Unravel Me: The Juliette Chronicles Book 2

child of nineteen! He is only one and we are many more!”
    The crowd is hushed, whispering amongst itself and I hear snippets of conversation and things like “naive” and “ridiculous” and “he’s going to get all of us killed!” but no one speaks up and I’m relieved. I can’t believe what I’m feeling right now and I wish I didn’t care at all about what happens to Warner.
    I wish I could want him dead. I wish I felt nothing for him.
    But I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.
    “How do you know?” someone asks. A new voice, a calm voice, a voice struggling to be rational.
    The voice sitting right beside me.
    Adam gets to his feet. Swallows, hard. Says, “How do you know he has a gift? Have you tested him?”
    And he looks at me, Castle looks at me, he stares at me as if to will me to speak and I feel like I’ve sucked all of the air out of this room, like I’ve been thrown into a vat of boiling water, like I will never find my heartbeat ever again and I am begging praying hoping and wishing he will not say the words he says next but he does.
    Of course he does.
    “Yes,” Castle says. “We know that he, like you, can touch Juliette.”

FIFTY-SIX
    It’s like spending 6 months just trying to inhale.
    It’s like forgetting how to move your muscles and reliving every nauseous moment in your life and struggling to get all the splinters out from underneath your skin. It’s like that one time you woke up and tripped down a rabbit hole and a blond girl in a blue dress kept asking you for directions but you couldn’t tell her, you had no idea, you kept trying to speak but your throat was full of rain clouds and it’s like someone has taken the ocean and filled it with silence and dumped it all over this room.
    It’s like this.
    No one is speaking. No one is moving. Everyone is staring.
    At me.
    At Adam.
    At Adam staring at me.
    His eyes are wide, blinking too fast, his features shifting in and out of confusion and anger and pain and confusion so much confusion and a touch of betrayal, of suspicion, of so much more confusion and an extra dose of pain and I’m gaping like a fish in the moments before it dies.
    I wish he would say something. I wish he would at least ask or accuse or demand something but he says nothing, he only studies me, stares at me, and I watch as the light goes out of his eyes, as the anger gives way to the pain and the extraordinary impossibility he must be experiencing right now and he sits down.
    He does not look in my direction.
    “Adam—”
    He’s up. He’s up. He’s up and he’s charging out of the room and I scramble to my feet, I chase him out the door and I hear the chaos erupt in my wake, the crowd dissolving into anger all over again and I almost slam right into him, I’m gasping and he spins around and he says
    “I don’t understand.” His eyes are so hurt, so deep, so blue.
    “Adam, I—”
    “He’s touched you.” It’s not a question. He can hardly meet my eyes and he looks almost embarrassed by the words he speaks next. “He’s touched your skin.”
    If only it were just that. If only it were that simple. If only I could get these currents out of my blood and Warner out of my head and why am I so confused
    “Juliette.”
    “Yes,” I tell him, I hardly move my lips. The answer to his nonquestion is yes.
    Adam touches his fingers to his mouth, looks up, looks away, makes a strange, disbelieving sound. “When?”
    I tell him.
    I tell him when it happened, how it all began, I tell him how I was wearing one of the dresses Warner always made me wear, how he was fighting to stop me before I jumped out the window, how his hand grazed my leg and how he touched me and nothing happened.
    I tell him how I tried to pretend it was all just a figment of my imagination until Warner caught us again.
    I don’t tell him how Warner told me he missed me, how he told me he loved me and he kissed me, how he kissed me with such wild, reckless intensity. I don’t tell him that I pretended to return Warner’s affections just so I could slip my hands under his coat to get the gun out of his inside pocket.
    I don’t tell him that I was surprised, shocked, even, at how it felt to be in his arms, and that I pushed away those strange feelings because I hated Warner, because I was so horrified that he’d shot Adam that I wanted to kill him.
    All Adam knows is that I almost did. That I almost killed Warner.
    And now Adam is blinking, digesting the words I’m telling him,