I just want to say thanks to everyone who has reviewed followed and favourited so far! You are all amazing!
Disclaimer: I don't own The Mortal Instruments, just the idea of trapping them in a bathroom and forcing them to go from there.
And the final chapter. . .
"How long has it been?" Simon asked anxiously, glancing around the room like a rat caught in a dark box it didn't know how to get out of.
Isabelle huffed an indignant sigh, leaning her head back against the wall. "How am I supposed to know, Simon?" She snapped back irritatedly. "You're the one with the watch that's making that infernal ticking noise."
Simon's hand came up to cover said watch in an unconscious gesture of defence, before he listened intently. Sure enough, the normally quiet ticking - though muffled by his hand - bounced off of the walls and was uncomfortably loud. "Compliments on your bathroom's acoustics," Simon muttered, but the annoyed comment he was about to follow up with dried in his throat at Isabelle's scorching glare.
He swallowed, then ducked his head apologetically.
"So how long has it been?" Isabelle asked, her tone slightly softer, but still with a wire of exasperation threaded through it.
Simon glanced down and squinted against the light bouncing off of the glass surface. "Um, ten minutes," he got out. Now the situation was sinking in, the realisation slapped him in the face and pierced his thoughts like a striking cobra. He was stuck in a bathroom with Isabelle Lightwood.
Was it hot in here all of a sudden? It felt hot. And there was clearly a shortage of oxygen. That was the only reason he was panting, and his heart pounding like he just ran a marathon. He swallowed.
Water. He needed water.
He strode over to the sink, his sudden action clearly startling Izzy, who raised an inquisitive eyebrow at him. He ignored it as he twisted the tap and filled his hands, trying to slurp up the liquid and getting half of it down his shirt in the process. Oh well; it was cooling him down anyway.
"Simon?" Came Isabelle's quizzical voice. He turned to see her lovely face grimacing in confusion, and he winced internally. His cheeks probably resembled the inside of a volcano. "What are you doing?"
"I thought it was hot it here," he rambled, thought that didn't make sense, because why was he shivering? "And I got really thirsty."
Isabelle pursed her lips and as always her disapproval hit him like a freight train, but then she bent over with a short laugh and said through her giggles, "You're such a dork."
His face still surely resembled the belly of a volcano, but his ears turned pink for an entirely different reason.
There was silence for a few of Simon's still frantic heartbeats, before Isabelle asked, "Has it really been ten minutes?"
He checked his watch. "Thirteen now."
Her lips pressed together again, and her nose scrunched up. "I swear it was not meant to take this long. . . Clary said she'd be in here in a second." She paused, then laughed. "That make out session she was going to have with Jace must be very heavy indeed."
The water he'd just drank seemed to resurface at the back of his throat as he gagged. "I do not need to know that, Iz," he said. "Clary's like a sister to me. I have drawn the line at Rebecca swooning to me over her boyfriends, and I know for a fact that Clary thinks that when Jon finally gets a girlfriend she'll keep well away from the details. You don't say that to siblings."
"Jace is like my brother," Isabelle pointed out, but she seemed slightly more relaxed than she had been earlier. He'd amused her: there was a slight curl at the edge of her mouth, and a touch of singsong laughter to her voice.
"Perhaps, but you're barely bothered by anything. You're like some sort of goddess. That, and you're the ultimate matchmaker. You don't care if someone gives to the details; in fact, you pester it out of them."
She flicked her hair in a mock self-flattering motion, and batted her eyelashes. However, her raven hair covered her face for the split second in which she wore her shy smile, so he missed it. She ducked her head to look at her bare feet, and smiled at him again through her lashes. Not a grin, not a smirk, but a real smile.
He felt a warm glow in his chest.
"Isabelle's smiling goofily right now," Clary informed Jace in a whisper.
"Shut up, I'm trying to listen."
Isabelle, in swift decisive movements that were about as different from Clary's clumsy motions as one could get, delicately perched on the side of the bathtub, leaving Simon to slide down the wall until he was sitting on the floor opposite her. It didn't escape his attention that they were in precisely the same positions as Clary and Jace had been when they were in there.
The moment the thought flitted across his mind, he regretted it. He glanced at the spot of floor where he'd seen Clary and Jace lying and kissing when he'd walked in earlier that day, and shuddered. He scrunched his eyes shut.
That was not an image he wanted in his head at this time.
"It's a shame really," Isabelle said, and Simon snapped his head up, so grateful that the image of Isabelle Lightwood was enough to burn out the last few sparse lingering traces of the horrible image previously burnt into his retinas.
"Huh?" He asked articulately, wondering if she'd said something he'd missed and instantly feeling ashamed.
Isabelle didn't look fazed, or like she'd even heard him. She just continued examining her nails with a sigh, like she was talking to herself. "It's a shame really. I was looking forward to getting to paint someone else's nails for once. I mean, I could do it on myself," she eyed the vials of nail varnish where they stood to attention on the small ledge like soldiers clad in bright uniforms. "But my current nail colour was done so perfectly, and I don't want to ruin them."
She stretched her hands and Simon saw what she meant: they were perfectly done with a shade of dark red that matched the ruby pendant she always kept tucked round her swan-like neck. The nails were long and slender, but smooth and sanded in a perfect curve. Tiny gold plastic jewels made patterns on them. One in particular that Simon recognised was an enkeli rune from the book series he and Clary had been briefly obsessed with a few weeks ago. In fact, as he swept his gaze over them a second time, they were all the runes from said series.
It was touching, he thought, that Isabelle, despite not sharing their passion for the series, had shown her support through her cosmetics. She loved her friends, just in a more subtle, harder to read way.
And there was that bitter word again: friends.
Simon scratched his head, feeling ashamed of himself for not being able to prevent himself from speaking, and opened his mouth to say, "You could paint my nails if you want."
Isabelle's mouth dropped open.
One second.
Two seconds.
Three seconds.
Four seconds.
Five seconds.
"You. Would. Like. Me. To. Paint. Your. Nails?" She asked, and in her tone was the same echoing disbelief that was written all over her face.
Very slowly, cursing his masochism all the way, he nodded, sure that he'd just sold his soul.
Only to have his gesture responded to with a squeal so deafening a banshee would be proud. Isabelle's shocked face melted into a beaming grin so wide Simon was concerned the skin at the corners of her lips would split. Then she was jumping up and down clapping, and Simon found that he couldn't regret whatever word vomit he'd just spewed, because it made her that happy.
He grimaced at the thought.
He was so screwed.
There was a deafening silence, broken only by Isabelle's shrieks. The two could hear them even without pressing their ears to the cracks of the door, and Clary winced in sympathy for Simon's ears.
Jace mouthed at her 'whipped'.
"Okay," Isabelle said, once she'd quieted down, uncertainty lacing her voice like she thought he would change his mind. "If you're sure."
Simon mentally kicked himself. Hard. Between the legs.
But the words fell out of his mouth anyway. "I'm sure." Because he couldn't deny that part of him - that fairly significant part of him - that just wanted to make her happy. "Knock yourself out."
He was rewarded for his stupidity - several times over - though, when her face burst into the widest grin he'd ever seen, as bright and brilliant and breath-taking to behold as the curve of the Earth. He grinned back, and then she swarmed him, instructing him in a sharp voice to sit, to take off his shoes, to spread his fingers. Then she was delicately leaping over him to open the bathroom cupboard and pull out a small transparent plastic bag that seemed to hold every shade of nail varnish under the sun.
She turned to Simon, and despite the undampened look of sheer delight on her face, her enthusiasm was starting to scare him a bit. He now empathised with Clary, and how many times she must have gone through this.
"Okay," she said, once they were both in a position she deemed suitable, with Simon's back to the wall and his legs bent so his feet lay flat on the floor, and with her sitting cross-legged opposite him, his knees forming a barrier between them. She twirled the thin handle to the bag round her finger, then dug around in it to pull out five small bottles: one a dark green, one a rich red, one a pale shell pink, one what looked like somewhere between bronze and gold, and one that was an attractive violet. "So, these are five colours that I got recently, and the whole reason I wanted Clary as a guinea pig was so I could test out what they actually looked like once dry. So which one do you want to test?"
Simon shook his head in bewilderment. "I don't know. . . Um. . . You decide," he cemented finally.
Isabelle raised an eyebrow. "You sure?" She said with a laugh, and there was wickedness in her face that promised nothing good for him, but again he damned himself for being a masochist and nodded, very very very slowly.
Then he spouted the most untrue statement in the world (at least on this, rather small and insignificant, scale): "I trust you."
"He is so going to regret that. He probably already is."
"Shut up for the last time! Ow! Don't elbow your boyfriend!"
Isabelle's grin only grew. "Okay then," she said calmly, gently picking up the green one and unscrewing the top. "Let's go."
He swallowed surreptitiously, even as she brought the brush up to his right hand, which was clamped in her left with an iron grip. The glide of the bristles over his nail was silent and smooth, yet he still held his breath for some strange reason. He relaxed as she lifted her hand to do a second coating, eyeing the colour critically, then blowing on it slightly.
Once the pink disc was painted green, giving the impression Simon had moss growing from his cuticles, Isabelle dropped his right hand and transferred her attention to his left. Simon wondered briefly why she'd only painted the nail on the fore finger before moving on, but his swallowed his protests, uncertain as to whether he would make it worse for himsef by arguing.
He dimly wondered why he was treating Isabelle like someone who might explode if she didn't get her way, but then he thought back to those amusing days when he'd seen her trying to persuade Clary to wear whatever item of clothing she'd deemed suitable. He decided that going up against that stubborn fire wasn't worth the bother. He'd get torched either way.
So he didn't argue when she gently but firmly encircled his left wrist with her long fingers, like she couldn't bear to be this close or touching him but acknowledged it was necessary to hold his hand still. The fingers gripping the brush shuddered slightly, a single drop of varnish falling to the floor like an emerald tear.
"So," Isabelle remarked cheerfully, and it was a cheer that remained violently at odds with her subtle discomfort as she swallowed against the silence. A slight sting emanated in Simon's chest. Did she not like being around him? He'd already suspected she only put up with him for Clary's sake. . . "How does it feel to see Clary with Jace?"
The question took him by surprise, and he stammered back. "How is it supposed to feel? I guess I'm happy for her, relieved that they're out of that painfully ignorant stage where they each threw alternating looks at each other, and slightly disgusted at the image of them making out on the floor right over there." He nodded at the tainted spot. "I can't get it out of my head. It was like watching Rebecca do something like that."
Isabelle raised one thin dark eyebrow. "I would've thought it would bother you more than mere disgust. More like jealousy." Her voice trembled ever so slightly on the word, as though she was realising how little she understood about him.
"No," he laughed out. "Not jealousy. I mean, I loved Clary once, but now I think I loved the idea of her. She was pretty and she was kind and she was dependable and safe. I guess I wanted to be able to trust the person I was in a relationship with, and always be able to understand what was going on."
"What changed?" She asked tentatively.
You came.
He wanted to say it, but he held his tongue. Jace had always been there, gazing obliviously at Clary when neither of them would notice, and she had always been there to gaze back. He'd known it even back then, and had hated the boy for it. If anything, that was what had sparked their passive aggressive hostility towards each other.
But then the Lightwoods had come to the school. Isabelle had made firm friends with Clary almost immediately, and Alec with Jace just as quickly, so there was less time for verbal sparring. Isabelle had been the first one to call Simon out on the futility of his infatuation, and slowly, unbeknownst to her, she'd been the one to help him get over it.
But he didn't say that. Instead, he admitted, "I've accepted that I love her like a sister - an annoying, short, stubborn little sister - and I guess I'll embrace love when it comes, as dangerous and unsafe as it may be."
Because Isabelle was nothing if not explosive.
The girl in question wore a small smile on her face as the tension in her shoulders eased, and Simon felt the sting in his chest dissipate to nothing at the softness in her usually sharp face. "That's beautiful," she said candidly. "Don't worry, I'm not going to start blubbering because it's just so touching and meaningful etcetera, etcetera. But it's true. Whoever you fall for is a lucky girl, even if she doesn't reciprocate your feelings."
Ignoring the fact that those words could potentially be a bad omen, Simon let them fill him with warmth. "Thanks," he said hesitantly. He paused, then barged onwards with that awkward tactlessness Clary and Isabelle had called him out on so many times. "Now I've spilled my soul, it's your turn."
She immediately tensed. "What?" She asked, wariness crawling around in her voice. Then she seemed to calm down and replied blithely, "What do you want to know?"
Simon shrugged, as though the gesture of casualness and normalcy might make him act normal. "I dunno. . . Who was your first crush?"
She turned bright red, and mumbled something unintelligible.
"What was that?" She looked just about ready to die of mortification - an astronomically strange look on her - so Simon tried to soften the atmosphere with a joke. "I apologise for the fact I don't have vampire hearing, could you repeat it?"
She smiled wanly, then admitted in a tone he still had to lean in to catch, "The Artful Dodger."
"What did she say?" Jace whispered. "I can't hear."
"I didn't hear either, but I know the answer." His girlfriend replied.
"How?!"
"She told me once."
"It sounds embarrassing. Tell me."
"No."
"Tell me!"
"Shut up and listen. Simon might let something slip if you're that desperate."
He huffed, but acquiesced.
Simon's eyes practically bugged out of his head. "You. . . what?"
A faint pink blush brushed her cheeks as she looked down, her unbound hair falling forwards to shield her face like it understood how much she wanted to hide in that moment. "You heard me. That guy Dodger from Oliver Twist."
"Why?"
She shrugged, tilting her head back; some of the blush had receded until it was just a memory as her face was revealed again and she regained her confidence. "Does anyone know why they have their first crush? He was smart, and he was friendly."
"He was also fictional."
She shrugged again. "As a kid, you don't care. You and Clary talk about those picture books and the people in them like they're real."
"It's called Manga."
"Whatever you say, Simon. Whatever you say."
He mock scowled at her, but she kept looking at him with that innocent gleam to her eyes and his frustration dissolved into bubbles of laughter, floating up his windpipe and turning the corners of his mouth up in a smile. There was a brief silence.
"Iz?"
"Hm?"
"How long do you think we'll be in here?"
A sigh. "I don't have a clue."
"Because sooner or later they'll have to notice we're missing." Simon pointedly out, half logic and half hope.
Isabelle snorted, jerking her hand at the sound and accidentally painting Simon's knuckles bright red, like she'd slashed a wound there, or dragged a cylinder of scarlet lipstick across his hand. "Hate to break it to you, Si, but Clary and Jace, and Alec and Magnus can get pretty distracted when they're alone together."
Simon's shoulders slumped. "We're never getting out of here."
"Not to mention the fact that Mum and Dad took Max out earlier today to the shops, so they won't be back for a few hours."
Simon groaned. "Stop! Stop killing my already non-existent optimism!"
"I'm just stating the facts."
A collective sigh reverberated around the room, and Simon gave up on the argument. He glanced down. "Are you done ye-" The sight dried the words in his throat. "Isabelle," he said through gritted teeth. "Why does it look like a unicorn pooped rainbows onto my hands?"
The girl only grinned.
The devil.
She'd used all five colours. The green had only been the start. Now two his ten fingernails were emerald, two crimson, two lilac, two gold, and two coral. She turned his hand into a freaking colour wheel.
"I told you I wanted to test out all of the colours!" She defended. "I wanted to see what they looked like once dry! And you're the one who agreed to this! Why on earth are you so angry?"
The redhead and the blonde listening at the door were silently laughing too hard to make a comment, even when Alec and Magnus cast them strange looks.
She was right. Why was he so angry? After all, he was the idiot who'd volunteered for this. She'd told him what was going to happen - and he should know anyway, considering all the horror stories Clary had told him about a makeover at Isabelle's hands.
And true, Eric and the rest of his band mates were so going to tease him for this. True, this was the most emasculating thing that had ever happened to him. True, he had no idea how long it would take before this varnish would fade.
But he'd done what she wanted, hadn't he? He'd brought it on himself.
He groaned, then leaned back and tilted his hand to bang it against the tiled bathroom wall. He was so whipped.
"You okay?" Isabelle asked with amusement.
"Fine," he scraped out, his eyes half shut. "Absolutely perfect." The syllables were clipped and meticulously picked apart in his mouth. He lifted his lids a fraction to observe Isabelle's confused - and was that hurt? - expression. To his annoyance, his heart stuttered in his chest.
"You don't have to lie to me, you know," she said, and her voice was suddenly harder, slightly offended. He watched through his eyelashes as she drew herself up imperiously and huffed like a peacock with ruffled feathers. "You can just tell me if you don't like it, then I'll take it off. I told you, I just wanted to test it was the right colour. You don't have to treat me like I'm made of glass. I won't break."
"I know you won't," he hastened to reassure her. "I just didn't want to disappoint you."
A pause. A breathless pause. "Oh." Came the faint sigh, like the breath had been knocked out of her with a soft thud. She swallowed, then smiled. It was barely an awkward flash of teeth, but it warmed his core anyway, and seemed to give off a pure light - one that was a far cry from the innocence (or lack thereof) of the beautiful girl in front of him. "Well then thanks, I guess. That's really sweet."
And though she couldn't possibly know it, with those words she gently and tenderly sliced his beating heart with long deep gashes, before stepping back to let the blood flow. He felt it seeping into his lungs until he struggled for air, with a shortness of breath that couldn't quite be feigned. The worst part? She didn't realise. She just kept gazing at him with that soft fond look and it gently rubbed to edges of him like sandpaper, until he felt the dust blow away in clouds.
Because Isabelle never dated, or was even remotely interested in, "sweet boys". She preferred the ones that her parents never approved of, and Simon had overheard a conversation between Clary and Izzy where the taller girl confessed that her parents were always so hard on all her earlier boyfriends anyway, scaring them away even when she genuinely liked them. So after a while she just gave up, dating around the place and breaking hearts like it was a hobby, leaving her parents thoroughly disgruntled.
She would never settle for someone as tame as him, not when she had her own fire that couldn't be contained.
But that painful truth didn't stop his mouth from going dry when she laughed, or his heart decide to imitate a rabbit's, or all the world's butterflies to migrate and try to practiced synchronisation in his stomach.
It was beyond frustrating.
"Thanks," he spluttered out quickly and inelegantly, once he realised that they'd been staring into each others eyes for a little too long, and that her comment was one that may require a response.
But her eyes were so pretty. He'd determined that from a distance they looked as black as the sticks of worn down charcoal Clary used to dirty her hands and draw moustaches on his face with at sleepovers - the same shade as Valentine or Jonathan's eyes. But after closer inspection, they were actually a very dark brown, the colour of conkers and chestnuts, superimposed with a complex latticework of lighter brown, like filigree gold.
"Simon," she inquired suddenly. He mentally shook himself. He was acting like a lovesick idiot, and needed to stop. "Are you okay? You kind of. . . spaced out." She cracked a faint smile. "I thought that was Clary's job. You're the one I rely on to keep your head out of the clouds."
"Feet firmly planted in this dimension," he joked, though it was lacklustre. Fortunately, if Isabelle noticed, she didn't show it.
"Yeah. Exactly." Her grin mirrored his: weak. They sat there in a tense silence, Simon's hands trailing down his legs to rest against the cool bathroom tiles. They were so cold. Had they always been that cold? Or was he just really, really, really hot all of a sudden?
He gave a heroic attempt at convincing himself it was the former.
Isabelle cleared her throat. "So. . ." Her first attempt trailed off into nothing but she swung back for another try. That was Isabelle Lightwood for you: not even accepting defeat when it stared her in the face. "Do you actually think Clary's going to come in any time soon?"
"Of course," he replied without hesitation. After all, he thought, how could she not? She may be oblivious, but surely she wasn't that oblivious, right? "I mean, it's only been. . ." He trailed off himself when he glanced down and tilted his wrist, so he could read the time. His heart sank even further than it had when it was drowned in the metaphorical tears from earlier. "Forty minutes."
Isabelle whistled, raising an eyebrow knowingly. "That must be one long make out session."
"For the last time: please don't say things like that in my earshot again. My poor eardrums might just melt from disgust."
"I'm just saying," Isabelle cut in with a laugh. "Clary's a prude. We all know this. So there's no way she and Jace went any further in this short a time. Therefore, why isn't she here to get us out?"
"Because she has better things to do in her life than constantly worry over her idiotic friends who frequently get themselves stuck in a bathroom?" He asked, with the 'duh' a ringing resonance in his tone.
"Uh huh." Judging by the terrifying girl in front of him, eyebrow raised sceptically, arms crossed over her chest as she rose to her feet, Isabelle wasn't buying it. "And she's smart too, remember? She's good at figuring stuff out. And fiery. She totally wouldn't want revenge on us - you in particular - for tricking her into wasting thirty minutes in a bathroom."
Simon's normally tan face had gone white. His Adam's apple bobbed unobtrusively. Then he threw himself into a standing position and before he processed what his subconscious had decreed he had strode to the locked door and was pounding on it yelling, "Clary! What did you do?!"
"What do I do now?!"
"Hell if I know. This is was your idea, sweetheart. You take the consequences."
"What?!" Came the muffled reply, and Simon's fingers and toes curled in indignation. "What could I have possibly done whilst merely standing outside a locked bathroom with my boyfriend that would justifiably warrant such aggression from my beloved best friend?" Used to Clary's rarely seen overdramatic streak after all these years, Simon pictured her clutching a hand to her heart and staggering backwards with mock anguish on her face. The image made him snort, and he was tempted to keep up the pretence, just to see what new phrases the redhead could come up with.
Isabelle, on the other hand, held no such inhibitions.
In a heartbeat she was pounding on the door. "Let us out!" She demanded, and if Simon looked closely he imagined he could see the fragile capillaries buckling under the force of her knocks, the blood seeping out into a purple bruise that adorned her knuckles like a set of sapphire and amethyst rings. "Let us out, Clarissa, or so help me I will-"
"You can't do much from in there," came a bored drawl that Simon recognised with a fierce scowl. Jace. He was in on this?!
"You're in on this?!" Isabelle echoed his thoughts, only pounding harder. Simon half thought he was hallucinating when he saw her wince from pain. The expression was an alien and unwelcome thing on Isabelle Lightwood's face. "How dare you, Jonathan Christopher?!"
Simon raised an eyebrow at the name. Jace was short for Jonathan Christopher? How in Hell did they work that out?
"Evidently." The reply was heavy will sarcasm, practically dripping with it. "But don't forget, Iz, your rat-faced boyfriend tricked me into spending precious time in there as well as Clary." Isabelle's mouth was open, but she didn't go to reply. Simon wondered why. "Life's short, Izzy. I don't want my youth to fly by in a haze of sinks and toilets."
Isabelle snorted then, that ridiculous comment seeming to have reawakened her inner rationalist. "Exactly; life's too short. And it's definitely too short to let you two waste on your painful ignorance, no matter how blissful it may have been for the two of you." She crossed her arms over her chest. "We were doing it out of good intentions. You're doing it out of spite."
At those words, a thought struck him.
Simon's breath caught.
"The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, Iz."
His palms started sweating.
He could practically see the knowing glance the couple exchanged behind that goddamned door.
His heart decided on a reprise at that rabbit imitation.
"Izzy," he said lowly, quiet enough that they couldn't hear. "Come over here a second."
The girl in question cast him an odd glance - part curiosity at his cryptic words, part exasperated by them - but did as he said, until they were both leaning against the wall on opposite sides of the sink, as far away from that unsurpassable door as it was possible to get in this room. Even so, he spoke in a hushed whisper.
"Izzy, you remember our motives for sticking the two of them in this room together for half an hour, right?" A quick nod confirmed what he already knew, but he repeated it anyway. "We wanted them to get together. And we both know that Clary doesn't do things halfway; it's either all or nothing with her." Another nod. "And why would 'revenge' be any different?"
"Why are you using air quotations on the word 'revenge'?" Izzy butted in, but making sure her voice was still a whisper.
Simon look down, and stared down the plughole of the basin for a moment to gather his courage, before he looked back up a swallowed. "I like you, Iz. A lot. Romantically." He admitted in a rush, the air blowing out of his lungs making to words more gush than tune. But he could tell she understood, as her eyes widened and he rushed out, "And Clary knows. She's known for ages. So. . ." He had to pause to make sure he worded this right. "It's possible she had the same motives as us, and was just disguising it as revenge."
At her expression, which Simon's self-conscious side insisted was her unconvinced face, he added, "You said that they're doing this out of spite. But Clary isn't spiteful."
Thankfully, Izzy didn't question it. "So what do we do?" She murmured, leaning forwards until he could feel her breath ghosting over his cheekbones. He gulped surreptitiously - or at least, he hoped it was surreptitious. He shrugged in a non-committal way that he hoped conveyed his lack of suggestion.
Somehow (Simon had his suspicions that Isabelle was just being generous) she picked up on this unspoken message, and he was infinitely glad it was her who made the next suggestion. A pregnant pause, then, "How about we kiss?"
Being said so quietly, with her face in such close proximity to his, lent the words a strange power, an intimacy of sorts, that coaxed a shiver up his spine. Her face was stony, expressionless, and dead serious. She knew how much he was - and would be - affected by this.
He wasn't sure whether to rejoice that his crush was kind enough to do something she had no desire to do because he wanted it (and to get out of confinement, but semantics) or to cry because the cruelty of giving him a taste of what he so desperately wanted before ripping it away, never to be seen again, would hurt so much.
For an instant, he hated Clary. Hated that for her reckless actions, she would wound him like this.
But in the end, he would never - could never - say no to Isabelle.
"Okay," he said.
The reaction wasn't what he'd wanted. She immediately leaned back and stepped into the centre of the room. His feelings must have shown on his face because she smiled faintly and held out a hand in invitation. "They have to have an idea of what's going on," she said, still quiet. "They have to know when to let us out."
A part - a large part - of him recoiled at the idea that she was only doing this for show, as fake as Katniss's feeling for Peeta were when they first started with the act in The Hunger Games. But the optimistic, foolish, part of him pointed out where that performance had led.
So he stepped forward, until he was standing right in front of Isabelle in the middle of the bathroom. She had always been a tall girl, but he'd had a growth spurt recently, and whilst that did nothing to lessen the lankiness of his build, it meant he could look her directly in the stunning eyes.
The ones that were fixed on his.
Very slowly, uncertainty burning the pads of his fingers, he reached round Isabelle to connect his hands in a loose embrace that just brushed the small of her back. She smiled slightly, then stepped forward, closer, to let her fingers tangle in the dark curls at the nape of his neck. His glasses were knocked crooked by the close proximity of heir faces, as they drew in breath as one, their lips millimetres apart.
"What are you waiting for? Just do it." She breathed, seemingly as lost in the moment as he was. He spared a moment of pain to consider what an amazing actress she was, before he did as she said.
He kissed her.
"They're kissing! Finally, they're-"
"If you interrupt this moment, Clarissa, I will kill you myself."
Clary looked up, her gaze focusing in on something unexpected. "Are you crying?"
"No." A sniffle. "I just have dust in my eye."
It was everything and nothing, fire and darkness, falling into some great abyss with the promise that a friend will catch you, but set you down immediately and not carry you away. It was everything Simon had dreamed of and more as their lips moved in sync, hers as soft as two rolled up rose petals, like the contrast between a picture of a landscape, and seeing the landscape with your own eyes, and not being able to think of words powerful enough to describe it.
It was a sunset and a sunrise all at once, with the glory of both scorching from their connected mouths down throughout their bloodstream until Simon's nerves were tingling with it. It was the transition of faith to hope to wish and back again, each stage of that trust blossoming tentatively in his chest like one of the first flowers to brave the crisp springtime. It was being in that famous cradle on the top of the tree from the lullaby, with the thrill of knowing the dangers of his predicament but the peace of feeling the wind and sky and of knowing that you were not alone.
And it was beautiful.
Then their lips disconnected, and the two drew back to gaze into each other's eyes, panting heavily. He watched the flicker of emotions cross Isabelle's beautiful face and at the final look of resignation he squeezed his eyes shut with the naïve hope that if you don't see the knife coming, it won't come. The ribbons of the cradle snapped and he was plummeting, falling fast and furious, his heart a dead cumbersome weight that would drag him to the bottom of the sea and drown him.
With his eyes closed, he couldn't see what was happening next, and couldn't prepare for the impossibility of it occurring.
But he still felt the shift of the air as Isabelle leaned in and kissed him again.
And then he was flying again.
He was so caught up in the sensation - in her - that he almost missed it as the door swung open to reveal two people, one smiling with pride and the other grimacing, tears in his eyes. He and Isabelle turned, hands sliding down to let their fingers interlock, and he felt something spread from between their palms, like they were holding a burning star between them. They turned in unison to catch the single tear that rolled down Clary's porcelain cheek, to see the moment that Jace cracked and let out a loud sniffle.
Simon just had time to mouth two words at Clary - two words that somehow made her smile widen - before he was spun around and was kissing Isabelle once more. Sometime later he heard the door close as Clary and Jace left but he paid it no heed as they held each other tighter as they kissed again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
Until Simon had two thoughts: that this was definitely worth having his nails painted for, and that not even the angels in Heaven could separate them.
And that's the end of Thirty Minutes and Counting. Sorry if that was too... poetic, at the end. I think I got a bit carried away.
Thanks to everyone who reviewed, followed, and favourited this story, and just generally showed their support. It really means a lot. Thank you all, you amazing people. Never stop being so wonderful!
Special thanks to: sophiecampbellbower, Guest, rami (Guest), 14bubbles, A Brunette Angel, oesteffel, Guest M, BlackHeron104, Author Autumn, It's Kris, Someone (Guest), Debra Williams, sharp039, Percabeth Fairdale, RetroNick, PupPup WoofWoof, Guest (2), Will H. is my bae, and ntlpurpolia for reviewing chapters one and two.
Thanks for reading!
