Kisses
You know what I loved about the situation I was in?
Nothing.
Not even Magnus's glittery eye shadow could make me feel any better right then, and that was saying a lot. Right then, of course, meant when I was sitting on my bed in Amatis's house in Alicante, pondering about what kisses meant.
Jace had kissed me on my birthday, back in New York, but what did that mean? Was I just the closest female to him at the moment, or did he actually feel something? He had seemed pretty pissed when I'd started in with the dismissals after we'd bumped into Simon. Did all guys do that? I didn't know. Aw, Hell, what did I know? I swear, girls make perfect sense. Boys are the confusing ones.
Simon had kissed me because he said that he loved me; this, at least, I could understand. But I couldn't help but wish that he was my brother instead of Jace. Golden Boy would never feel like a relation to me, my flesh and blood, no matter how much he felt like a part of me sometimes.
Ah, the kiss at the Seelie court: legendarily awkward. Jace had told me that I was free to think of England if I liked, but in reality there was only a very small window available for thought process when he was…near me that way. I guess the very fact that he was kissing me should've sent my skin crawling, but what unnerved me was how much I enjoyed it. I shouldn't have. I really, really shouldn't have, but I cared about the blonde, sarcastic bastard that was my brother in a way that was far from sisterly. And if the way he acted afterward was any indication, I was sure he felt that way as well, at least back then. Ugh, he'd just looked so…destroyed. I couldn't believe that I, a little nerdy redhead with an art fetish, could make him feel anything at all. In any realm of normalcy, I would've made no impression whatsoever.
Well, I was a Shadowhunter. All normalcy has flown out the window.
Jace had kissed Aline- or she had kissed him; who knows? - back at the Penhallow's, which was quite the conundrum. First of all, Aline was a ho. Just felt the need to put that out there. Second, one moment Jace was eating her face (that rhymed!), and the next, he was yelling at me for basically everything under the sun that had gone wrong in the past few months. He could've just said, "And you started Swine Flu to boot!" As far as I could see, pregnancy was the only feasible cause for his mood swings.
I guess that brings me to Sebastian. Let me tell you: he was really good-looking, but an absolutely awful kisser. Maybe I'm a jerk for thinking it, but every single second his lips were on mine, a large section of my brain was comparing how he made me feel to how Jace made me feel. I was also, for the record, thinking about how I wouldn't be thinking (much less metacognizing) if it had been my brother I was with. So when I pulled away from Sebastian, telling him it didn't feel right, it was the absolute truth. I just had the feeling that he interpreted it in a different way.
So, there you have it: a girl and a boy who both cared about each other, and had each admitted it aloud at some point, who could never be together. Their only obstacle was the blood that ran through their veins.
Man, was I a lousy sister.