M&Ms pelted me painfully. I jumped around, trying to dodge them, and flailing my arms to knock them away. I didn’t see Hannah because I was too busy protecting my face from candy coated missiles.
“You. Are. A. Giant. Bag.” Apparently, she had not yet reached warm fuzzy reconciliation mode.
“Ow! I’m sorry. Quit it.”
There was a momentary lapse in abuse. I thought she’d accepted my apology but I heard a crinkle, and candy once more flew. “Did you stock up just to attack me?!” I grabbed the corner of her comforter, held it up like a shield, and stretched out one hand, letting my palm glow. “I can hurt you.”
“Rule number one.” A pillow whacked against my head. “No hurting humans!”
Tentatively I lowered the blanket, wincing as she smacked me full in the face. “Is this because of the apocalypse?”
Hannah lowered the pillow. She glowered at me.
I held very still. In case she was going to pounce and tear my throat out.
She breathed heavily. But she looked as fabulously Hannah as ever. I noted that, while her jeans were a cuter cut that she used to wear pre-Pierce, she had on one of her punny science T-shirts, instead of the stylish tops she’d started to wear. This one read “Zoologists do it with animal instinct.”
I tamped down a hopeful smile. I wanted to believe that she’d put the shirt on for me. A nod to our pre-boyfriend, pre-goddess days. “I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Hannah scowled deeper. “I know that. Do you think I’m stupid? Because I’m not a high and mighty goddess?”
Right. Not mad about the apocalypse. “You’re worth a billion of any god.”
Her glare softened a bit, but her fingers tightened on the pillow.
I put every ounce of sincerity I had into my face. “Everything I said to you. It was horrible. I’m so so sorry. I’ll do anything to make it up to you.”
She gnawed on the corner of her top lip. At least she was thinking it over. Then she smacked me again. “You cut me out of your life. I was stuck here not knowing if my best friend was alive or dead.”
“You remembered me?”
She froze, the pillow held in mid air. “What? Of course I remembered you, idiot. We had a fight. I wasn’t lobotomized.”
I sank onto her bed, relieved beyond anything. “You don’t understand.”
I heard her clothes rustle as she sat back, waiting. “Then explain it to me.”
So I did. For the first time, I told her everything that had happened since the night Bethany stabbed me. Everything I had felt. All the way through my time in Hades. Into the rift and the burning garden.
I must have talked for hours. By the time I finished, we had moved to the cafeteria. Had eaten lunch and seen the room empty out. French fry remnants sat on the plates between us. I’d been fortified with caffeine and sugar.
Occasionally, a teacher wandered through. But they left Hannah and me alone. I guess she had some kind of free pass from classes today, since I was back.
It made me appreciate how supportive this school really was. I’m really home.
I looked at Hannah. I’m not sure what I was expecting from her. Sympathy or horror or forgiveness. Whatever it was, I certainly didn’t think she’d be staring at me like I was stupidest person ever. “Nice look.”
“That’s how I look at morons,” she said. “And you’re the poster child.”
I kicked at her leg. “For what?”
She kicked me back. “Not believing in yourself. Not loving yourself. Gawd, Sophie, it took you almost getting killed to realize that?” She tossed her hair out of her face. “Pathetic.” But she said it with love.
A laugh bubbled out of me. Surprised. “Ingrate.”
“Annoying.” She tossed a fry at me. “And I get the last word because you were really really mean to me.”
I could live with that.
“Are you gonna move your stuff back in or what?” Hannah was back to glowering.
“Yeah. Give me five seconds. Jeez.”
Hannah pushed her chair back. “I want to hit biology class. But you’re here now, right? For good?”
“Yeah.”
She stood.
I did too. Then the two of us rushed each other in a mutual crushing hug. When she spoke, there was a waver in her voice. “Don’t ever do that again. Any of it.”
“Promise.”
I practically skipped up the stairs to our bedroom. I was giddy at the thought of unpacking. I flung open my door and skidded to a stop at the sight of Kai sitting on my mattress.
Man, he was in über poker-face mode. “I’ve been thinking about you and I,” he said.
“Okay.” Thinking about us was good.
“And how the two of us caused the apocalypse.”
My heart sank. That wasn’t the kind of thinking I wanted him to do. That was the kind of thinking that led to talks ending in, “I think we should just be friends.” Suddenly my skin felt like it was the wrong size.
I sat down across from him on Hannah’s bed, matching him perfectly in give-away-nothing blank expression, and waited.
He fidgeted, almost as if he were nervous.
That was sweet, but no way was he going to cute his way out of this. He’d come to me. And if he didn’t have anything genuine to say, then maybe there really was nothing left for us to say at all.
Under the sleeve of my sweater, I stroked a finger over my tattoo. My reminder that I’d be okay eventually, no matter what went down in the next few minutes. But also my hope for our love and happily-ever-after.
Kai watched me, but couldn’t see the tattoo. After a long, massively awkward silence, he spoke. “On a scale of one to ten, one being, ‘of course I could never hurt you, my beloved’, and ten being my imminent phospherocious destruction, where, exactly, do I stand?”
“Thirty seven.”
He nodded. “That’s pretty good. I thought you’d be angrier at me.”
I waited for something more. This time, I wasn’t giving him an inch.
Kai braced his hands on his lap. “Watching you, engulfed in the flames like that? It wasn’t just your death I saw. It was the death of this twisted thing that I’d been holding on to for so long.”
Whoa. I’d wanted genuine and this was as real as it had ever gotten with him. I kept still for fear of jolting him back into his usual mode of suck-ass communication and general disappearance.
He kept going. “I’ve spent so much of my life defining myself against my father that watching you, understanding what you were doing …” He looked directly into my eyes. “Yes, Sophie, I did understand the significance. I was furious. At you. I felt like you had wrested control away from me and were resolving the situation without any discussion about my place in it all.”
I twisted my hands together. “I kinda was. But I didn’t have a choice.”
“Let me finish,” he chided. “Overriding my anger, was fear. I was terrified you weren’t going to survive. Because it didn’t look like Theo had. Terrified that, even if you did, what would my purpose be then? How was I supposed to go take the Underworld from my father after that?”
“But you don’t have—”
He slid over beside me and clapped a hand over my mouth. “Like, five minutes without butting in?”
I nodded that I would be good.
He took his hand away. “When I saw you emerge from that fire unharmed and lit up with such joy when I felt so,” he growled in frustration, then sighed. “It was too much.”
I didn’t know how to interpret this. “But you came to find me here,” I said.
He straightened his shoulders. He was steadying himself. “Yeah. Because I realized that the main thing I felt was relief that you were alive. I want to be here. With you.”
Cautious delight. “You’re sure?”
He nodded. “Positive.” Kai kissed the tip of my nose. “Your turn. What happened after you jumped?”
I filled him in on my conversation with Kiki and all that had transpired in the garden. “You know, Persephone had been trying so hard to live up to a certain image of herself that it snapped her. But I was just as bad. I thought I’d been living my life, kinda giving Felicia the finger, but I hadn’t. Once all these other gods came into my life, my desire to be seen a certain way, to get validation in a certain way … It just got worse.”
I pursed my lips, thinking it over. “Ultimately, my big ‘whoa’ moment was realizing that everything I’d gone through just made me the best person I could be. I became whole. If that makes sense.”
“It does.” Kai pulled me onto his lap.
I leaned back into his strength, and his warmth, then twisted to face him. “Everything that was happening with Persephone? That was happening with me and sending spring into limbo …” I laughed at the look on his face. “Yeah, forgot to mention that. It was because we forced ourselves to fit all these ideas everyone had about us. In the end, though, it warped us. In Persephone’s case, to a point when she was willing to take everyone down because there was nothing left but her rage.”
I stroked Kai’s arm. “I hate that you got caught in that fallout.”
His eyes sparked. “I lived. Maybe it helped me figure stuff out in the end.”
“Hmm. Thing is, I’m probably going to spend the rest of my life figuring myself out, but it’s for me to figure out. Just me. I’m okay with that. I started out feeling like a nobody and ended up feeling like a—”
“Goddess?”
I shook my head. “No. Better.”
He nuzzled against my cheek. “I love you.”
“So much.”
He exhaled hard and grinned. “Good. Because who else would I match with?”
I scrunched up my nose. “Huh?”
Kai tugged up my sleeve, then his own. He brought our wrists together. Mine was palm down, his palm up. That made it easier to read: “All you need,” across mine, and “is love” across his.
Incredulous, I stared at our identical tattoos. Like down-to-the-ink-color identical. “When? How?” I turned his wrist over to examine the full inscription. No wonder Jennifer had been surprised when I’d asked for those words. She’d already tattooed them on Kai.
Kai linked our hands together. “A while after I left you in the garden. After all we did, good and bad, I finally accepted that I didn’t have to prove anything to my father anymore.” He smiled at me with the full wattage of his love. “He’s not the one I want to be important to. You’re my tree. My roots and my heart.”
Not going to cry. Not going to cry. I swiped at my eyes.
He cupped my jaw in his hands. “I want a life. Not an afterlife.”
With that, he leaned in and kissed me.
As I lost myself in his kiss, in his touch, my last coherent thought was that while I didn’t know what tomorrow held, it didn’t matter. I didn’t need a plan.
I had my friends and the guy who loved me. Life was pretty damn fabulous.
I was pretty damn fabulous.
And the kiss … well, let’s just say that fabulous didn’t even come close.
THE END
(a.k.a. Sophie’s and Kai’s Happily-Ever-After)