Jace’s point of view of his first kiss
with Clary.
I kissed your lips and broke your heart.
—U2 - Until the End of the World
—U2 - Until the End of the World
The Institute’s bell begins to toll,
the deep loud heartbeat of the apex of the night.
Jace sets his knife down. It’s a
neat little pocketknife, bone-handled, that Alec gave him when they became parabatai.
He’s used it constantly and the grip is worn smooth from the pressure of his
fingers.
“Midnight,” he says. He can feel
Clary beside him, sitting back amongst the remains of their picnic, her
breathing soft in the cool, leaf-smelling air of the greenhouse. He doesn’t
look at her, but straight ahead, at the shining closed buds of the medianox
plant. He isn’t sure why he doesn’t want to look at her. He remembers the first
time he saw the flower bloom, during horticulture class, sitting on a stone
bench with Alec and Izzy on either side of him, and Hodge’s fingers on the stem
of the blossom—he had woken them up at nearly midnight to show them the marvel,
a plant that normally grew only in Idris—and remembered his breath catching in
the wintery midnight air, at the sight of something so surprising and so
beautiful.
Alec and Isabelle had been interested
but not, he remembers, caught by the beauty of it as he had been. He was
worried even now, as the bells rang on, that Clary would be the same:
interested or even pleased, but not enchanted. He wanted her to feel the way he
had about the medianox, though he could not have said why.
A sound escapes her lips, a soft “Oh!”
The flower is blooming: opening like the birth of a star, all shimmering pollen
and white-gold petals. “Do they bloom every night?”
A wave of relief goes through him.
Her green eyes are shining, fixed on it. She is flexing her fingers
unconsciously, the way he has come to understand she does when she is wishing
she had a pen or pencils to capture the image of something in front of her.
Sometimes he wishes he could see as she did: see the world as a canvas to be
captured in paint, chalks and watercolors. Sometimes when she looks at him that
way he finds himself almost blushing; a feeling so strange he almost doesn’t
recognize it. Jace Wayland doesn’t blush.
“Happy birthday, Clarissa Fray,” he
says, and her mouth curves into a smile. “I have something for you.” He
fumbles, a little, reaching into his pocket, though he doesn’t think she
notices. When he presses the witchlight runestone into her hand, he is
conscious of how small her fingers are under his—delicate but strong, callused
from hours of holding pencils and paintbrushes. The calluses tickle his
fingertips. He wonders if contact with his skin speeds her pulse the way his
does when he touches hers.
Apparently not, because she draws
away from him, her expression showing only curiosity. “You know, when most
girls say they want a big rock, they don’t mean, you know, literally a big
rock.”
He smiles without meaning to. Which
is unusual in and of itself; usually only Alec or Isabelle can startle laughter
out of him. He had known Clary was brave the first time he’d met her—walking
into that room after Isabelle, unarmed and unprepared, took the kind of guts he
didn’t associate with mundanes—but the fact that she made him laugh still
surprised him. “Very amusing, my sarcastic friend. It’s not a rock, precisely.
All Shadowhunters have a witchlight rune-stone. It will bring you light even
among the darkest shadows of this world and others.” They were the same words
his father had spoken to him, upon giving him his first runestone. What
other worlds? Jace had asked, and his father had only laughed. There are
more worlds a breath away from this one than there are grains of sand on a
beach.
She smiles at him and makes a joke
about birthday presents, but he senses that she is touched; she slips the stone
into her pocket carefully. The medianox flower is already shedding
petals like a shower of stars, lighting her face with a soft illumination. “When
I was twelve, I wanted a tattoo,” she says. A strand of red hair falls across
her eyes; Jace fights the urge to reach out and push it back.
“Most Shadowhunters get their first
Marks at twelve. It must have been in your blood.”
“Maybe. Although I doubt most
Shadowhunters get a tattoo of Donatello from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
on their left shoulder.” She is smiling, in that way she does when she says
things that are totally inexplicable to him, as if she is fondly remembering.
It sends a jealous twinge sparking through his veins, though he isn’t even sure
what he is jealous of. Simon, who understands her references to a mundane world
Jace can never be a part of? The mundane world itself that she could one day
return to, leaving him and his universe of demons and hunters, scars and
battle, gratefully behind?
He clears his throat. “You wanted a
turtle on your shoulder?”
She nods, and her hair falls back
into place. “I wanted to cover my chicken pox scar.” She draws the strap of her
tank top aside. “See?”
And he sees: there is some sort of
mark on her shoulder, a scar, but he sees more than that: he sees the curve of
her collarbone, the light dusting freckles on her skin like a dusting of gold,
the downy curve of her shoulder, the pulse at the base of her throat. He sees
the shape of her mouth, her lips slightly parted. Her coppery lashes as she
lowers them. And he is swept through with a wave of desire, a kind he has never
experienced before. He’s desired girls before, certainly, and satisfied that
desire: he had always thought of it as hunger, a need for a sort of fuel that
the body wanted.
He has never felt desire like this,
a clean fire that burned away thought, that made his hands—not tremble,
exactly, but thrum with nervous energy. He tears his eyes away from her,
hastily. “It’s getting late,” he says. “We should go back downstairs.”
She looks at him, curiously, and he
cannot help the feeling that those green eyes can see through him. “Have you
and Isabelle ever dated?” she asks.
His heart is still pounding. He
doesn’t quite understand the question. “Isabelle?” he echoes. Isabelle? What
did Isabelle have to do with anything?
“Simon was wondering,” she says, and
he hates the way she says Simon’s name. He has never felt anything like this
before: anything that unnerved him like she does. He remembers coming to her in
that alleyway behind the coffee shop, the way he had wanted to draw her
outside, away from the dark-haired boy she was always with, into his world of
shadows. He had felt even then that she belonged where he did, not to the
mundane world where people weren’t real, where they passed just beyond his
vision like puppets on a stage. But this girl, with her green eyes that pinned
him like a butterfly, she was real. Like a voice heard in a dream, that you
know comes from the waking world, she was real, piercing the distance he has set
so carefully about himself like armor.
“The answer is no. I mean, there may
have been a time when one or the other of us considered it, but she’s almost a
sister to me. It would be strange.”
“You mean Isabelle and you never—”
“Never.”
“She hates me,” says Clary.
Despite everything, Jace almost
laughs; like a brother might, he takes a certain delight in observing Izzy when
she’s frustrated. “You just make her nervous, because she’s always been the
only girl in a crowd of adoring boys, and now she isn’t anymore.”
“But she’s so beautiful.”
“So are you,” Jace says,
automatically, and sees Clary’s expression change. He cannot read her face. It
is hardly as if he has never told a girl she’s beautiful before, but he can’t
remember a time it wasn’t calculated. That it was accidental. That it made him
feel like going to the training room and throwing knives, and kicking and
punching and fighting shadows until he was bloody and exhausted and if his skin
was flayed open, it was only in the way he was used to.
She just looks at him, quietly. The
training room it is, then.
“We should probably go downstairs,”
he says again.
“All right.” He can’t tell what she’s
thinking from her voice, either; his ability to read people seems to have
deserted him and he doesn’t understand why. Moonlight spears down through the
glass panes of the greenhouse as they make their way out, Clary slightly in
front of him. Something moves ahead of them—a white spark of light—and suddenly
she stops short and half-turns to him, already in the circle of his arm, and
she is warm and soft and delicate and he is kissing her.
And he is astonished. He doesn’t
work like this; his body doesn’t do things without his permission. It is his
instrument as much as the piano, and he has always been in perfect command of
it. But she tastes sweet, like apples and copper, and her body in his arms is
trembling. She is so small; his arms go around her, to steady her, and he is
lost. He understands now why kisses in movies are filmed the way they are, with
the camera endlessly circling, circling: the ground is unsteady under his feet
and he clings to her, small as she is, as if she could hold him up.
His palms smooth down her back. He
can feel her breathing against him; a gasp in between kisses. Her thin fingers
are in his hair, on the back of his neck, tangling gently, and he remembers the
medianox flower and the first time he saw it and thought: here is
something too beautiful to properly belong in this world.
The rush of wind is audible to him
first, trained as he is to hear it. He draws back from Clary and sees Hugo,
perched in the crook of a nearby dwarf cypress. His arms are still around
Clary, her weight light against him. Her eyes are half-closed. “Don’t panic,
but we’ve got an audience,” he whispers to her. “If Hugo’s here, Hodge won’t be
far behind. We should go.”
Her green eyes flutter all the way
open, and she looks amused. It pricks his ego slightly. After that kiss,
shouldn’t she be fainting at his feet? But she’s grinning. She wants to know if
Hodge is spying on them. He reassures her, but he feels her soft laughter
travel through their joined hands—how did that happen?—as they make their way
downstairs.
And he understands. He understands
why people hold hands: he’d always thought it was about possessiveness, saying This
is mine. But it’s about maintaining contact. It is about speaking without
words. It is about I want you with me and don’t go.
He wants her in his bedroom. And not
in that way—no girl has ever been in his bedroom that way. It is his private
space, his sanctuary. But he wants Clary there. He wants her to see him, the
reality of him, not the image he shows the world. He wants to lie down on the
bed with her and have her curl into him. He wants to hold her as she breathes
softly through the night; to see her as no one else sees her: vulnerable and
asleep. To see her and to be seen.
So when they reach her door, and she
thanks him for the birthday picnic, he still doesn’t let go of her hand. “Are
you going to sleep?”
She tilts her head up and he can see
that her mouth bears the imprint of his kisses: a flush of pink, like the
carnations in the greenhouse, and it knots his stomach. By the Angel, he
thinks, I am so . . .
“Aren’t you tired?” she asks,
breaking into his thoughts.
There is a hollow in the pit of his
stomach, a nervous edginess. He wants to pull her back to himself, to pour into
her everything he is feeling: his admiration, his new-born knowledge, his
devotion, his need. “I’ve never been more awake.”
She lifts her chin, a quick
unconscious movement, and he leans down, cupping her face with her free hand.
He doesn’t mean to kiss her here—too public, too easy to be interrupted—but he
can’t stop touching his mouth to hers lightly. Her lips part under his and he
leans into her and he can’t stop. I am so—
It was at precisely that moment that
Simon threw open the bedroom door and stepped out into the hall. And Clary
pulls away from him hastily, turning her head aside, and he feels it with the
sharp pain of a bandage ripped off his skin.
I am so screwed.
