The room grows furious with cheering — Zara feels it in her body, louder than her pulse. Every time it surges, Adrian drives the kiss deeper.
Zara has kissed him a hundred times in rehearsal and a hundred more onstage. This feels different — hot and smothering and breathlessly wrong.
This is her life. Not the Aurelia.
And Leopold is right there behind them for the big reveal. He knew about this. He orchestrated it.
And then, over Adrian’s shoulder, she sees Eli standing in the wings. Not only is Eli wearing a dress, it’s the perfect one. Dark, fathomless blue with tiny points of silver. With her hair down, she looks like a wild night spread out over the sea.
Zara draws back from Adrian. A furious red has settled over Eli’s face. She rushes for the door, her combat boots peeking out below her gown.
In this moment, Zara doesn’t care about Leopold. About what he wants or what he’ll do to her.
She runs.
Eli slams through the backstage door, headed for the lobby. Zara left her coat at the coat check, and there’s no time to get it now because Eli is already passing through one of the triple front doors.
Zara hurries under the shattered light of the chandeliers. She picks the middle door, which turns out to be a mistake, the heavy old-fashioned fins of revolving brass and glass barely moving as she pushes. In front of the hotel, the night smacks into her like a careless stranger. Cold slides down her back. Wind takes the hem of her dress and waves it around.
Eli disappears around the corner.
Zara pitches forward in her borrowed heels, balanced like a tiny boat taking on ten-foot waves. She keeps her eyes on Eli’s gray coat as she steps into the street, crossing at almost a run, muttering under her breath — probably every swear she knows, in two languages. Zara has to stop at the intersection, where a stream of speeding taxis holds her to the curb.
“Eli!” Zara cries. “Eli!”
The taxis clear the intersection and Zara takes flight. Halfway across the avenue, she catches up.
Eli turns, a tight spin. “What?”
Zara wants to touch her, but she can tell it’s not allowed. Eli’s hands blink open with rapid fury.
“Why were you late?” Zara asks. As if that’s what matters, as if that’s why she kissed Adrian Ward.
“I couldn’t find my invitation, and then I remembered Roscoe put it with his,” Eli says, her words so heated that they’re almost melting together. “So I went back to the theater — yes, alone — I found the tickets in the booth with this note Roscoe wrote to himself. It said get a corsage to match her eyes, but then he crossed it out and wrote they don’t make dark-brown corsages, so just get something pretty. I spent half an hour crying on the floor. That pretty much catches us up.”
The light changes and cars speed at them in a solid line, horns and headlights bearing down. Zara and Eli run. When they make the far side of the street, Zara reaches for Eli’s hand.
“Look,” Eli says, snatching her fingers away, not stopping. “I know that kiss was about the play. Your career. Whatever. I know this is how things work. So you don’t even have to say it, okay?”
Zara doesn’t know what to do. She’s terrified of the Aurelia, and she’s terrified of losing it. She’s sick of how things work.
“Eli . . .”
“No,” she says, and the word is so hard, but her eyes are soft and starred with tears. “You don’t get to kiss me under the stage and then kiss Adrian Ward everywhere else. Maybe that would have been a good deal a long time ago, but I’m not doing it.”
“I didn’t know that was going to happen,” Zara says, leaning forward, everything in her trying to get back to Eli. “I stopped it. I left.”
“Too late,” Eli says.
Zara gulps cold air. She’s out of time. “I love you.”
She finally said it — not in her head, not on a stage. The words slipped out and hit Eli, and instead of a smile or a kiss or an I know or an I love you, too, Zara gets the world’s most frustrated sigh.
“Fuck,” Eli mutters, hands clutched to the opposite arms, holding herself together. “This is not the time you tell someone you love them.”
Zara feels a bitterness that has nothing to do with the cold. She messed this up in a single day. Ruined whatever could have happened between them. She can still see it — the beautiful possibility of them. Together.
She knows she should turn right around and go back to the gala. She could make up some story to keep Leopold from hurting her. Hurting Eli. Zara should tell him she needed to step outside, get some air. That would make sense to Leopold. What girl wouldn’t lose her head over Adrian Ward?
But the feelings Zara has been chasing since the day she found that ragged paperback of Echo and Ariston are right here, in a girl who made herself out of tattoos and abrupt laughs and every form of light.
Zara takes a step forward.
“What are you doing?” Eli asks.
“Telling the truth.”
When Zara kisses Eli, it starts as a little brush. One pass, then two. Eli’s lips are so hesitant that it hurts. Zara puts her hand to Eli’s face and tries another brush, a painter searching for the right stroke. She’s not going to let Eli go this easily. All Zara has to do is find the right kiss — the one that changes the story. Her hands grasp at Eli’s waist. And then Eli’s hand is on the back of her neck, soft and gasp-worthy.
Eli’s fingers rain down Zara’s bare shoulders, stroke the secretly soft inside of her elbows, work their way down to her hands, curling their fingers together. It’s perfect for a second, and then it’s not enough. Zara tugs at the collar of Eli’s coat. A hundred places on their bodies meet. Time melts, the way it does in the theater. The brightness behind Zara’s eyelids grows brighter, the shadows take on a velvet depth. Eli lets out a low sigh. Zara kisses her harder. Everything is heightened, everything is more.
Eli pulls back, letting her lips hover. There’s a tiny smile warming them. “What now?”
Zara sighs into Eli’s shoulder. “I don’t want to go back to the gala. And Kestrel’s apartment . . .”
Zara sketches a quick update about Kestrel throwing the glass at Carl, about her screaming, about the Xanax. Before she can stop herself, Zara asks, “Can I come home with you?”
“Ha!” Eli’s laugh is even better up close. It breaks things up — a moment away from the trouble at the Aurelia. An intermission laugh. “I was worried it would look shady if I asked you. But you asked me. So yes.”
Zara rushes in for another kiss. Eli is right there, her lips already warm. People part and flow around the two girls. They’ve made an island, a safe place to stand for a few moments before the city pushes them down the sidewalk and washes them away.