(A/N): Gah, another superbly difficult-to-write chapter! Almost to the end, now! A huge thanks to the lovely OldButYoung for taking my mind off the tedium of the writing process with our stimulating conversations. It's been a pleasure! :D Enjoy this chapter, everyone! I love you all.
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By some great mistake, Skye fell asleep.
When she jolted awake, she was curled tightly on the bed's firm mattress, nauseated beyond words, clutching her left arm in a purely instinctive last attempt at holding off the inevitable.
The skin on her forearm was glowing eerily in the spaces between her clenched fingers. In the room's pressing darkness, it was a hot orange hue that traveled in painful bursts through her main arteries. Her heart felt much too large for her chest; it leaped behind her rib cage like a wild animal raging within the too-small boundaries of captivity. This combined with a blistering, otherworldly pain in arm. Her skin was scorching, smoldering, burning right down the bone. It hurt like nothing Skye had ever felt before, yet she knew what it was with the kind of dread reserved for life's cruelest disappointments.
Then the burning faded, leaving a burgundy inch-long mark in the flesh just above her wrist that looked like a half-healed scar.
Skye Penderwick had a Heartline.
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There was a darkly comic edge to the whole thing.
Skye had spent a lifetime warding off Heartlines, had never allowed herself to love anyone hard enough to acquire one. And in the end, all it took was one kiss with Jeffrey and twenty-two years of careful vigilance turned to dust. Life was like that. Ironic, unexpected, devastating.
She was sitting on the bed with her feet dangling over the edge, spine ramrod straight. The lone Heartline tingled innocently on her arm and she glared coldly at it, despising its physical existence on her body. She'd been in this position for the greater part of three hours, ignoring the cheerfully chirping birds and morning sunshine that slipped blithely between the blinds. The world had ended. Passing of time meant nothing to her.
Weakness is the greatest flaw, said the horrible voice in her head. You succumbed to a brief, meaningless kiss and destroyed a lifetime of effort.
But, countered the other, of all the people I could have fallen in love with, Jeffrey is not a terrible choice.
No. Love is a mistake, a defect. The damage it creates is irreversible.
"Shut up," Skye muttered to herself, flopping heavily back on the mattress. However crushing and inconvenient, she was in love with Jeffrey—she had a Heartline to prove it—and she must deal with the consequences. There had to be a way to go about hiding the evidence from Jeffrey, her sisters, and the rest of civilization, even if the solution was as primitive as wearing long sleeves until the day she died. But there was also the problem of the inexorable post-kiss awkwardness that would hang between her and Jeffrey, souring their friendship and turning it inside out. The thought clenched somewhere deep in her gut.
That was the great mystery of it all. Why had he kissed her? Was it a strange way of thanking her for having faith in his career as a musician? Skye thought of the encouragement she'd given Jeffrey the night before and wondered if, in a haze of enthusiastic gratitude, he had gotten confused and blurred the lines between romance and friendly affection. But, in all honesty, nothing about the kiss had been remotely friendly. It had been uncoordinated and electric and absolutely the hottest thing Skye had ever experienced. And, judging by his flushed neck and trembling hands, Jeffrey had felt similarly. Why, then, had he resolutely treated her like a very platonic combination of best friend and sister for ten years?
Perhaps he hadn't meant it after all, thought Skye. He likely regretted kissing her as much as she regretted getting a Heartline. At this very moment, he too, was probably cursing himself for that brief moment of stupidity, deeply annoyed because he really meant nothing by it.
The image turned her heart to stone.
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At half past noon, there came a light knock on the door.
"It's me," said Rosalind.
"I'd really rather be alone," said Skye.
As all good sisters did, Rosalind ignored this and swept into the bedroom. She closed the door behind her with a soft click and, without turning around, asked, "What exactly happened last night?"
Skye said nothing.
"Because Jeffrey's been sitting balefully at his piano all morning without playing a single note, you refuse to come out of this room, and neither of you seem to want to interact with anyone." Rosalind turned around. "What happened?"
Skye remained mute.
"I will continue to ask until you tell me, Skye." While Rosalind often worried, it was a rare occurrence for her to worry this sharply. A fleeting sense of guilt skittered in Skye's stomach, but she shook it off.
"I need to be alone. Please."
"Listen, I can't help you if you won't tell me what upset you."
"Good. I don't need help." The fresh Heartline twinged on Skye's forearm and she clenched her left fist. It was ruining her, just as she had predicted.
"Somehow, I doubt the accuracy of that statement." Rosalind's concerned expression dissolved into one of acute anger and it bewildered Skye. "I didn't come in here to suffer through a temper tantrum from my adult sister. Tell me what's going on or stop acting like a child."
"You can't understand."
"Try me," Rosalind said coldly.
There was nothing else for it. Skye wrenched her sleeve up. Rosalind stared at the vein-shot underside of her sister's forearm, at the single Heartline marring the skin there. A beat passed. Then Skye yanked her sweater sleeve back down and looked up at Rosalind, grimly triumphant.
But this did not have the effect she thought it would, because Rosalind's next words were not ones of sisterly sympathy.
"Get over yourself."
Skye blinked.
"You have a Heartline. So what? That isn't the end of the world. It means you're human, Skye, that you have the capacity to care deeply for another person."
"But it's worse than that," Skye said, her voice shaking a little. "For years I've woken up each morning and immediately checked my arm for a Heartline, terrified I would get one suddenly and lose control of my emotions. You know how I am! I covet logic and common sense, and love will only ruin these qualities! I've put so much effort into avoiding Heartlines and the fact that I failed infuriates me."
Skye went silent, clenching her jaw so tightly her neck ached. Rosalind took one look at her, crossed the room in three steps, and joined her on the bed.
"Skye, scientists have been trying to understand Heartlines for centuries. They don't serve any practical function, and no one has ever been able to figure out why the physical body echoes the emotional one by burning a red mark into the skin. But I see them as battle scars. They're the manifestation of the courage we display when we allow someone to become special to us, to let them touch the deepest, tenderest part of ourselves. No one with a Heartline makes it out of this life unscathed—no matter how hard we try to avoid getting hurt—but we go on loving anyway. That's why Daddy always says we should be called Homo Amorus instead of Homo Sapiens. There's something in us that still believes that, despite everything, it really is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all."
Relief filtered into the space behind Skye's ribs and thrummed warmly there, anchoring her. She felt inexplicably light, as though she'd been living with all of Earth's gravity focused on her and it had finally lifted.
Rosalind looked at Skye, her face oddly bright. "Be proud of that little mark. Falling in love is a phenomenal thing."
Then she whisked noiselessly from the bedroom, leaving Skye with the truth ringing in her ears.
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I normally hate adding an author's comment down here, as it tends to kill the mood, but I have a request: If any of you are at all artistically savvy, I would love if you could illustrate a scene from this story. Anything would be wonderful. In return, PM me your idea for a Penderwicks one-shot and I will write it up to the best of my abilities.
Thank you so much. Have a beautiful week!