Paragon - Book I

Believe

Moonlight creeps across her arm and across the hand draped on her hip. Half her concentration goes to it, its weight, its warmth, the strange reassurance of it laying there.

What a fool I am, she thinks, head clearer than she would like as she picks out his outline in the darkness. What a damn fool.

Iaves snorts somewhere above her head, shifting on his cot with a discomforted sigh. He and Meg had entered an hour earlier, oblivious to their two friends tangled in sheets with their cots pushed next to each other.

What have I done? Allayria rues, searching the faint outline of Ben's cheekbones, his nose, the line of his jaw in the fractured light. Their barriers have been pulled apart, shattered, and there is no simple parting as friends now.

Why can I pretend to not be the Paragon—deceive you about my abilities and Skills, but not about this? she wonders, and her hand curls into a fist.

Maybe because the title has always felt like something hung on her, a plaque not of her choosing, not of her deepest self. Hiding it is simply shutting a door on a part of her to which strangers have no right.

Yes, being the Paragon complicates things, she reasons, but it doesn't make me who I really am.

It's not me. It's not really me.

But lying here on the cot, watching his chest rise and fall in sleep, she realizes that the jumble of feelings banging around in her chest and the emotions that had been painted across his face are real, and she doesn't have it in her to lie to him about it. With a different person this could be played off as a drunken mishap—a crazy, one-time mistake many eighteen-year-olds make, filed away and forgotten about over time.

Not Ben, she thinks—she knows in a way that feels like surrender. His smile seems to come to mind; the solid comfort of his hands cradling hers; the weight of his arms, shielding her from her darker thoughts.

I should have left the first night we got here. I should have left when you told me about that bow. I should leave now.

Ben shifts and his eyes open, fixing her with a stare as the light catches the grey blue in his irises. His thumb brushes against her hip bone and she shivers.

"Look at you," he says, and his admiration is mixed with an ache of sadness. "One tumble in the sheets and you're already working yourself up to leave." His hand shifts up, reaching out to cup her cheek.

She flushes, swallowing back her protest.

"Whatever secrets you have, whatever ghosts you're hiding from, it doesn't matter: I don't care," he whispers, his finger trailing down her neck, then in the valley between her breasts. "Tell me, don't tell me—I only want you here."

She wants to ask him if he really means it, but it seems like such an insult. Of course he means it: he's watching her with that clear, unwavering gaze. He's made up his mind.

"Just promise me you'll wait until the morning if you have to go," he whispers. "Give me a chance to say goodbye."

He traces the outline of her cheek and she looks at his tousled hair, and those inquisitive, vibrant eyes.

"I promise," she whispers back.

Hours later, dawn spills in as a warm orange glow, and Allayria traces circles on her stomach, watching the morning creep across the walls. Her slumber was at times deep and unmoving, then shifting and light, filled with spaces of conscious, drifting thinking, dreaming.

Her friends sleep around her, and she knows now she has to commit to this, commit to giving up being the Paragon. It's not so bad, really. It's not even like she liked it.