Normally, I'm careful. I pick my words with the utmost precision.

Becoming a lawyer flowed from my need to wield that verbal and linguistic dexterity. If I didn't, if I was careless, people got hurt. It'd been happening all my life.

It's the same way I approach being a Magisorcerer.

Normally, I don't mess up like this.

But I was buzzing, my mind still elsewhere, when I asked about the bell at Lisette's. And there was this... want to engage. To understand Kam just a bit better. I wanted to let the moment keep going — the moment in which we could pretend we were together.

So I was careless, and now — as always — I'm paying the price.

Jessica's pitching a plan that's all about damage control. It's smart, too. The press and paparazzi would eat it up. But next to me, I can practically feel the way that Kam's stomach lurches at the thought. She can't handle this.

Kam doesn't understand the scale of bad this will inevitably get, though, even if everything goes "well". I was called to my powers after another girl resigned in scandal.

She was fourteen, and had the gall to get up in a pap's face after he wouldn't leave her alone. The Guild apologized. To him.

And the girl before her joined the light two weeks in. It's so routine, they have a euphemism for it: "joined the light". Surviving to GirlCon isn't guaranteed. You don't get featured on any panels in Hall A that first year for that reason. That's why GirlCon exists — to celebrate veterans.

They don't call us that. They use other terms — "Senior Girl" and "Big Sister" — that soften and couch the violence we have to deal with, the losses we have to endure. By the time I'd been at this for three months, I'd collected enough broken bones and scars that I stopped wearing bikinis.

I stopped wearing anything that didn't cover most of my body, actually.

Nakedness isn't a thing I enjoy anymore. It hasn't been for a long time, but now? In this room, I feel more exposed than I was when I was grinding my bare pussy against Kam's tail.

I want to cover myself, but I can't.

All I can do is try to help Kam, to make this as easy as possible on her. It's what heroes do, after all: we make sacrifices to protect others. This sacrifice, though, feels cheap.

"I still have a husband," I say. It's the wrong thing to say, but now we're in the territory of "least wrong".

Jessica nods her head. "Yeah, I know. Which is why you two are gonna be—" she sighs, as if annoyed by her own idea "—gal pals."

Kam lets out a derisive snort. "Are you fucking kidding me? Gal pals?"

"Uh-huh!" Jessica chirps. "You're gonna go hang out, and be friends in front of the cameras."

"And what does she tell Rory? The guy's not stupid," Kam says, and it steals away my breath. She's defending him. His honor. His dignity.

I resolve to do what I should've from the start. "I'm going to tell him." There's no hesitance when I say it, and Kam seems as taken aback as I was a moment ago.

Moment of truth.

"He's been traveling because I've been distant. Colder than usual. I... I can tell he knows there's something going on, but I don't think he knows it's this," I explain, gesturing between Kam and I. "Or, was this," I add hastily, not wanting to presume Kam might take me back.

"How're you doing?" Kam inspects me as she asks it, her gaze burrowing so deep into me. She doesn't answer the question I wasn't asking, but she asks the question she knows we both need to talk about.

And it's why I love her, even if I can never, ever bring myself to say those words now.

And, because I love her, I'm going to spare her. "I've been okay," I say with a shrug. When Kam doesn't buy it, I change the subject — thankful that Jessica's still in the room to act as the moderator we so desperately needed on stage. "Kam has someone she's seeing. That won't complicate things?"

"You are?" Jessica asks.

"I am?" Kam echoes, furrowing her brow.

Annoyed heat rises in my face. How could she not remember? "The girl behind the bar, the one who was there when I—" I lean in close. "—teleported inside you," I whisper as quietly as I can muster.

I've been careless again.

I feel the shift in her mood like the air becoming charged just before lightning strikes, every cell in my body acutely aware of just how angry Kam is.

"Jessica, can I have a moment alone with Tiana?" The saccharine sweetness in Kam's voice tells me exactly what my body is telling me: danger.

"Just don't kill her," Jessica says with a shrug. She goes before I can ask for her to stay.

"Learned that one from you," Kam says.

"I remember."

"Her name is Lisette. She owns the fucking bar that you tracked me down at. The one you went to because you wanted something cheap and tawdry."

I take the body blow of her words. I deserve them. I deserve worse, actually, based on how acutely I can sense Kam's emotions. It's not just rage that I didn't recall Lisette's name.

It's pain, too. Unlike the bluntness of the anger, the pain is sharp and manifold — a thousand stinging points.

And under it all, I feel the way her yearning for me carves a deep valley into the core of everything good and decent she is. It leaves an aching want that I can't help but feel the urgent need to soothe. To make right what I've put wrong, again and again, by being so utterly fucking careless.

It's then that I realize, far too late, that things between us will never be as they were.

The moment we got on stage together, everything was different. I thought I'd just developed an understanding of who Kam was, but no.

Her Decay hadn't just bonded to me, but bonded me to her.

Affecting me.

Letting me feel her with an intensity I didn't realize could exist.

It's as though the whole of the convention center's dropped on my head. That's how crushing the weight of this realization is.

Kam looks stricken. I know it's because of me.

I know because I can feel her.

I can feel every inch of her confusion, and wonder, and fear.

And she can feel me.

Oh god.