Chapter Twenty-One

This sitting room is stuffed with people and conversation and no one else notices Dad’s departure.

In his wake, I turn to Iris and take her hand. Mine is trembling, the aftereffects making it so my lips shake a little too when I smile.

“Iris, I love you. Will you do me the honor of not marrying me, today, or ever?”

She grins. “Coal. I love you too. And from this day forth, I promise to never marry you.”

I grab her up in a hug.

Over her shoulder, I see her father at the edge of the room, looking stricken and confused.

“I’ll talk to your dad with you,” I say. “We’ll make this work for Easter too.”

She squeezes me, hard. “Later, Coal.” Another hug, softer, her head resting against my temple. “But thank you.”

I set her down. “How do you want to announce that the wedding is off? I’ll take credit. Or blame. Whatever you think will best appease any rumors of—”

She smiles. It should be happier than it is, should be relieved; but beneath it, there’s apprehension still, exhaustion that never seems to really let her go.

Iris turns to a nearby staff member and whispers quickly to them. They go momentarily stunned, then announce to the room, “The wedding is… off. But you are invited to partake in the Christmas Eve Ball.”

Shock only seems to hit a few pockets within the room, mostly reporters who whip towards Iris and me, and I brace, angling in front of her on instinct.

My brows skyrocket at her. “Just that easy, huh?”

She shrugs. “Maybe it always was.” Her voice is soft and reaching, like she’s trying to convince herself that it’s that easy, that nothing bad will come from making a choice for ourselves like this.

“If anyone in Easter uses this to start shit,” I tell her, “they’ll have Kris and me to contend with—”

But Iris cups my face in her hands and the look in her eyes shuts me up.

“Coal. I’d rather talk about those dreams we’re allowed to have now.”

I go rigid. Suddenly aware of Hex’s ring on my thumb where I’m holding Iris’s hip and I can’t see her through the way my head is a struck gong of imagining what his reaction to this would have been. Would he have been proud of me? God, I hope he’d be proud of me.

Thinking about him is a tap on my emotions and I realize how taxing it is to run on pure adrenaline. I need to sleep for maybe the rest of the year.

Iris pinches my cheeks in her hands. “Coal. Did you hear me?”

She’d been talking. Shit. “Yes. Yeah. Fine.”

Her eyes roll. “I said my only dream tonight is to dance with my best friend.”

I smile. “I’m pretty exhausted. I think I’m going to crash. Dance with Kris?”

“No. You do not get out of celebrating this.”

She has my cheeks fully squished between her hands now and I break away with an exasperated head shake. “You’re impossible.”

“We’re a matched pair.”

I loop my arm through hers and turn to wave over Kris—

He’s gone.

“Where did—”

“Come on!” Iris tows me into the crowd. People shout for me as I pass, introductions and pleas to talk in the next few days and oh, fuck, I’m going to be in wall-to-wall meetings, aren’t I? But I catch Wren’s gaze in the chaos and she nods, tablet already out, and mouths, I’ll handle it.

Again, she needs a raise. Multiple raises.

Iris drags me back into the ballroom. The orchestra has switched to faster songs and the floor is packed with people—not everyone funneled out to watch me restructure our Holiday in ten minutes while dressed as a Christmas toy.

I should want nothing more than to fling myself into dancing with Iris and Kris and shake off this stress and emotion, but the sight of the crowded ballroom only adds to my exhaustion.

I don’t want to be here.

I want to be in my room, ripping off this choking suit, and lying flat out on my bed until my chest stops aching.

Today was a victory but it doesn’t feel like a victory, and the thing that’s missing is taking up so much space that I tug on Iris’s hand once we’re a step inside the ballroom.

“I’m going to bed,” I tell her, voice raising as the music gets louder.

“Like hell you are!” She grips my hand in both of hers. “You need to dance.”

“I don’t. What happened to Kris? Did he get swallowed in small talk? I should go find—”

“He’s over there.” Iris points into the ballroom. “And you need to dance, Coal.”

She says each word with an odd weight. A sparkle in her eyes.

I frown at her and follow her pointing to where my brother is working his way across the middle of the floor, surrounded by people who are spinning in the palpitating swell of the song, red and blue ballgowns flying and jewel-toned suitcoats lustrous—

The drain of emotion, the crash after the adrenaline, the burn of grief—my body forgets how to feel any of it. There is a sudden, splendid absence like city lights going dark to show the full vastness of a diamond-studded night sky and I am not tired, I am not lost, I am not broken, because the sight on that dance floor demands everything in my body reknit itself.

Iris presses into me. “I was going to go see him. I had a whole speech prepared and Kris wanted to come so he could tell Hex how pissed he was, but before I could leave, he was here. He showed up in my suite this morning—”

I whip my eyes to her. “He’s been here since this morning ?”

“—and asked us how he could make things right. He didn’t want to get in the way once we told him what was happening, but the point is, Coal, he came back for you. He chose you.”

“Iris,” I gasp her name. I think I do. My voice sounds garbled.

I catch sight of Hex and lose him again as the dancers spin. He and Kris are trying to get to us, but Hex’s gaze meets mine and he stops.

His black-lined eyes shift over me, even with the distance. He doesn’t smile. I can see him holding his reaction for mine, that infuriating control he has over his responses, and a strand of black hair hangs out of his knot, brushing across his cheek. It flutters in an exhale.

“Go,” Iris tells me, but I’m already walking, the dancers passing around me like vapor.

In and out, bodies pirouette between us, and each time I think they’ll move on and he’ll be gone. I’ll blink, and he’ll vanish, but then I reach him, and he’s here, his chest rising in a sharp, shaking intake of breath.

Kris ducks away with a smile.

He’s in a bright cherry-red suit, a riot of color, with a black shirt under it, the balance of Halloween and Christmas, and he has those rings on his fingers and the glint of silver piercings on his ear. He’s here and we’re standing in the middle of the dance floor and the orchestra drags violins in a crooning wail.

His lips part, but he says nothing, and I want to fill the silence but I know silence is an offering for him. So I just watch his eyes dip down my body again, and I feel the trip when his focus catches on my hand—on his ring still on my thumb.

A tremble shakes his parted lips.

Finally, he says over the music, “I was at that bar to see you.”

I frown, head cocking.

“The bar. Where we met. I went there—” He huffs a breath, one that’s fighting against a tremor. “It was the first anniversary of Raven’s death. I couldn’t sit at home.”

My eyes widen, but before I can say anything, he looks up at me and pushes on, talking faster.

“I went because I knew you would be there, from the tabloids, and I wanted to see what kind of person you really were. I wanted you to be as bad as your father so I could point at you and say, Look, Raven wouldn’t have gotten what she wanted no matter who was in charge of Christmas. I was so angry, and it was senseless, and I needed someone to be mad at. But you were—” He gasps, throat bobbing. “You were nothing like I wanted you to be. You haven’t been, this whole time. You’ve been like her, and I think I—no. I know I started to fall in love with you in that alley.”

“Hex,” I whisper. He doesn’t hear me.

“And you were right. I put those restrictions on myself, on us, because I could not fathom that falling for you had happened so fast. But you, Coal. You, with your light and laughter and joy. You, with your honor, that infecting honor, and your devotion. Somehow, I got to be the object of that honor and devotion, and it stunned me, still stuns me, that you look at me the way you do. I’m so sorry that I didn’t trust myself to choose you—”

“Hex,” I say, louder, and his lips snap shut, those wide eyes holding on mine. “I would never keep you from doing what you feel you need to do for Halloween. I would never ask you to choose between us and your role. I know how much it means to you, and it’s one of the things I love most about you, your big heart and your bigger sense of purpose. My god, Hex, I’d sooner expect you to stop breathing than to make any concession that would jeopardize the joy Halloween brings. It’s you, and I wouldn’t change a thing about you.”

He shakes his head. “That’s just it. It’s fine, I think, to make some concessions for myself. I am still getting my bearings with letting myself have more than Halloween, but I promise, I will learn how to fight for”—his voice catches—“for the man I love too.”

My reaction surges through me and I only barely stop myself, a near painful lurch of remembering we’re in a crowded ballroom and there are reporters watching.

But Hex steps closer and angles up and asks, mouthing the words, Kiss me.

My lungs are too thick and my heart is beating too fast. “It’ll be out. You and me. What will the autumn collective think of you with the Christmas Prince?”

His eyes shift through mine. “They might hate it. Or they might see what you’ve done in starting your own form of equality here, and be all right with it. Either way, this isn’t about them, or Halloween, or Christmas. It’s about you and me, and we’ll deal with whatever happens together. So now,” he steps closer, imploring, “I want you to kiss me.”

But he hesitates. Just a fraction, and something like uncertainty darts across his face.

“I understand, though, if you haven’t forgiven me for leaving,” he says, voice resolved. “I shouldn’t have pushed, and if I—”

I groan, and laugh, and it all gets tangled up in need. “I swear to god, Hex, the two of us have officially discovered that there is such a thing as being too respectful of each other, and it will kill me.”

I dive into him, like moving through a heavy liquid, melted gold, until my lips crash to his. He trills in surprise and I know nothing until his arms are thrown around my neck and I bind my hands against the curves of his hips, coming to as his lips move under mine. I brace on him in the ruckus and mayhem of his mouth back beneath me, that mouth, his beautiful goddamn mouth and this beautiful goddamn storm that has me tearing my hand into his hair and rocking back so he’s lifted, so every bit of him is held up by me. He kisses me in a way that will bring me to my knees later, and I think that word like a prayer, later.

Cameras flash, lights out of the corner of my eyes, but they don’t matter. There are no more secrets now. This is our new future, this man in my arms, the way I rock my forehead to his and breathe in his exhale and tug lightly on his hair because I need to remind myself not to float out into incandescent space.

A new song begins. Dancers twirl around us. There are far, far too many people here, and we are far, far too exposed for all the thoughts plowing through my head.

But I rest my mouth over his. “Dance with me?”

I taste his grin. “You’re going to have to set me down for that, I think.”

“Under duress, let it be noted.”

“Noted.”

I rest his feet on the floor. I know this song, and imagine sweeping him away into the twirl of couples and the brush of motion, but I hesitate long enough to look down at him.

“I love you,” I tell him. Because last time I said it, it was more sob than truth, and when I say it now, I memorize the way his pupils dilate, the ardent spark of connection as my words hit home and nestle in and he accepts them.

His fingers twine in the hair at the base of my neck. He’s silent for one of those intensifying, emotion-brimming moments of him finding himself through his mesmerizing internal noise and I will never in my life be given a greater honor than the way he painstakingly chooses his response for me.

“I love you too,” he says.

I kiss him again, a clumsy layering over of our smiles, and we’re laughing and this, here, is my victory. He is my spoil of war, the most vital piece in my new-forming foundation.

Joy creates magic.

I have never believed that more than with him.