The Last Graduate

He looked over and caught me watching him and smiled so blithely that I immediately wanted to run over just to punch him in the mouth, or just possibly kiss him one last time,

He kept that horrible shining look on me the entire time; not even smiling, just holding my hand in his and listening to me go on and on getting progressively more fanciful,

“Yes, fine, you utter wanker, you can come to Wales and meet my mum,”

“I know it’s not fair, El. But I just need to know. I never had a plan except to go home and kill mals. I never wanted anything else. But now I do. I want you. I want to be with you. I don’t care if it’s in New York or Wales or anywhere else. And I just need to know if that’s okay. If I can—if I can have that. If you want that, too.

“There’s no such thing as normal people,”

“You’re the only right thing I’ve ever wanted.”

I felt I’d accomplished something unique and magical, that, unlike all the other actually unique and magical things I can do, wasn’t horrifying or monstrous in the least. I was draped over his chest and he had his arms round me, which would become intolerably uncomfortable at some point that wasn’t now,

But Orion said it like he’d been holding it in his mouth for a year, an unreal vision he hardly believed he’d found, and I wanted to cry and also thump him at the same time, because I didn’t want to like it.

and then the bastard looked down at me with his entire heart crammed into his eyes and his face and said, barely a whisper, “Galadriel.”

they were all just awful hollow lies, but he was real: his mouth and his arms round me and his body overheated against me, trickles of rain and sweat trapped against my cheek and his breath gasping out of the sides of his mouth even as he tried to keep kissing me, wanting me, his heart pounding so hard I could feel it through my chest, unless that was my own heart.