(Heart) Strings

Confusion swamps me. “I don’t… I mean… I told you…”

“Never mind.” He shakes his head, rubs a hand over his hair. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“I don’t know what you were thinking, either,” I tell him. “That’s kind of the point of a conversation.”

“Maybe.” He shrugs.

“Maybe? What does that mean?” I feel like I’m missing something important here, but I don’t have a clue what it is. Even worse, this damn amnesia makes it impossible to figure out.

This time when his eyes meet mine, there’s so much intensity there that my mouth goes desert dry. “It means I guess I saw what I wanted to see this afternoon.”

I don’t have a response to that, so I just stand there, watching him, even as a small frisson of…something works its way down my spine. I can’t identify it—and if I’m honest, I don’t want to—but it scares me a little. Even as it makes me more determined than ever to regain my memory of what happened in those three and a half missing months.

Because for a moment, during the whole magic-channeling portion of the afternoon, I realized that it didn’t feel absolutely awful having Hudson stand right behind me. In fact, it almost felt kind of…nice.

I shook the feeling off because just the idea is absurd, but now that he’s standing here in front of me, a vulnerable look in his eyes for the first time ever, I can’t help but wonder if this afternoon was an anomaly or a memory of a friendship so unimaginable that I’ve somehow managed to forget it.

“Hudson…”

“Don’t worry about it,” he tells me, and the softness that’s been here since he showed up this morning is effectively gone. As I watch the Hudson I’ve come to know and despise over the last few days come to the fore, I can’t decide if I’m relieved or sad. Or maybe a little of both…

“So why’d you decide to do laundry tonight, anyway? I thought you and Lover Boy would be cuddled up in his tower.”

“Is that why you stayed away?” I ask as I open up the dryer to check my clothes. Sadly, they’re still very much wet, but I grab a few things I don’t want to overdry and shrink and throw them in my basket before I close the door and flip the timer on again. “Because you wanted to give me some privacy?”

“I stayed away because I had some things I needed to do. But you dodged the question, which makes me wonder if there’s an actual reason you’re here doing laundry.” He narrows his eyes at me. “So spill.”

“It’s nothing.”

“You hate doing laundry, so I don’t believe for a minute that it’s nothing.” He snatches my favorite sweatshirt out of the dryer and dangles it just out of my reach. “Spill or you’ll never see this hoodie alive again.”

“It’s nothing,” I tell him a second time. Then screech a little as he balls my damp hoodie up and prepares to make a three-pointer into the trash can.

“Last chance, Grace.”

“Okay, fine. I’m nervous.”

“Nervous?” He looks confused as he lowers the hoodie. “About what?”

“We’re all supposed to meet tomorrow morning on the practice field and start preparing for Ludares. I’m supposed to try to fly for the first time, and I have no idea how that’s going to work. Or even if I’ll be able to turn into a gargoyle. Everyone else will be doing their thing, and I’m either going to be a useless human or an even more useless statue.”

Hudson laughs. He actually laughs, and I have the sudden urge to punch him.

“Thanks,” I tell him with the nastiest glare I can muster. “You pushed me to tell you, and now you’re laughing at me. You suck.”

“I’m not laughing at you, Grace,” he manages to say between laughs. “I’m… Yeah, I can’t even lie with a straight face. I’m totally laughing at you.”

“You know, this may be funny to you, but if we don’t do well as a team, we don’t get the bloodstone. If we don’t get the bloodstone, we don’t find a way to free you and you’re stuck inside me forever until, you know, we both die. So I have no clue why you’re so amused.”

“I’m amused,” he answers with a shake of his head, “because you’re going to do fine.”

“You don’t know that—”

“I do know it, and you would, too, if you would just get out of your head for a minute and let yourself breathe.”

“I’m trying to get out of my damn head!” I fire back. “So sorry that I’m struggling with it, but it’s kind of hard to do with you in here demanding my attention all the time! It’s even harder to do when I can’t remember anything. I don’t know what I can do, so how can I have any faith in myself? How can I ‘breathe’?”

“Yeah, well, I know what you can do. I’m the one who was trapped with Gargoyle Grace for more than a hundred days, and I’m the one who remembers every damn minute of it. So listen to me, stop worrying, and just trust your instincts. You’re going to do great.”

His words give me pause, precisely because they aren’t the ones I expected him—or anyone—to say. “What does that mean?” I ask after several seconds pass. “When you say you were there, what does that mean?”

“It means four months is a long time to just stand around somewhere.” He shifts uncomfortably. “We weren’t just frozen in time while you were gone, Grace. You were a gargoyle, and one of the things you spent that time doing was figuring out what that means.”

His words have my hands trembling and my heart pounding triple-time as I realize he knows more about me than I ever imagined.

I guess I thought we were enemies when we were together, but he makes it sound like that wasn’t the case. Or at least, not the whole case.

Did we talk? Did we laugh? Did we fight? The latter seems the most likely, but the look in his eyes doesn’t make it seem like he hated every second. “You remember what I was doing during those months?” I whisper.

For the first time, he looks wary, like he’s afraid he’s said too much.

And I get it, I do. I know everyone is worried that I have to find my memories in my own time, but I just want to know now.

He doesn’t answer my question, but he does say something even more interesting. “You love being a gargoyle.”

Now his words have my palms dampening and my stomach roiling with excitement. “What did I learn?” I ask.

The need to know is a physical ache inside me.

“What can I do?” I ask him.

“Pretty much anything you want to,” he finally answers. “And if you want to prove it to yourself, you could just shift right here. There’s plenty of room.”

“What do you mean? Here here?” I ask, looking around. “Where anyone could come in?”

“I guarantee you, Grace, no one is coming in. You’re the only one in the entire school doing your laundry on a Saturday night. Honestly, I don’t know whether to be impressed or embarrassed for you.”

“Wow.” I glare at him. “That’s a great way to motivate someone.”

“It’s not my job to motivate you,” he shoots back. “That’s your job. I’m the enemy, if you remember correctly.”

“I do remember,” I snap. “And if I didn’t, God knows it would only take a minute with you to figure it out.”

“Exactly.” He looks me over with that cold smile of his that doesn’t quite meet his eyes. “Now, are you going to do something, or are we just going to stand around here all night while you feel sorry for yourself?”

Those words piss me off more than any others he might have used, and I have to force myself not to scream when I answer, “I’m not feeling sorry for myself!”

He looks me over from head to toe and says, “Okay.”

That’s it. Just a simple okay—and somehow he has me seeing red. “What do I need to do?” I grit my teeth, hating having to ask him. But pride is one thing. Naïveté is another. “What do I have to do to shift?”

“You’ve already got the answer to that.”

“Yeah, but I can’t remember the answer! So will you please help me out instead of just standing there voicing platitudes in my head?” I throw my hands wide in the air.

For long seconds, he looks torn. Like he doesn’t know how much to say. But eventually his need to get the hell out of my head must supersede everything else, because he says, “You told me once that being a gargoyle was the most natural thing in the world for you. Like, you couldn’t imagine how you’d spent seventeen years of your life not feeling it, because it felt like home.”

I roll his words around in my mind, weighing them against everything that I’m feeling now, and they make no sense. “I really said that?”

“You really did.”

How did I go from that to feeling like being a gargoyle is the most unnatural thing in the world for me? Could I really forget that much, I wonder, even as I stand in the middle of the room with my eyes closed and try to look inside myself.

But there’s nothing to see, except the yawning emptiness that has been there all along. “This is hopeless.”

Hudson shakes his head and reaches down to pick up my hands. “You’re trying too hard.” Our gazes meet, and I get lost in the tumultuous blue waves in his eyes. “You don’t have to learn how to be a gargoyle. You are one. It’s a part of you, of who you are. And no matter what—no one can take that from you.”

I feel like he’s talking about more than just my being a gargoyle. “What does that—”

He stops me. “Not now,” he says. “For now, close your eyes.” He waits until I do before continuing. “Take a deep breath, let it out. And reach for that part of yourself that’s hidden. The part you keep a secret from everyone else.”