This Enchanting New World

Chapter 22

"Haven't we been here before?," I asked Calahan, raising an eyebrow.

"At least you're not punching me in the stomach this time," he answered, his voice dry in a manner that only he ever managed to perfect.

"Calahan, I really can't stop to talk. I'm going to be late for class and I....," my voice cracked. "I have a date. I can't keep seeing you." My eyes misted. "I'm so sorry. I have no idea what we have, but whatever it is, we have to let it go."

"I agree on that. I simply can't figure out how to do it. I didn't have a heart at all back on the Isle, and now it's small, but you take up all of it. And the worst part of it all is that I don't even know why. I truly don't understand what I'm feeling."

My heart ached, pulling me in two directions until I felt I could be torn apart.

"I don't either, but, Calahan, whatever it is, it isn't love."

He looked at me in a way that reminded me of the Isle, but that somehow slid over me like a waterfall off my shoulders.

"What would you know about love? You're trying to woo someone you don't love, just to be a queen again!," he quipped, throwing his hands into the air.

I took a wary step back, towards the closet door. My eyes widened and my chin quivered in utter shock.

"H-h-h...," I struggled to find the words. "How do you know about that?"

He gave a humorless, hollow laugh and a deadpan look.

"Really," he said, rolling his eyes. "It was easy to put the pieces together. You're rather predictable, you know."

"You take that back before I switch to dragon form and burn this room to the ground," I scowled, but my eyes glinted with playful mischief and the hint of a smile showed on my face.

"All I'm saying is that to love and not be loved in return is the worst feeling in the world, but to love and to be loved, Clarissa? That's the greatest feeling in the world."

"And you would know?," I inquired.

"No," he confessed. "But I know that's what other people say."

"You're not other people," I replied truthfully.

He gave a terrifying, wry smile. "Indeed I'm not."

"You're better," I hastily amended. "You're real."

He backed against a wall. 

"I can't do this," he trembled.

I looked at him in a new lens, like staring into a magic mirror.

"Do...," I pressed.

"This," he completed, gesturing between me and him.

"I can't do...this..either. Not if I want to be someone in this world. But the wicked side of me, the side of me that leads with the heart instead of the head, wants to anyway," I confessed.

"So neither of us can," he realized aloud, with the same hopeless resignation in his voice now as when he told me I wasn't in line to be queen.

"Maybe that's why we keep coming back," I replied insightfully, my eyes vacant.

His ice-blue, chilling eyes seemed to well up with tears. He went paler than a ghost, and his platinum locks stood on end like stalactites in a cave.

To me, he looked like a fairy tale gone wrong: stains of blood splashed against newly fallen snow, under cover of moonlit darkness.

"Something has you scarred," I probed. "Please, tell me what it is."

He turned away from me, blinking back tears and staring down at his feet, head bowed.

From anyone else, except maybe Mal, Goth, or Dizzy, I would have taken the gesture as a sign of respect for royalty and look back on it with great satisfaction, but from Calahan, the boy who had blurred those lines, the only person in Auradon who still treated me the way I had been on the Isle- and knew how much that had touched me- it was disheartening and cruel irony.

I looked deep into his eyes and their fragile sheen of glittering ice, placing a delicate but firm hand on his shoulder.

"I shared my  deepest insecurities with you," I reminded him.

He gave a sigh that was deeper and more soulful than any I had heard or heaved in my life. It was a sigh from the heart.

"You already know who my father is- Claude Frollo," he smiled ruefully. 

The smile faded as quickly as it came.

"But you don't know my mother," he added cryptically, still not wanting to get into detail, "Esmerelda."

I clapped my hands over my mouth to contain my scream.