This didn’t seem like something I should be talking about with Caspian’s sister. I mean, yes, he’d been a dick to me. But that didn’t mean I got to be a dick back.
I gave Ellery what I hoped was a suitably ironic look. “Right, because you’re such a bastion of normality.”
“I only hurt myself.”
I wasn’t sure how to begin to answer that.
But then she stood, shaking out her dress, and asked, “You really want to do stuff with me?”
“Why not?”
“He won’t like it.”
“He won’t care.”
She smiled, a thin half-moon of a smile, one side of her mouth pulling up a little farther than the other. “Come on, then.”
She held out her hand and I took it. Leather bands and chunky bracelets clung to her wrists, making them look thinner than ever, and her nails were bitten right down, painted with chipped black polish. She was too cold, too frail.
But, hey, at least someone in the Hart family was okay being touched by me.
Ellery took me to Harrods, which I still hadn’t got round to visiting, even though it was just over the road from where I lived. It was kind of dizzying in there. A Victorian wonderland of gilt and excess. The sort of place where you could buy tiaras for three hundred grand and chocolates for twenty quid each. It reminded me of a museum more than a department store, with its myriad rooms and echoing antechambers. The statuary. The Egyptian escalator.
Crazy shit. Beautiful and grotesque in equal measure.
A shop designed by Kubla bloody Khan.
We had oysters. At an oyster and champagne bar. Because, apparently, that was a thing.
Oysters were something else I’d never done. Never seen the point, since they looked like snot and—apparently—tasted of girls. Not that I had any objections to the second.
It turned out to be a lie anyway. They tasted purely, almost overwhelmingly, of the sea. Clean and rich and a little metallic.
I liked to think I was a pro at the swallowing thing—plenty of practice and all that—though I couldn’t help notice Ellery chewed. I didn’t know if she was trying to psych me out or if I was doing it wrong. Shifty glances at the people around me revealed a mixture of techniques and I felt this sharp and sudden pang that I wasn’t here with Caspian.
It would have been so romantic—sexy too—to share something like this with him. He probably knew exactly how to eat oysters. I imagined the curve of his palm beneath the whorled silver-gray shell as he held it to my lips. The slight roughness as I opened for him. Then the flood of flavor across my tongue like the rush of the waves to the shore.
God. I was being a terrible guest. About three melancholy thoughts from weeping into my Krug Grande Cuvée—which was a champagne I definitely recognized as expensive this time.
Somewhere around the third glass of it, I plucked up the courage to ask, “Why Ellery?”
“I didn’t like Eleanor.” She licked a trail of lemon juice from the heel of her palm.
Once again, I didn’t know what to say. I wondered if it was natural talent or an ability she nurtured. If she enjoyed capriciously dead-ending conversations or if it was just about control. Like maybe that was something else that ran in the fucking family.
“Hey, I”—she looked up suddenly, catching at me with her too-bright eyes—“forgot your name.”
I half wished I had the balls to take someone for oysters without having a clue who they were. And then to admit it right to their face without a trace of shame. “Arden. After the forest.”
“The forest?”
“The Shakespeare version, not the real one.”
There was a silence.
Then, with flat disbelief: “Your parents named you after a forest?”
“Well, it’s a magical forest. A place of transformation and self-discovery where boys are girls and girls are boys and love is love.”
