“Oh, my God, are you five?” I said. “Give it back.”
Instead, he clamped one of his large hands down on my shoulder, keeping me an arm’s length away as he skimmed the passage I was reading. My heart skipped as his fingers tensed against my skin, the heat of his palm soaking through the lace cap sleeve. I didn’t like the way his touch buzzed through my body. He’d probably touched a hundred women who’d melted from it. I wasn’t going to add my name to that list.
“Is that why your hair looks like that?” he asked. He kept the book high and far away, and it was easy for him to hold me in place, no matter how I struggled. “I get it. Medusa was always my favorite too.”
I choked on a breath and jerked to a stop. “What?”
“I assume you’re a fan. With that green hair and those red lips, you sort of look like her.”
My heart banged in my chest, a side effect of the anger bubbling in my bloodstream. Had he just called me ugly? “Actually,” I snapped, “in most versions of the story, Medusa was beautiful.”
“I know that.” He looked at me strangely. “Do you . . . not think you’re beautiful?”
Wait, what?
He didn’t think I was ugly, but beautiful? The floor beneath my feet softened, and I struggled to stand on this newly uneven ground. I could handle Royce treating me a variety of ways. He could be indifferent, or annoying, or even cruel, but he’d never been nice before.
It was unsettling.
He’d sounded sincere, but I refused to believe it. He was working some angle, and I just hadn’t figured it out yet. I had to regroup.
“What I meant,” I said, “is that in the original versions, she was gorgeous. But once she became a symbol for feminist rage, men retold the story and made her ugly. I assumed that was the version you’d know.”
His hand slipped from my shoulder, and I was cold in the absence of his touch. His eyebrows tugged together. “Feminist rage?”
I was vaguely aware this was a ridiculous conversation to be having, but my mouth ran away with itself. “Yeah. She was raped by Poseidon, and after that she could turn any man who looked at her into stone.” I reached for the book. “Not women,” I clarified. “She only used her power on men.”
I tugged the book gently, but Royce wouldn’t release it. “Interesting.” He cocked his head to the side, and his icy eyes sharpened. “So, you are Medusa.” A smile tilted on his lips. “It was temporary, but you turned me to stone just now.”
My mind went blank. “What?”
“Do you have any idea how long I was standing there, watching you?”
And with that, he let go of the book. The sudden lack of resistance, or perhaps it was the seriousness in his expression, left me stumbling backward. This version of Royce was lethal. He’d sold it well enough for me to believe him.
But only for a single breath.
The idea of my beauty turning this man into stone, the one who could have nearly any woman he wanted, fluttered in my belly. And then it soured and crashed to my toes. He wasn’t really a man, but an entitled brat, and it was just a line. I knew better. His favorite toys growing up were the ones that lived and breathed and had feelings that could be manipulated.
I wasn’t going to be his plaything tonight.
“Did you forget which Northcott sister you’re talking to?” I tightened my grip on the edges of my book. “Save your attempts at being charming for Emily.”
It was like I’d unexpectedly punched the hollow laugh from him. “I’m not attempting to be charming. And, Jesus, what happened to you? I don’t remember you being so prickly before.”
“Really? I’m amazed you remember anything at all about a nobody like me.”
The half-smile on his lips froze and his shoulders stiffened. His reaction was probably as close to embarrassment as he got.
“You remember saying that, I guess,” I said.
He let out a long sigh.
Back when I’d been a sophomore in high school, I’d begged Emily to let me tag along to some crappy dive bar on the outskirts of town. It had been a school night in the middle of the week. The bar agreed not to serve liquor until after ten to allow the group of kids from Cape Hill Prep, who had formed a shitty band, to perform for an underage crowd. Emily had been dating the drummer—who had zero fucking rhythm—and we’d stood in the crowd sipping sodas as her friends fumbled their way through a pathetic set of five songs.
I still remembered standing on the sticky floor in the dark, in a place I wasn’t usually allowed to go. The too-loud guitars and muddled music vibrated in my chest as the band covered songs and butchered them, and I thought up to that point it was the coolest moment of my life. All the popular kids were there, swaying to the haphazard beat, and I’d been included. For the first time, I felt like part of something.