Night of Cake & Puppets (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #1.5)

by Laini Taylor

What plan, you ask? The plan to finally—finally, finally—meet violin boy, and sweep him off his feet. Me, sweep him off his feet? I know. The laws of the jungle and romance novels would have it the other way around, but I’m not going to wait one more second for that. Milquetoast girls raised on princess stories might sit tight and bat their eyelashes in desperate Morse code—notice me, like me, please—but I am not that girl. Well, to be honest, I’ve been that girl for three months now, and I’ve had enough.

So there’s a non-fact about Mik. He’s that kind of alien. You know, um, as gleaned from casual observation. From a distance. Over several months of stalking watching. (It’s not stalking if you don’t follow them home, right?)

There are boys you look at and want to touch with your mouth, and there are boys you look at and want to wear one of those surgical masks everyone in China had during bird flu. There are a lot more bird-flu boys at large.

But Mik I want to touch with my mouth. His mouth, with my mouth. Maybe his neck, too. But first things first: Make him aware I exist.

So while I could do the normal thing and try talking to him—“Nice fiddling, handsome man” has been proposed—I don’t trust my mouthparts not to betray me by either stuttering into silence or puckering up. Also, there are always people around in the theater, potential witnesses to humiliation, and that is unacceptable. No, I have to lure him out, like a will-o’-the-wisp, tease him deeper and deeper into the forest until he is lost and doomed. Without the forest or the doom—just the luring. Like a Venus flytrap that says I am a delicious flower, come taste me and then snap! Devour. Without the devouring. Well, maybe a little devouring. Here we go. I have scuppies in my pocket and lust in my heart.

I want to do mysterious and improbable things alongside a fierce and beautiful girl who looks like a doll brought to life by a sorcerer. Is that really so much to ask?

I’m hoping the talking portion is just a thin layer between the dazzling portion and the kissing portion, like the frosting between layers of a cake. (Mmm. Cake.) Not that I’m not keen to talk to him. I am—in the fantasy version of tonight, anyway, in which I actually manage to string words into sentences, and not just random magnetic-poetry sentences, but sentences that don’t lead to the logical conclusion that I have brain damage. It’s just… I can’t begin to account for the intensity of my urgency to get kissing. The most likely explanation, after long thought, is that I’m a clone preprogrammed to perform this activity now or self-destruct. Or else it’s just Mik’s velvety sweetness. Like a cupcake, in boy form.

I love vengeance like normal people love sunsets and long walks on the beach. I eat vengeance with a spoon like it’s honey. In fact, I may not even be a real person, but just a vow of vengeance made flesh. My parents swear I was a real baby and not a demonic bargain, but of course they would say that.

It’s my personal theory that only 27 percent of perceived confidence is actual confidence, and the rest is

Close your eyes and music paints light vines and calligraphy on the darkness within you.

Touch. The softness of lips. At first, okay, there wasn’t so much softness as frozen-faced numbness, but really it just made me that much more aware of our breath, because our breath was warm and every second that our lips moved near and against each other in this feather-light way, I could feel more. It was like something coming into focus. I couldn’t say at what point I could feel fully, just that we got there. We got there slowly and exquisitely, our breath touching more than our actual lips, so that each small brush of contact was wrapped in longing for the next, and I learned this: The eye’s perception of texture is pale compared to the lips’, and I didn’t know what velvety was until I knew it with my lips. Oh, kissing. Oh, violin boy.

I’m drifting off to sleep. A text. It’s Karou: Have to know. If ghost peacock was 2nd-to-last scuppy, what did you do with the LAST?

Which is what one always hopes will happen: for life to take over and be bigger and more marvelous than what we can dream up on our own. Life doesn’t need magic to be magical. (But a little bit sure doesn’t hurt.) It’s nice knowing I have this one last scuppy if I ever need to whip up some peacock footprints—literal or figurative—but maybe I’ll just end up keeping it as a souvenir. Who knows? Saving it for a rainy day, I text back to Karou,