Chapter 9: Liar

I stopped thinking for about four minutes.

Then I started again, all at once, with his mouth on my neck and my hands inside his shirt.

The ER.

The study.

The pen I'd dropped three times.

I put both hands on his chest and pushed.

He stepped back right away.

His shirt was hanging open and his hair was a mess, and he looked, for the god of the dead, a little dazed.

"Six days," I said.

"Clary."

"Six days I've been walking around thinking you were under a spell. That you'd wake up one morning and hate me."

"I know."

"I sat on your lap and talked about the door. I said it was very romantic, the door."

The corner of his mouth moved.

"Don't," I said. "Don't you dare laugh."

"I'm not laughing."

"You're laughing with your face."

He fixed his face.

It took him a second.

"I told you I'd take you up at dawn," he said. "I did. I never said I was struck."

"You let me think it! You let me say it to you! You stood in an orchard and let me turn down a crown because I thought you'd been drugged!"

"Would you have come down here with me if you'd known I was choosing you?"

I opened my mouth.

I shut it.

"No," I said.

"No," he agreed.

"That doesn't make it okay."

"No," he said again, quieter. "It doesn't."

That took some of the wind out of me.

I'd been ready for a fight, and he just stood there under the blue lamps with his shirt open and let me be right.

I hate that.

"Okay," I said. "Rules."

"Rules."

"I make lists. It's what I do when I'm scared or mad. Right now I'm both."

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