She scrambled to regain her composure. “Jace, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“No. You’re not sorry. Don’t be sorry.” He moved toward her, almost tripping over his feet—Jace, who never stumbled, never tripped over anything, never made an ungraceful move. His hands came up to cup her face; she felt the warmth of his fingertips, millimeters from her skin; knew she ought to pull away, but stood frozen, staring up at him. “You don’t understand,” he said. His voice shook. “I’ve never felt this way about anyone. I didn’t think I could. I thought—the way I grew up—my father—”
“To love is to destroy,” she said numbly. “I remember.”
“I thought that part of my heart was broken,” he said, and there was a look on his face as he spoke as if he were surprised to hear himself saying these words, saying my heart. “Forever. But you—”
“Jace. Don’t.” She reached up and covered his hand with hers, folding his fingers into her own. “It’s pointless.”
“That’s not true.” There was desperation in his voice. “If we both feel the same way—”
“It doesn’t matter what we feel. There’s nothing we can do.” She heard her voice as if a stranger were speaking: remote, miserable. “Where would we go to be together? How could we live?”
“We could keep it a secret.”
“People would find out. And I don’t want to lie to my family, do you?”
His reply was bitter. “What family? The Lightwoods hate me anyway.”
“No, they don’t. And I could never tell Luke. And my mother, what if she woke up, what would we say to her? This, what we want, it would be sickening to everyone we care about—”
“Sickening?” He dropped his hands from her face as if she’d pushed him away. He sounded stunned. “What we feel—what I feel—it’s sickening to you?”
She caught her breath at the look on his face. “Maybe,” she said in a whisper. “I don’t know.”
“Then you should have said that to begin with.”
“Jace—”
But he was gone from her, his expression shut and locked like a door. It was hard to believe he’d ever looked at her another way. “I’m sorry I said anything, then.” His voice was stiff, formal. “I won’t be kissing you again. You can count on that.”
Clary’s heart did a slow, purposeless somersault as he moved away from her, plucked a towel off the top of the dresser, and headed back toward the bathroom. “But—Jace, what are you doing?”
“Finishing my shower. And if you’ve made me run through all the hot water, I’ll be very annoyed.” He stepped into the bathroom, kicking the door shut behind him.
Clary collapsed onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling. It was as blank as Jace’s face had been before he turned his back on her. Rolling over, she realized she was lying on top of his blue shirt: It even smelled like him, like soap and smoke and coppery blood. Curling around it like she’d once curled around her favorite blanket when she was very small, she closed her eyes.
In the dream, she looked down on shimmering water, spread out below her like an endless mirror that reflected the night sky. And like a mirror, it was solid and hard, and she could walk on it. She walked, smelling night air and wet leaves and the smell of the city, glittering in the far distance like a faerie castle wreathed in lights—and where she walked, spiderwebbing cracks fissured out from her footsteps and slivers of glass splashed up like water.
