteen of us, we managed to eat pretty much everything in the kitchen that wasn’t nailed down.

Afterward, Luc and I drove up to the Headlands, just the two of us. The bunker we sat on a few weeks previously—our bunker, I’d started calling it, at least in my head—was unoccupied. This time, instead of sitting awkwardly next to him, I climbed into his lap and we kissed for a good, uninterrupted hour until he finally pulled away.

“So,” he said teasingly, twisting the chain of my horseshoe necklace around two of his fingers. “Are you still afraid of heights?”

Still holding on to him, I leaned boldly over the front of the bunker and looked down at the bay. It was there in all of its Annorasi glory—my glasses weren’t in the bag Nate had rescued from the fire, so I couldn’t have filtered out the gorgeous scene beneath me even if I wanted to, and why would I? The golden bridge sparkled by the light of the full moon, and its serpent guards twisted around the two pillars, dutifully watching the boats passing underneath. I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful sight, unless of course I was looking at Luc.

“I think I’m actually starting to like heights,” I told him, which wasn’t entirely true. My irrational fear of falling to my death was still there, yet it was being overshadowed by the excitement of being so near him. “As long as you’re here, I’ll be fine.”

“I will always be here,” he promised.

“Yeah,” I said, with a huge fake sigh. “Until you get bored of me. You have such a boring job, Luc. Don’t you ever wish something exciting would happen?”

“They definitely don’t pay me enough to keep up with you,” he agreed, going along with my joke.

I raised an eyebrow. “
Do
they pay you? And who is ‘
they
’?”

He laughed. “There’s no money in the Annorasi world. Not the way you think of it, anyway. And I already told you who ‘they’ is—my father and a couple of other people who knew your parents well enough to want to protect their only daughter.”

“I forgot your dad knew my parents,” I said. “They were friends?”

“My father was your father’s Guardian,” Luc said bluntly.

I blinked. “That actually explains a lot. Last night—I don’t know, it didn’t seem as though he liked me very much. I couldn’t figure out why he would want to help me, why he would be willing to go to so much trouble for someone he didn’t like.”

“My dad was in fine form last night. He’s not always so . . . confrontational. But if you think he’s something, just wait until you meet the General.”

I raised an eyebrow. “The who?”

Luc smiled. “My mom. General Tamsyn Stratton.”

“You call your mom ‘the General’?”

“She
is
a General. And yes, that’s what I call her,” Luc replied with a totally straight face. “About my dad, though—he may have his faults, but he’s the right guy to have on your side right now. He’s a well-respected Annorasi, but he’s also lived in the human world for years. He’s an excellent lawyer—in both worlds. And it’s not that he doesn’t
like
you, Addy. You bring up some painful memories for him, I think. Failing to protect your father is the biggest regret of his life. He’s told me that many times.”

“How did he end up as my father’s Guardian?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Luc thought for a second. “I think your mother asked him to do it, but I’m not positive.”

“Why does he live in the human world? Is he someone else’s Guardian now?”

Luc shifted uncomfortably beneath me.

“He’s nobody’s Guardian now. He’s, well, he’s not exactly welcome in the Annorasi world anymore.”

I raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“He is what’s known as an Outcast, an Annorasi who has been banished from the Annorasi world and forced to live in the human one. It happened just after the war. The Council had to do something to show they were back in control. Your parents and your grandmother were gone; my dad was the only one left to punish.”

“How terrible,” I said, suddenly unable to look Luc in the eye. Luc’s dad may have been the only one the Council could punish, but I was only the surviving member of my family, and that meant I was the only one left to feel guilty about it.

Luc lifted my chin and forced me to look at him.

“I didn’t tell you that to make you feel bad,” he told me. “I want to be honest. About everything. The truth is, my dad loves the human world. The General is still free to go between the worlds, so he sees her all the time. That’s all he cares about.”

“What about you? Did you grow up with your dad or your mom?”

“I went back and forth a lot.”

We were silent together for a moment. Then I turned around in his lap until I was facing him again.

“I have another question,” I said warily.

“Uh-oh,” he teased.

“Two questions, actually,” I went on. “First—why is it that some Annorasi hate humans so much and some, like you, seem to think humans are all right?”

His arms tightened around me. “Some of them are more than
all right
.” He kissed me lightly, but when I pulled back and he saw I was waiting for an answer, he shrugged. “It’s just an opinion, I suppose. How do most opinions form? It’s a combination of what your parents teach you and what you learn on your own, I guess.”

“And your parents taught you to respect humans?”

“Yes. Was that your second question?”

“No,” I hesitated. “My second question—I sort of asked you this before, but you didn’t answer it then.”

“I’ll answer it now, if you tell me what it is.”

“Promise?”

“I promise,” he said after a moment, already looking like he was sure he’d regret saying that.

“When you first got to our school, and you had to pick between the two of us, why did you think Emily was the person you were looking for, not me?”

Small lines appeared in his forehead as he thought this over. With both arms draped around my waist, he looked out at the shiny city I had my back to. He stayed still and silent for so long, I eventually figured he needed some help.

“When I asked before, you said there were a number of things that made you choose her, but none of them mattered now,” I reminded him.

“That’s right. None of those reasons matter now.”

“I’d like to know what they were anyway,” I said, even though I was beginning to think I really didn’t. I don’t know why I’d even asked him the question in the first place. Did I want him to tell me how attracted he had been to Emily from the very start? The thought made a black hole open up inside of my middle.

“Well,” he said finally. “I had sort of assumed I’d be able to sense something Annorasi-like about one of you, but I couldn’t. Not a thing. So I tried to match you both to the image of the girl I was looking for—the image inside my head.”

“You had an image of me?” I asked, and he smiled.

“It was definitely, definitely not you,” he corrected me. “It’s who I
thought
you would be. Somebody lost. Somebody searching. Somebody waiting for someone like me to come along and explain to them what she’d been missing all of these years, to assure her she hadn’t felt whole for a reason.”

“And
that
led you to Emily?” I asked, incredulous. I very much doubted she’d ever had a “lost” moment, at least not in the past couple of years. She was the very definition of “together.” From her perfect hair, to her meticulous wardrobe, to the ease with which she sashayed her way through life. She never seemed to doubt the world would simply lay itself down at her feet whenever she asked it to—and why wouldn’t it, for someone so beautiful?

“I think you’re confusing ‘lost’ with ‘perfect,’” I informed Luc. “Emily is the very last person I would ever assume had something missing in her life.”

“Really? I thought the exact opposite. I still do. How can someone who lives her entire life trying to guess what others want of her, then uses all of her energy going to great lengths to deliver it, be anything
other
than lost?”

I went to say something further, then paused. I’d never thought of Emily that way.

“And then there was you,” Luc continued. “Watching you, even from a distance, I never got the feeling your life was anything other
than whole. Sure, I knew you lived with your grandmother and your parents had died when you were young, but you seemed to have everything all worked out. You had Nate, you had Olivia, and you seemed far too . . . content. Yes that’s the word. You looked too content to be the person I was looking for.”

I nodded, fascinated at this sudden insight into how his mind worked. Although, a large part of me still suspected he was making all of this up, to cover up that he’d simply chosen the hot girl.

To my surprise, he went on. “Plus, you never spoke to me.”

“What?” I asked skeptically.

“You didn’t!” he said, like I was arguing the point with him. “Never, not once. Not all those times before precalculus, or in any other class we had together. You never acted like you had any clue I existed at all.”