Velveteen (23 page)

Nick sneered and pulled away into the shadows, shaking
his head. “It’s just that I thought I could handle it. But after Miss Antonia took me to my room and the door closed behind me …” He paused. “After I was alone, it just kind of hit, you know? Like an earthquake.”

“Yeah.”

“Why are you up?”

“Stupid dream. It’s nothing.”

She rested on her heels and sighed. Nurturing wasn’t the kind of magic she carried around in her bag of tricks along with the penchant for violence and the really cool fashion sense, but there was something about this boy that made her want to protect him. Though Velvet wasn’t sure she had it in her.

She glanced toward the opposing sets of stairs—no one stirred in either wing of the dormitory. Probably exhausted from Quentin’s dimming and the gloomy ceremony of cleaning up that followed. Velvet rubbed the ash further into her cheek at the thought.

What am I even doing down here?

She had her own shit to deal with. She didn’t have time to help this boy through his. Like she needed one more thing on her plate. Thwarting serial killers and banshees, investigating revolutionaries, keeping secrets? Yeah. All she needed was to take on a depressed, albeit hot, boy. But there he was, his shoulders softly heaving and his big bare boy foot poking out into the light.

“I’ll never see them again?” Nick’s voice was heavy with sorrow, but the sobs had stopped. Thankfully.

Velvet wasn’t a fan of crying, as if you couldn’t tell.

“Not for a while,” Velvet said, conjuring up her most empathetic tone. “But maybe. Someday.”

“Maybe?” His sleepy glowing eyes sought out hers and held them in his gaze.

“Maybe.”

She slipped in next to him, sliding down the wall until her butt hit the cold stone and her hip nestled next to his.

“It’s a matter of perspective. So it’s like this. Time is on our side, right? It’s not like we’re going to die again. So lots of stuff falls into the realm of possibility. Way more than when we were alive.”

He scrunched up his face, the skin around his eyes crinkling.

“Give me your hand,” she directed.

Nick slipped his hand tentatively into hers. She thought his hands would be rough. But they weren’t. They were way bigger than hers, mannish, but soft skin lay beneath the fine layer of ash. And a warmth. A tragically welcoming warmth. She began to massage his palm with her thumbs.

Nick’s head rolled on his neck, and she thought she heard a quick gasp.

“Hand massages have a miraculous effect on mood. And since I like you better not so weepy, let’s give this a shot,” Velvet said.

A small smile made its way onto his mouth. “Is that right?”

She looked up from his hand. “Huh?”

“You like me?” His face was creepily hopeful. Well, as creepy as he could look with perfect bone structure and those fat boy lips stuck to his face like candy.

“Uh … not so fast with the semantics, dickweed. I said I like you better not bawling your eyes out like a little girl. There’s a difference.”

“Gotcha,” he said with a grin that quickly faded.

Why couldn’t people just let her be nice? She’d been doing so well.

She went back to work on his hand. “It’s all about pressure points. You gotta get in there real good. Sometimes it hurts, but in the end, you’ll feel great. Take this spot here in the web between your thumb and index finger.”

He glanced down at their hands.

“Rubbing it just right relaxes the brain. Chills you out.”

“Feels nice.” His voice was deep, dreamy. It vibrated as thought they were both asleep. Floating. Safe.

He turned her hand in his and caressed
her
palm this time, the grit grinding between them magnificently, sending tiny earthquakes through Velvet’s skin, up her arms and all over, until her whole body ached for his touch.

“Do you like me, Velvet? I mean, do you like me at all?”

She shrugged, bit her cheek. “I don’t know you.”

And that was when she did it.

Broke yet another rule.

Partly because she was, like Kipper had said, lonely. Or maybe it was because things had just gotten out of hand and she was nervous all of a sudden.

Everything was so nuts. So out of control.

Bonesaw’s latest. The departure. Quentin.

Velvet leaned forward, probably a little too abruptly, and found his lips, brushed the soft flesh there with her thumb
before tentatively pressing her mouth to his. Nick’s hands slipped around either side of her neck, lingering on the curves, caressing the soft hollows of her throat, her shoulders. He pulled her toward him, kissing her deeply and then in soft pecks that trailed down one cheek and then the other, as though it had been Velvet crying before.

“I could take care of you,” he said, his breath hot against her neck. “We could care about each other.”

Just like that. Like it was a choice.

The words surprised her. Not that he’d spoken them, but that he seemed to know she needed some relief. As though he’d read her mind. She thought a moment, or rather tried to think, to gather her thoughts into a tidy little pile. It was tricky to do with Nick’s hands fumbling with her T-shirt, his fingertips drawing across her belly. In the end she gave up.

She knew it wasn’t right. Hell, she didn’t even know the boy, let alone love him, or like him, for that matter.

“We could.” She spoke the words softly against the flesh of Nick’s throat.

He quivered beneath her, and Velvet pushed him farther into the shadows, pressing her body to his.

A
railcar lumbered past, rattling the thin greasy windowpanes and dusting her cheeks with a fine rain of ash from the rafters.

Velvet’s eyes fluttered open.

Gaslight streamed in from outside, not the full glow alerting them to working hours but a dingy yellow slanting across her bed. Time worked differently in purgatory. The imposition of night could stretch on and on as the stations that studded the planet cleared out their backlogs of incoming souls.

When death lulled to a manageable trickle, the gaslights blazed up.

She pushed up onto her elbows, yawned one of those big quivering yawns that make you see squiggly lines, and stretched. Velvet twisted her neck to the right, trying to
crack it, work out the kink, and noticed something strange about the blankets.

Something horrifying.

She wasn’t alone. Nick lay sprawled out beside her.

“Uhhhh.” The sound spilled out of her like a leaky tire. She’d woken thinking their liaison had been a semi-pleasant dream, but clearly—unless Nick was extremely agile at slipping into girls’ beds unnoticed—it was less dream and more like a hazy reality with consequences she didn’t really have time for.

Ash had been rubbed from Nick’s bare shoulder, revealing the dull glow of sleep threading through his nerves.
Not dreaming
, she thought. He would be brighter. His hair was tousled, his face slack with slumber and something else … satisfaction?

She hoped not.

He lay on his back with the white sheet bunched up under his right arm and his palm up and clawed, clinching something imaginary. A soft whisper spilled from his parted lips. Lips she’d been more than happy to taste not so long ago.

What else had they done?

She pinched the edge of the sheet and lifted it up. Skin, and lots of it. Nick had on the brown wool trousers from earlier, only now they were beltless and open where the trail of gray hairs disappeared down his glowing stomach into the exposed band of his boxers.

Pants were a good sign, she decided. Not case-closing, but something.

Velvet poked him in the shoulder, and his face instantly scrunched up uncomfortably.

Nick groaned, rubbed his eyes, and winced in her direction. “Jeez. What?”

“What are you doing here?” she asked, biting out each word.

He grinned, like she was playing with him or something. “Um … we kind of made out and stuff, remember?”

“Yeah. I got that. I’m just a little hazy on the part where I invited you to sleep in my bed. I’m gonna need to see your permission slip.”

Nick smiled broadly and started to lift the sheet, his eyes motioning downward.

“Not what I meant.” Velvet slapped his hand, and the sheet fell from his fingers.

“Hey, it’s no big deal, right? We were both tired. I kissed you good night, because I seriously can’t get enough of your mouth.” He sighed. “I think I was just dreaming about those lips.”

“Don’t.” Velvet’s eyes narrowed viciously, and she balled her hand into a fist.

“I couldn’t find my room, but I remembered where yours was.”

“If you tell me we did stuff and I just don’t remember …”

“No way. I mean, God. No. You don’t know me. I get that. But you gotta know that I wouldn’t take advantage.” His jaw clenched with conviction. He sat bolt upright and covered her fist with his palm. “Your honor is unblemished, if that’s what you’re worried about. You were pretty tired.”

Is this guy for real?
she wondered, glancing down at his hand, so much larger than her own, strong. Protective.

The imagery didn’t sit right.

“All right, Nick. I believe you.” She twisted her wrist until his hand fell away, and then she slipped out from beneath the covers, thankful she hadn’t stripped off all her clothes in her exhausted state. It would have been really difficult to make her point if she’d had to deliver the next bit totally naked.

She tugged a sweater on over the T-shirt she wore and settled back at the foot of the bed. Nick followed her each and every movement, poring over her like he would an exam or maybe his playbook, if they even had those in basketball.

“This …,” she said, poking the space between them and leaving a dimple in the blankets. “Is
not
a love story.”

He squinted, shook his head. “No?”

Definitely not
, she thought. Velvet needed to get that through to the boy. His cocky smile, the way he deflected stuff with humor, everything about him was wrong for her. If anything, he’d have to settle for her eyes wandering over his body. And that face and those eyes. And the way he was tracing the indents between his stomach muscles.

Velvet gripped the thin slip of fabric covering the mattress. “No.”

“Then what is it?”

“Depends on the day. Mostly horror.”

She stopped short of telling him the real story. Girls punched through like college rule paper. Tortured. Packaged. Instead, Velvet shrugged and bent to fish a pair of
jeans off the floor. “Everything that happened was a mistake. I was bestowing a kindness on your pathetic grief act.”

“Harsh,” he said matter-of-factly.

Velvet thought about it, glanced back over her shoulder. “Coulda been way harsher.”

Nick rested his back against the headboard, as if he were posing. He was ridiculously gorgeous, even with bed-head—maybe because of it. It made her sick—like violently ill. He could at least be polite and have some scars, a third nipple, or a low-hanging ear on the side of his head. But no. He was perfect and adorable and in her bed. And, oh yeah, she felt like punching the shit out of him.

“You must be going soft,” he mumbled.

“Unlikely.” Velvet pulled on the jeans and crammed her feet into her black boots.

“Going somewhere?”

She nodded, rolling her eyes. “You’re very observant, aren’t you?”

“I’m like a detective that way.”

Velvet resisted an almost impossible urge to smile. The guy was charming for sure, and a smart-ass, which, of course, she couldn’t get enough of, but seriously. Enough was enough.

She spun around. “Listen, Nick.”

His face took on a stern mocking. “Yes, Velvet.”

“You need to be gone when I get back. This whole thing was a giant mistake. Huge.”

Concern wiped the humor from his face. “So, wait. That’s it? We make out and it was awesome and you make me feel things I never have with any other girl, and then you run? I gotta say, I’m feeling a little slutty here.”

Velvet nodded, cranked the doorknob, and pointed into the hall. “Yeah, well. I can’t do anything about that.”

He groaned, looked wounded, and pulled the sheet up around him.

Meanwhile, Velvet was close to breaking. It was hard to be mean to the guy. He’d been so vulnerable just a short while ago. “What do you want, a ring?”

“Well, no,” he said. “But I was hoping we could skip the teenage heartbreak part.”

She nodded sympathetically. “Well … just this once.”

“You mean it?” He brightened.

She glared back. “No.”

Nick shoved the sheet off and bounded from the bed, head swinging from side to side, squinting into the dark corners of the room. “You can really be a bitch, you know?”

“I have training.”

He snatched his shirt from the floor and tugged it on over his head. “Yeah. I’m being a little bit serious.”

“I know, and that scares me in a restraining order kind of way. So let’s plan on forgetting that all this happened and agree to simply be polite when we run into each other again, and leave it at that.”

She left him scratching his head as she pulled the door closed behind her and made off for the stairs.

What the hell had she been thinking? As if she didn’t have enough going on in her afterlife, she had to go and throw Nick into the mix? Insane.

It really was too bad souls couldn’t take medication.

Velvet needed a lot.

Lots and lots of psychiatric medication.

What with Bonesaw’s mountain of crazy spilling into her dreams, an inability to follow even the most basic of rules, and now a seeming lack of decision-making skill other than the kind that would have her end up standing in front of the Council of Station Agents.

Problems. Lots of problems.

And Nick. And his eyes. And his body. And those hands.

If only he weren’t such a good kisser. She was going to have to put his mouth up on the same pedestal with egg rolls and linguini with clams, all things she’d miss so freakin’ bad.

Game face.

The tables in the courtyard were polished to a high sheen, obsessively so. There wasn’t a streak in sight. In the tables’ reflection, Velvet could see the grid of ropes and hoses strung from the balconies, stripped free of clothes and rags. The bubbles of gaslight were dimmed to a mute flutter, and beyond that was the streaked glare of passing souls. The chairs were pushed up under the tables with precision, like someone had had all the time in the world—which they just might—a nasty case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a ruler.