“Goes without saying.” Then she looked serious again. “You do believe me, right? You can’t be doing this for me.”
“I’m not doing it for you,” Simon said, and that was true. He may have gone to the Academy, in part, because of Isabelle—but he’d stayed for himself. When he Ascended, it wouldn’t be because he needed to prove something to her. “But . . . if I did back out, which I would never do, but if I did, wouldn’t that make me a coward? You’d date a mundane, maybe. But I know you, Izzy. You couldn’t date a coward.”
“And you, Simon Lewis, couldn’t be a coward. Not if you tried. It’s not cowardly to make a choice about what you want your life to be. Choosing what’s right for you, maybe that’s the bravest thing you can do. If you choose to be a Shadowhunter, I will love you for it. But if you choose to stay a mundane, I’ll love you for that, too.”
“What if I just choose not to drink from the Mortal Cup because I’m afraid it will kill me?” Simon asked. It was a relief to finally say it out loud. “What if it had nothing to do with how I want to spend the rest of my life? What if it’s just being scared?”
“Well, then, you’re an idiot. Because the Mortal Cup could never hurt you. It will know what I do, which is that you’d make an amazing Shadowhunter. The blood of the Angel could never hurt you,” she said, intensity blazing in her eyes. “It’s not possible.”
“You really believe that?”
“I really do.”
“So the fact that we’re here, and you’re, you know—”
“Partially disrobed and wondering why we’re still making small talk?”
“—has nothing to do with the fact that you think this might be our last night together?”
This earned him another exasperated sigh. “Simon, do you know how many times I’ve been almost certain one of us wouldn’t survive the next twenty-four hours?”
“Um, several?”
“Several,” she confirmed. “And on not one of those occasions have we ever had any sort of desperate, angsty farewell sex.”
“Wait—we haven’t?”
Over the last several months, Simon and Isabelle had gotten very close. Closer, he thought, than they’d ever been before, not that he could quite remember. At least conversationally. As for the other kind of close—talking on the phone and writing each other letters wasn’t exactly conducive to losing your virginity.
Then there was the excruciating fact that Simon wasn’t certain he still had a virginity to lose.
All this time he’d been too embarrassed to ask.
“Are you kidding me?” Isabelle asked.
Simon could feel his cheeks burning.
“You’re not kidding me!”
“Please don’t be mad,” Simon said.
Isabelle laughed. “I’m not mad. If we’d had sex, and you’d forgotten—which, by the way, I assure you would not be possible, demon amnesia or no demon amnesia—maybe I’d be mad.”
“So we really never . . . ?”
“We really never,” Isabelle confirmed. “I know you don’t remember, but things were a little hectic around here, what with the war and all the people trying to kill us and such. And like I said, I don’t believe in ‘farewell sex.’?”
Simon felt like the whole night—possibly the most important night of his young and sorrowfully inexperienced life—was hanging in the balance, and he was very afraid of saying the wrong thing. “So, uh, what kind of sex do you believe in?”
“I think it should be a beginning of something,” Isabelle said. “Like, say, hypothetically, if your entire life were going to change tomorrow, if it were going to be the first day of the rest of your life, I’d want to be a part of that.”
“The rest of my life.”
“Yep.”
“Hypothetically.”
“Hypothetically.” She took off his glasses then and kissed him hard on the lips, then very softly on the neck. Exactly where a vampire would sink its fangs in, some part of him thought. Most of him, though, was thinking, This is actually going to happen.
This is going to happen tonight.
“Also, most of all, I believe in doing it because I want to do it,” Isabelle said plainly. “Just like anything else. And I want to. Assuming you do.”
“You have no idea how much,” Simon said honestly, and thanked God that Shadowhunting blood didn’t bestow telepathy. “I should just warn you, I don’t, I mean, I haven’t, I mean, this would be the first time I, so—”
“You’ll be a natural.” She kissed his neck again, then his throat. Then his chest. “I promise.”
Simon thought about all the opportunities here for humiliation, how he had absolutely no idea what he was doing, and how usually when he had no idea what he was doing, he screwed things up. Riding a horse, wielding a sword, leaping from a tree—all these things people kept saying would come naturally to him usually came with bumps, bruises, and, more than once, a face full of manure.
But he had tried none of those things with Isabelle by his side. Or in his arms.
As it turned out, that made all the difference.
“Good morning!” Simon sang, stepping out of the Portal and into his bedroom at the Academy—just in time to catch Julie slipping out the door.
“Er, good morning,” George mumbled, tucked beneath the covers. “Wasn’t sure you’d be back.”
“Did I just see—?”
“A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell.” George grinned. “Speaking of which, should I ask where you’ve been all night?”
“You should not,” Simon said firmly. As he crossed the room to his closet to find something clean to wear, he tried his best to keep a silly, moony, heartsick smile off his face.
“You’re skipping,” George said accusingly.
“Am not.”
“And you were humming,” George added.
“I most definitely was not.”
“Would this be a good time to tell you that Jon Cartwright the Thirty-Fifth seems to have done his business in your T-shirt drawer?”
But this morning nothing could dampen Simon’s mood. Not when he could still feel the ghost of Isabelle’s touch. His skin buzzed with it. His lips felt swollen. His heart felt swollen. “I can always get new T-shirts,” Simon said cheerfully. He thought that from this point forward, he might say everything cheerfully.
“I think this place has officially driven you round the bend.” George sighed then, sounding a bit heartsick himself. “You know, I’m really going to miss it here.”
“You’re not going to cry again, are you? I think there may be another sentient slime mold growing in the back of my sock drawer, if you want to get really choked up.”
“Does one wear socks to get transformed into a half-angel superhuman fighting machine?” George mused.