This wasn’t the Gansey she’d seen in the kitchen earlier; this was the Gansey she secretly called at night.
He didn’t ask where she wanted to go. They were not allowed to speak of this, so they said nothing at all.
The Camaro idled on the silent late-night street. She climbed in and slammed the door.
Gansey — heedless, wild Gansey — tore into another gear as soon as they were out of the neighborhood. He sent the car hurtling from stoplight to stoplight and then, when he got to the empty highway, he let the car frantically climb in speed, his hand a fist over the gearshift.
They were driving east, toward the mountains.
Blue turned on the radio and messed with Gansey’s music until she found something worth playing loudly. Then she wrestled down her window so that the air screamed over her. It was too cold for that, really, but Gansey reached in the backseat without taking his eyes off the road and dragged his overcoat to the front. She put it on, shivering when the silk lining chilled her bare legs. The collar smelled of him.
They didn’t speak.
The radio tripped and waltzed. The car roared. The wind buffeted inside the cab. Blue put her hand on top of Gansey’s and held it, white-knuckled. There wasn’t another soul on the road but them.
They drove to the mountains — up, up, and through the pass.
The peaks were black and forbidding in the half-light of the headlights, and when they reached the very highest point in the pass, Gansey’s fingers tightened beneath hers as he downshifted and hurtled the car around a U-turn back the way they had come.
They sped back to Henrietta, past eerily vacant parking lots of shops, past silent townhomes, past Aglionby, past downtown, past Henrietta. At the other side of town, he slid around a corner to the new, unused bypass: four pristine lanes of streetlight-lined road from nowhere to nowhere.
He pulled over here, and he took his coat from her, and they switched places. She slid the seat up as close to the wheel as it would go and stalled the car, and stalled it again. He put his hand on her knee, fingers on skin, lifeline touching bone, and kept her from letting the clutch out too quickly. The engine revved, strong and sure, and the car surged forward.
They didn’t speak.
The streetlights striped through the windshield as she made a pass up one side of the road, then turned and went the other way, again and again. The car was fearsome and willing — too much, too fast, everything all at once. The gearshift knocked under her fist when they were still and the gas pedal stuck and then surged when they were moving. Cool air from an under-dash vent whispered night air over her bare legs; heat from the thrumming engine burned the tops of her feet.
The sound: The sound alone was a monster, amplified when she could feel it vibrating in the gearshift, tugging at the steering wheel, roaring through her feet.
She was afraid of it until she hit the gas, and then her heart was pounding too hard to remember being afraid.
The Camaro was like Gansey tonight: terrifying and thrilling, willing to do whatever she asked.
She was bolder with each turn. For all its noise and posturing, the Pig was a generous teacher. It did not mind that Blue was a very short girl who had never driven a stick before. It did what it could.
She could not forget Gansey’s hand on her knee.
She pulled over.
She had thought it was such a simple thing to avoid kissing someone when she’d been with Adam. Her body had never known what to do. Now it knew. Her mouth didn’t care that it was cursed.
She turned to Gansey.
“Blue,” he warned, but his voice was chaotic. This close, his throat was scented with mint and wool sweater and vinyl car seat, and Gansey, just Gansey.
She said, “I just want to pretend. I want to pretend that I could.”
He breathed out.
What was a kiss without a kiss?
It was a tablecloth tugged from beneath a party service. Everything jumbled against everything else in just a few chaotic moments. Fingers in hair, hands cupping necks, mouths dragged on cheeks and chins in dangerous proximity.
They stopped, noses mashed against each other in the strange way that closeness required. She could feel his breath in her mouth.
“Maybe it wouldn’t hurt if I kiss you,” he whispered. “Maybe it’s only if you kiss me.”
They both swallowed at the same time, and the spell was broken. They both laughed, again at the same time, shakily.
“And then we never speak of it again,” Gansey said, mocking himself softly, and Blue was so glad of it, because she had played the words from that night over and over in her mind and wanted to know he had, too. Gently he tucked her hair behind her ears — this was a fool’s errand, because it had never been behind her ears to begin with and wouldn’t stay. But he did it again and again, and then he took out two mint leaves and put one in his mouth and one in hers.
She couldn’t tell if it was very late or if it had become very early.
And now the catastrophic joy was wearing off and reality was sinking back in. She could see now that he was very nearly that boy that she’d seen in the churchyard.
Tell him.
She rolled the mint leaf over and over her tongue. She felt shivery with cold or fatigue.
“Did you ever think of stopping before you found him?” she asked.
He looked bemused.
“Don’t give me that face,” she said. “I know that you have to find him. I’m not asking you to tell me why. I get that. But as it gets riskier, have you ever thought of stopping?”
He held her gaze, but his eyes had gone far away, pensive. He was weighing it, maybe, the cost of this quest versus his undying need to see his king. Then he was focused on her again.
He shook his head.
She slouched back and sighed big enough to make her lips go blbbphhbbbt. “Well, okay.”
“Are you afraid? Is that what you’re asking?”
“Don’t be stupid,” she replied.
“It’s okay if you are,” Gansey said. “This is only mine, in the end, and I don’t expect anyone else —”
“Don’t. Be. Stupid.” It was ridiculous; she didn’t even know if it was the search for Glendower that would kill him — any old hornet would do. She couldn’t tell him. Maura was right — it would just ruin the days he had left. Adam was right, too. They needed to find Glendower and ask for Gansey’s life. But how could she know this huge thing about him and not tell him? “We should go back.”
Now he exhaled, but he didn’t disagree. The clock in the Camaro didn’t work, but it had to be dangerously close to morning. They switched places; Blue curled again in his coat, feet up on the seat. As she tugged the collar up to cover her mouth and nose, she let herself imagine that this place was rightfully hers. That somehow Adam and Ronan already knew and were already okay with it. That her lips carried no threat. That Gansey was not going to die, that he wasn’t going to leave for Yale or Princeton, that all that mattered was that he had given her his coat with its wheatgrass and mint on the collar.
As they headed back into downtown, they spotted a shiny vehicle, undoubtedly a raven boy car, pulled over by the side of the road. It was glittering and astronomical in the streetlights.
The ugly feeling of reality nudged Blue again.
“What’s this —?” Gansey said.
“One of yours,” she replied.