Nox

"Carve your name into my arm

Instead of stressed, I lie in shards

Cuz there's nothing else to do

Every me and every you. . ."

—Placebo, "Every Me, Every You"

Chapter Eight - Don't Touch the Glass

    Katie was seated almost exactly mirroring Draco in every way she could. She had the look of the cat that swallowed the canary, and on her lips played a twisted little smile not befitting a tiny, fairy-like person such as herself. Her hair was much longer than Hermione remembered, so she supposed it hadn't been cut in seven years (which is an awfully long time never to get a haircut, but when you're supposed to be dead, haircuts aren't a high priority) and still had the same over-processed, straw-like texture. There was a flimsy white fibreglass chair in the cell with her, along with a straw pallet and a fluffy mint green blanket with the words Semper Fi Voldenatus embroidered on it in silver thread, with Voldenatus then crossed out with black thread. She sat backwards on the chair, leaning forward with her arms crossed on top the backrest and her chin resting on her arms. One gracefully arched strawberry blonde eyebrow was lifted at Draco expectantly, as though he was withholding a much-desired toy from her.

    "Well, where is my visitor?" she asked, suddenly finding herself impetuous.

    Draco cast her a suddenly disinterested glance from where he stood behind his chair. She pursed her lips in a pout, not liking being cast off so suddenly. Hermione looked at him, unexpected fear coursing through her veins that moment. She'd never dreamed she'd ever get to confront Katie again, having thought her to be as dead as Ginny. She didn't have a list of questions prepared; she didn't know what she could possibly say. Finally, she took the final step forward into Katie's line of vision.

    For a moment the two women just stared at each other, each examining the other. Hermione searched Katie's dark eyes for some shade of emotion but found none, while Katie hunted ravenously for identity and ultimately said in a low purr of a voice, "Hermione."

    Hermione allowed the muscles in her cheeks to relax into a sardonic smile, but one that she was certain didn't allow Katie satisfaction of any sort. "It is I," she said.

    Katie grinned. Her eyes travelled down to Hermione's throat, to the scar. Draco was long forgotten, and he knew it. Hermione took his chair while he leaned back against the wall to simply observe the two. "I gave you that scar. Am I still credited with the feat, sweet?" she asked, selecting a pet name that made the hair on the back of Hermione's neck stand up and made Draco's skin crawl.

    "Nobody else would dare try and kill me, Katie," Hermione replied succinctly. Katie gave her another sizing smirk. She blew a strand of hair out of her eye.

    "Yes, seeing as you're such high society and all." Katie's voice was mocking.

    Deliberately ignoring her tone, Hermione scoffed at the notion. "I'm just an exile; at least I'm not trying to pretend I'm dead."

    "You should be," Katie replied simply.

    "Maybe I should."

    Katie shifted on the chair, putting her arms down at her sides as she looked at Hermione with narrowed eyes and a gaze that would make lesser souls than Hermione quiver.

    Draco cleared his throat, drawing their attention to him for a moment. Hermione looked surprised that he was still there. "Katie, why'd you do it?" he asked, cutting straight to the point. She drew back from leaning on the back of the chair, a look of perfectly insincere surprise painted across her face. She made Hermione's stomach turn.

    "Do what, Draco?" she asked with her eyes large as saucers in mock innocence. For someone who could play dead as well as she, she was certainly a wretched actor.

    He groaned, glanced at Hermione then took out his wand and pointed it at Katie's forehead. "What does a Veritas curse do to you if cast on your head?" he asked her, the same strain of smile in his eyes. Katie looked briefly nervous, knowing very well the answer. "But on your chest, you'll be pouring answers out of that little concrete heart of yours, if you've even got that much."

    "It beats, ever beats, inside my chest, always beating," she said, the eerie tone of her voice adding to her aura of calm dementia. "Anyway, Draco, I want a cigarette."

    He laughed aloud, then looked to Hermione, who clucked her tongue in annoyance but dug into her pocket and produced the blue and white plastic-wrapped box.

    Katie looked positively delighted. "Granger smokes? I'm impressed."

    "They're Newports," said Hermione.

    "Works for me, sweet," Katie replied with a flippant shrug. Hermione tossed the cigarette between the bars and Katie caught it in a fist like a steel trap.

    "Anyway," Draco said, dusting imaginary dirt from his hands onto the lap of his pants, "shall we proceed with this undoubtedly fruitless venture?" Katie and Hermione both raised their eyebrows at him before resuming their staring contest. Hermione carefully threw up firewalls to block Katie from reading her, knowing her through her eyes. She leaned forward, bracing herself with her elbows on her knees and her chin rested on her hands.

    "Why Ginny?" she asked.

    "Granger, Granger, always the noblest one. Even Potter's fallen from grace now. Must you take up his torch?" Hermione wrinkled her brow in thought at the ambiguity.

    "That's not an answer to my question," she said.

    "No answer is also an answer," Katie replied coolly.

    "That wasn't no answer," Draco pointed out. Katie raised one finger on her right hand to him but never took her eyes off Hermione's. Draco gave her a pointed glare and then waved the wand at her menacingly. Katie sneered at him. He tapped his foot.

    Finally, he stepped forward, opened her cell door, and as Hermione watched in horror grabbed Katie by the throat. She seemed to enjoy the roughness of his gesture. He forced her mouth open and dripped a thin, clear liquid onto her tongue from a bottle neither woman had previously noticed had been in his palm. Katie coughed then shoved him off of her. "Fuck you, Draco. . ." she muttered, her voice trailing off as the potion began to take its effect on her.

    Draco smiled pleasantly to her, then exited the cell, allowing it to slam close again behind him. Hermione reasoned there were certain advanced locking charms in place that only allowed a select few to touch the bars, from the way the welded seams of the bars at the ceiling and floor and door hinges glowed faintly green. She didn't care to see the consequences if someone not cleared to touch the bars touched them.

    "Now, without the distraction of your own free will, Katie, please enlighten us on why you murdered Ginny Weasley."    

    "She was in the way," she said simply with a dismissive wave of the same hand she'd just used to make a rude gesture to Draco.

    "She was sixteen," Hermione countered. "How in the way could she have been?"

    "Did you know that there was one Arithmaniacal—"

    "That's not a word," Hermione said. Katie gave her a frigid glare. The Veritaserum didn't control facial expressions well. Draco supposed Katie just liked to insert 'maniacal' into her speech in any way she could.

    "—formula that would sidestep the Shrouding Charms the Dursley family had on them, would eliminate the protective barriers around Harry Potter's summer home?" At their surprised looks, Katie threw her head back in a menacingly insane laugh. "And Bill Weasley, former Gringotts employee, Hogwarts Arithmancy professor, and probably finest magi-mathematician since the last of Pythagoras' followers, was the ticket to working out the formula by inserting the proper variables. So I was dispatched to seduce him and get him to love me. Then, I would discreetly present parts of the formula and the variables to him in expectation that he would construct the perfect equation that would bring down the Light side."

    Hermione, aghast that anyone could plot something so dastardly against one of the nicest and most interesting Weasleys, looked away, at the floor near her left foot. Draco, having only ever met Bill Weasley in Arithmancy for that one year he taught it, persisted. "What went wrong?"

    "Bill was schizophrenic," she said simply, sitting down on the cold stone floor. "Even when I had him almost completely under my control, he would have a bout where he'd revert to being a whole different Bill Weasley who I had no control over. He was concerned about his little sister's safety and well-being and that usually took prevalence over the formula and equation and even me. But he got almost the entire equation complete before he realized it would lead to something he knew could never be released upon the world. He began to research the formula and he left his notes out on his desk one day before going to lunch. Ginny came to ask him a question and found the notes. There was something about me giving the formula to Bill in those notes."

    Hermione squeezed her eyes closed and choked back a whimper. She crushed her fingernails into the palms of her hands, forming crescents that went from white indents to violently, angrily red slashes ready to bleed with any more pressure. The expression, or lack of expression the Veritaserum brought over Katie's face unnerved her to the severest degree.

    "Then what?"

    "The little bitch approached me, down in the dungeons. I had been down there talking to Snape"—Hermione wasn't sure if she should have been pleased or not at the bête-noir in Katie's tone—"and was on my way back up when she grabbed me. I Obliviated her, of course, but it damaged her, and I was forced to AK her. You must understand. I was doing the humane thing by killing her."

    Suddenly, Draco took a step forward and stared hard at Katie. "She's got a Glamour on her, Hermione," he said furiously. Hermione leaned her face more towards Katie, who draped herself across he chair in that highly provocative way Hermione had been instructed to use at all costs when the client is. . .less than compliant. It was a sure-fire way to play with both the male emotions and the blood flow to certain areas of their anatomy.

    Within a moment of his speaking, "Deletrius," in a voice so imperceptibly low, Katie's body jerked violently. Her dark eyes widened, and she rolled herself over to cover her sudden nakedness. Hermione was unable to suppress a smirk from crossing her lips. Katie Bell, for all her evils, was shy of showing them what she truly looked like.

    "Oh, Katie, what's the matter?" Draco cooed mockingly. "Ist thou in a state of undress? Was thy mantle only a facade? Why should thee mislead thy captors so?"

    Katie made no answer. Why the Veritaserum had not forced an answer from her would never be known. Hermione tore her eyes away. The scene before her seemed to grow progressively more disturbing with each tick of the watch she had left in the drafty house in the capital city of a country across the ocean.

    Finally, Katie turned back towards them, her eyes heavy with something better left unidentified. Her hair swept down across her cheek, and then covering her body like a pale pinkish-orange curtain. "This isn't fun anymore," she said.

    "Finite Incantatem," Draco spat bitterly, pointing his wand more at the wall behind her. Her head snapped backwards, making a small cracking sound. Hermione cringed. Katie just laughed. She stretched her arms above her head. Draco must have known further questioning her in that manner was fruitless.

    He began to pace, a nervous habit he'd desperately been trying to break for several years. Relapses were still common.

    "Why did you choose such a blatant way of doing away with Ginny?" Draco asked. "Why something so. . .criminal?"

    "Crime is relative. What is sin to one is cake to another," she replied, her voice once again unaffected.

    Draco slammed his fist against the stone wall, its force reverberating through the walls and making the sconces lining the walls shudder. Hermione watched him with her brow furrowed. "So, Ginny's been AK'd, and is lying on the floor like a brick," Draco began. "What was going on inside your mind then? The Dark Detectors and wards were surely going off all around the castle."

    Katie gave him a smirk he would shudder at the memory of for years. It was the look one gives when one is trying to convey a complicated idea to an utter simpleton. "One would think. Then again, I chose the sealed dungeon where Ministry of Magic fugitives are taken for questioning." This statement was met with stares of confusion, which only caused her to laugh. "And when I sensed Hermione down in the dungeons. I felt like I needed someone to prove my work to. I figured, hey, one witness is no witness," Katie spat, her dark eyes reflecting contempt.

    "Then why did you try to kill Hermione?"

    Katie smiled smugly. The dancing torchlight cast shadows across her face. "In the cat's eye, all things belong to cats," she recited. "As I saw it, Harry Potter's best female friend, who if he had any brains at all would be lovesick over, was a perfect target, second to his actual girlfriend. When the opportunity presented itself, I ran with it."

    They sat back, digesting her words. But gaps remained; those oddly shaped emptinesses beat into their brains. Suddenly Hermione said in a low voice, "Explain Aveda Kedavra," she said.

    Looking delighted to be asked, Katie crossed one leg over the other and slanted her head forward. "It actually was created to be a defence spell, and also a remedy for severe burns. It's useful when dealing with dragons. Unfortunately, it also stops all bodily functions of what it is cast upon."

    "Why is it useful for dragons?" Draco asked, intrigued.

    "Because, silly, it liquefies the body when it is touched by flame. I simply melted away in my funeral pyre, not injured," she said with a laugh. "By then I was conscious, and I oozed away to a safe place where I could return to my human form." She took a new stance, shifting to sit up, crossing one ankle over the other.

    "What's it like to be liquid?" Everyone jumped as Ron approached. Draco seemed to be angry at himself for not seeing him approach.

    Katie shrugged, suddenly flippant. "I wouldn't expect you to understand," she said scathingly.

    Ron laughed hollowly. "I wouldn't expect you to over-exert yourself in telling the story," he said.

    "Because frankly, Scarlet, he don't give a damn," said Blaise as she approached. Only Hermione seemed to pick up on her joke. Padma trailed along behind, looking rather uneasy.

    "You killed Ginny," Hermione said simply. Katie looked at her funny, tilting her head to one side.

    "The innocent are more corruptible than the knowing," Katie replied with a shrug.

    And then it clicked. "What do you mean by that?" Draco asked.

    Katie seemed to realize what she'd said, and she backtracked. Though her pretense of irascible calm remained intact, Draco could see in her dark eyes the sudden panic. "Myself, I mean," she said. Blaise let a smile crowd her features, and she narrowed her eyes, though she had no idea why. "You remember, Granger, when I was just one of the Gryffindor Chasers, the afterthought of them at that? When I was still so innocent and cute?" Hermione nodded. "Well, then I graduated, and I went on a tour of Europe with a few others, visiting old Magical battlefields for a month. I lost a whole day while we were in Munich, near Grindelwald's headquarters. And then I returned home to start playing for the Tornadoes," she smiled. "And then I looked down at my left forearm, and there it was, white and so. . .ugly. I didn't know what exactly it was—I'd been under Imperius, you see." At this pronouncement, she looked down.

    "But soon, as it darkened on my skin like gangrene or the plague or a scar, it began making me evil. It darkened and hardened my heart, too." Then she sat up, her hair falling back and looked at them all, one by one. Everyone looked away. The sight of her body was too much. Not that she was ugly, because she wasn't. In fact, her skin was perfectly unblemished, and there wasn't a bit of fat to be found. But there it was, on the arm, the Dark Mark no one had bothered to comment on before. Even Bill had been oblivious of it when she was in his arms in an equal state of undress, even her teammates. Everyone.

    She was determined to make the ordeal turn back over to her favor. As revenge for seven years of living in hiding and running every time the Underministers got a lead on her, she turned her head away from Draco and Ron and Blaise. She ran her tongue over her lower lip, and then she delivered the cruelest words she could muster, directed at Hermione as their eyes locked onto each other, fathomless black on lifeless brown. "Why does everyone love this whore so much, anyway?" She looked towards Draco, and then Ron, and then back to Hermione. "What's her allure?" Hermione's eyes grew large and she choked back a sob.

    "Hey, she's not the one who's naked," said Blaise scathingly in Hermione's defense. Katie rolled her eyes.

    Then Hermione cleared her throat. "I don't know," she said slowly. "What is my so-called allure? Katie's right! All I am is a whore." Everyone in the corridor was stunned stupid. And then Hermione crumpled to the floor, and she cried.

    For a long moment, no one—not even Katie—moved. Then Draco, slowly as though he were trying to move through something as nonmalleable as molasses, stooped beside her and gathered her up, bringing her to her feet. She responded by listlessly burying her face into the breast of his robes.

    Katie shook her head, then looked from the pair, to Padma, to Ron, and finally to Blaise. Blaise's expression was the most unreadable, Katie found. There was a shadow of approval over whatever else her eyes labored with. Ron simply looked on Draco with jealousy, and Padma was forced to look away, her eyes hurt and her lips vanished between her teeth. She moved closer to Ron, their upper arms just touching.

    "Remember, Draco, don't touch the glass," Katie said, her voice rising to trill shrilly on the final word. Draco gazed over Hermione's head into her dark, untouchable eyes with scrutiny. The small brunette pressed her face harder into Draco's chest at the sound of Katie's voice. Ron drew Padma close. Blaise leaned back against the wall, unmoved by Katie for once.

    "What glass?" he asked, hardly daring to reveal he didn't understand her.

    Katie's face broke into an insincere Cheshire Cat grin. "Why, the glass you hold in your arms," she said in an outrageously bad Southern accent. "She might break, you know. But then again, don't let go." Katie's tone got darker. "She might recognize you and run away, leaving you there, helpless to find her."

    Draco gritted his teeth. Hermione drew back from him and twisted her head and shoulders to stare unabashedly at Katie. "What did I ever do to you?" she said softly.

    And for once, Katie was silent, looking at the dark stone floor from behind her curtain of hair.

*

    What was the exact allure of Hermione? Draco would ponder that for the next twenty years, constantly, even when he had possible answers and solutions so obvious they had to be faulty berating him.

    Hermione slowly gave up, as they stood wrapped up together. How long they stood, no one in that dungeon would ever be able to guess (and their guesses were varied indeed). The trauma of Katie was too much, even though Katie had drawn back and was now carefully brushing her long tresses. Her eyes closed and she departed from the conscious realm. Only mildly startled, Draco picked her up in his arms. He secured her against him and used one hand to support the back of her head to look at her face, the hard lines of her broken expression shadowed uncouthly in the torchlight. The others, save for Katie, were too horrified to even watch as he walked back up the corridor. Blaise was the first to look up at the sound of his feet on the stairs. Katie had put the brush down when Blaise laid eyes on her. Her long hair touched the dirty floor but she didn't seem to care. "I see," she mused in a weak voice. "A man surrounded by fools who cannot see his strength. His power. His glory. That burning baby fish swimming all around your head. . ." Blaise shook her head and followed Draco, not fully grasping the gravity of Katie's words.

    Just before Padma and Ron left as well, Katie sprang up and grabbed Padma's arm through the bars. "Remember," she said in a low, sweet voice to the former Ravenclaw's look of terror and revulsion, "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion." Then the fingers released and Padma literally ran from the cell, her blood frozen. Ron made no move to comfort her, lost in his own darkened thoughts. Once they were all gone, Katie laid back on the cold, dirty floor and released a such cackle that her back raised up off the floor. It would have made gooseflesh rise on a cadaver in a morgue, so high, bell-like, and evil.

*

    Draco's quarters were on the second floor. He and Blaise shared the floor. Narcissa kept the third, and the top floor was off-limits on Narcissa's request should Lucius ever decide to come back to Ireland.

    Lucius was a touchy subject in the Malfoy household. After the Final Battle in 1998, he'd moved to the house in Naples to garden his days away. He'd been accidentally stricken by the Dark Lord's last bright idea for torturing his enemies before murdering them. A Selective Severing Charm calibrated for destroying the larynx (Vox Severus!) had been cast by a fellow Death Eater at the Auror Lucius had been fighting (actually, defending himself against, because his wand was in the Auror's hand due to a speedy Expelliarmus!). However, the Auror ducked and Lucius was hit by the spell. Anyone who'd been there recalled the final sound Lucius Malfoy would ever make, a terrible scream like the pterodactyls of prehistory and the magnificent chimera in their shadowy halls. A proud, great man was destroyed. Yes, he was terrible; but great nonetheless. With the loss of his ability to speak, Lucius lost his ability to do wand magic because he was unable to speak incantations.

    Narcissa paid his way out of trouble, but he thanked her quite ungratefully by leaving the United Kingdom and moving to the family home in Naples. When, if at all, he wrote, he wrote in Italian or French, and Narcissa replied in the same language. His letters often seemed sullen and mismatched. And there was always a lengthy dissertation about some plant or another he was growing in his extensive rooftop greenhouse system or in the gardens. His current favorite project, in 2004, was a rare Muggle breed of clematis flower that bloomed in pale yellow (any yellow for a clematis is rare indeed) with fuchsia veins and minute white pistil and stamen. He almost never focused heavily on Muggle plants, but the clematis had caught his eye, much like the parasitic orchid and charming aster. He also always sent special seeds for Narcissa's famous moon garden, and marvelous flower seeds for the rest of the Malfoy gardens, such as bright orange Arelle, a flower not unlike the Muggle tulip, but with mild hallucinogenic properties and a usefulness in treating asthma. The mute herbologist he'd become was only a mellow, barely recognizable shadow of the terrifying, commanding man he'd been once upon a time.

    The halls of the manor were deathly silent when Draco reached the top of the stairs on his floor. Had she been awake, Hermione would have been chattering nonstop about the beautiful paintings and other priceless art that littered the house. Having grown up with it, Draco was quite unmoved by it anymore but Hermione would have behaved like a small wizard in a candy store.

    There were two main corridors on the second floor, both of which branched off from the top of the staircase. The left corridor was Blaise's, and Draco hadn't been down it since before she moved in. The right corridor was his. The first room off the corridor was completely empty but for a tarnished cauldron in the middle, a rickety table, a pile of moldy books, and a threadbare bed. It was the room Snape had stayed in during the war for protection, and Draco had never seen the point of reclaiming it. The next room was his old playroom, and it was filled with every toy an aristocratic young wizard could ever want. The next two rooms were connected, the wall between them removed. This space served as his storage room. And it was crammed with more junk than a thousand Burrows. Of course, in belonging to Draco Malfoy, it was also meticulously catalogued and organized alphabetically and numerically. A spacious, elegant bathroom opened off the end of the hallway with double doors. The right side of the hall had only three doors. The first was Draco's office and lounge. The second, his bedroom. The third didn't open and had never been opened since Draco could remember. When he'd asked Narcissa about it, she answered something vague about Janlen Malfoy, Draco's grandfather who died rather suspiciously three weeks before Draco's birth, but Draco didn't believe it. After he'd learnt the truth about his mother (Charlotte Zabini, that is), he had decided that room had belonged to Charlotte.

    His bedroom, where he carried her, was a surprisingly simple room. The walls were mainly bare and white plaster. The furniture was simple and terse, well-made but with the appearance of sub-standard quality. It was also painted white or left bare pine. The curtains that covered the three floor-to-ceiling windows were sage green linen with nice eggshell sheers underneath. The last lights of twilight were filtering through the sheers, casting a gray-gold light on the sage green comforter on the bed. A wardrobe stood in the corner, beside his old Hogwarts trunk. A cat with black-dappled fur lay languorously on the long white linen cushion that sat on top the trunk. There was a plush, deep white chair with sage green cushion beside the bed.

    He carefully set her in the chair, and turned to pull down the covers on a bed he hadn't slept in for a year for her. He himself planned on sleeping on the brown kid leather chaise in his office, under the luxurious cashmere blanket.

    As he was plumping the pillow, Hermione slowly opened her eyes, blinking in disbelief as the picture in front of her became clearer. The back pockets of expensive khaki pants half-peeked out from under a long black cotton shirt. For a moment, Hermione had no clue what she was looking at. Then it hit her. Or rather, stepped on her foot.

    "Ouch," she said. "That was my foot, Draco."

    He glanced over his shoulder. "Conscious now, I see," he said, examining her face. "And ignoring my arse. Granger, I'm hurt."

    She rolled her eyes and then squeezed them closed. "So what are you going to do about Katie?" she asked. He turned and sat on the edge of the bed. Testing what he could and couldn't do, he took her bony hands between his and rested on her knee. She didn't put on an outward response, so he figured she didn't care.

    "Don't know yet. Haven't talked to Ron yet."

    "Why not?" she asked, confused.

    "Because of you," he said. His eyes were light, which normally would have completely unnerved her. But just now, she didn't care what tone he said it with or what body language he put forth. She tore her gaze away from his.

    "This is all too much," she said finally in a strangled voice. He watched in alarm as her features started to disintegrate and her eyes reddened. And then, as he looked down at their hands clasped together, the tiny, bony, tan of hers enveloped between the large pale of his, he heard the last smooth breath leave her lips as she began to cry.

    Crying was something Hermione never did. And Draco had been the witness of the phenomenon twice in less than a week. He wasn't fully aware of the current situation until a hot tear dropped from her chin to his knuckles. The glassy droplet shattered into a thousand pieces, each bearing the same shape and color as the parent tear, but far more diminutive. He stared at the liquid that lay above the vein pulsing against his tendon before he raised his eyes back to hers.

    Without realizing fully what he was doing, Draco released her hands and pulled her close to him. Her body, he'd noted many times before, was wafer-thin. She couldn't have weighed ninety pounds wringing wet. And for several minutes, they stayed like that: the strong, narrow-hipped blonde wizard holding the emaciated and beautiful (in that tragically practiced and woefully oblivious way) brunette as she cried into his shirt. It obviously didn't matter to her anymore who he was (even he didn't really know anymore) or who he had been (the pointy-faced rat of a boy she'd known a million years earlier at Hogwarts).Not a word was spoken. The unspoken agreement between them restricted verbal communication.

    Then, long after the gray-gold light faded from the window and the room and the sky, to be replaced by a billion stars and the blackness of night, Hermione pulled back. His shirt, just above where the word 'I'm' was printed, was soaked with seven years worth of sorrow she didn't need to tell him about. It was all understood; it was all relative. He was nonjudgmental, which was exactly what she needed, though she didn't think so herself (she wanted to be told she was an idiot, that she was wrong and that Katie in all her insanely creepy observations was the one who was correct). She stared hard at his face, memorizing the unnoticeable puncture mark on his lower lip where he wore the ring on formal occasions, memorizing the pearly-white upside-down crescent-shaped scar under the outer corner of his right eye, committing every detail of his eyes and the black veins in the pewter. He stared back, too afraid to look away for fear she would simply vanish like the smoke of a cigarette on an exhale, dissipate like vapor was apt to do.

    And then, without any preamble, she kissed him. Not on the lips, as would have been romantically suggested, but on the vertex of his jawbone, just a centimeter from his neck. His breath was caught in his throat with the kiss. His eyes widened, but she didn't notice. She moved closer, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him again, this time on the extreme flank of his cheekbone, right in front of the tiny outcrop of cartilage before his left ear. And there was something far more intimate about those than any oral kiss. Something about the latter suddenly seemed futile and childish. He much preferred her manner of doing things.

    Just as he lowered her to the bed and returned the favor on the swell of her throat, Katie's words and his own additional concerns echoed in his mind:

    "Don't touch the glass, 'cause it might break. And then what? What will you have left but fractured memories and shattered remains?"