Unearthly

He leads me over to his bed and I sit down. Then he grabs his desk chair and sits across from me, his eyes worried but steady, like he thinks he can take anything I have to dish out. He’s with me; that’s what his eyes say.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Yes. Kind of.”

There’s nothing left to do but tell him. “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m grounded.”

He looks confused. “For how long?”

“I don’t know,” I say miserably. “Mom wasn’t very specific. Indefinitely, I think.”

“But why? What did you do?”

“Uh—” How can I explain that it’s all because I turned Christian Prescott down for a date? That my mom is punishing me because I didn’t tell her about being Tucker’s girlfriend. Not that I hid it from her, exactly. I simply didn’t tell her, because I expected her to frown on the idea. Just not this much.

My face must betray something because Tucker says, “It’s me, isn’t it? Your mom doesn’t approve of me?”

I hate the hurt I detect in his voice. I hate looking at him and spotting the Avery brave face in his expression. This is so unfair. Tucker’s the type of guy most mothers would love their daughters to date. He’s respectful, polite, even downright chivalrous. Plus he doesn’t smoke, drink, or have any crazy piercings or tattoos. He’s golden.

But my mother doesn’t care about any of that. After she grounded me she told me that if I was a normal girl, she would have no problem with me dating Tucker Avery.

But I’m not a normal girl.

“Is this about Christian?” he asks.

“Sort of.” I sigh.

“What about him?”

“I’m supposed to be concentrating on Christian. My mom thinks you’re distracting me from that. Hence the grounding.” He deserves a better explanation, I know, but I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I didn’t want to feel like I’m cheating on him, when none of this is my choice, and that’s the way he’s looking at me now.

He’s quiet for another long moment.

“What do you think?” he asks then.

I hesitate. I don’t know any stories of angel-bloods who didn’t fulfill their purpose. I hardly know any stories about angel-bloods, period. For all I know they shriveled up and died if they failed. Mom certainly never presented me with another option. She always made it sound inevitable. What I was made for.

“I don’t know what to think,” I admit.

It’s the wrong answer. Tucker blows out a long breath.

“Sounds like we have to see other people. At least you do.”

“What?”

He turns away.

“You’re breaking up with me?” I stare at him, shock waves moving through me like an earthquake. He exhales, runs his fingers over his shortcropped hair, then looks back into my eyes.

“I think so.”

I stand up. “Tuck, no. I’ll figure it out. I’ll make it work, somehow.”

“Your mom doesn’t know, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“She doesn’t know that I know about you. That I know about the angel-bloods and all of that.”

I sigh and shake my head.

“And you’d get in even more trouble if she knew.”

“It doesn’t matter—”

“It does matter.” He starts to pace back and forth. “I’m not going to be the one who messes you up, Clara. I’m not going to stand in the way of you and your destiny.”

“Please. Don’t.”

“It’s going to be okay,” he says, I think more to himself than to me. “Maybe when this is all over, after the fire happens and you save him and all that, everything can go back to the way it was before.”

“Yeah,” I agree weakly. It will only be a few weeks, a month or two at the most until fire season’s over, and then the whole Christian thing will be done and I can go back to Tucker with nothing to stand between us ever again. Only I don’t believe that. I can’t. Something inside of me knows that if I go with Christian in the forest I’ll never be able to find my way back to Tucker. That it will be over, for good.

He’s not meeting my eyes anymore. “We’re young,” he says. “We’ve got lots of time to fall in love.”

* * *

I stay in bed for two days, the world without color, food without taste. It seems dumb, I know. Tucker’s only a boy. People get dumped; it’s a fact of life. It should have made me feel better that he hadn’t really wanted to dump me. He was trying to do the right thing. Wasn’t that what Christian said when he dumped Kay? I’m just trying to do the right thing. I can’t be what she needs. But I need Tucker. I miss him.