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“Alex?”
My mother.
“Hey, Mom.”
“I’m glad you’re home.” She stood from the couch and held out her hand. “I didn’t realize you’d be out so late— you need to take this.”
She gave me a pill. I swallowed it dry. “We stopped for dinner.”
“Did you have fun?”
“Um, yeah, I guess.” I wanted to be in my bedroom. Wanted to be shut in, safe, away from prying eyes. With Miles.
“How was Miles?”
“Good? I don’t know what you mean.”
“He was visiting his mother in a mental hospital. You’d think he’d have some sort of issues. Heaven knows the boy already seems a little . . . emotionally stunted. I’m half convinced he’s autistic.”
“So what if he is?”
She blinked at me. “What?”
“So what if Miles is autistic? And he’s not ‘emotionally stunted’—he has emotions like the rest of us. He just has trouble figuring out what they are, sometimes.”
“Alex, he seems very smart, but I don’t think he’s the best influence.”
I scoffed. If only she knew. “Then why’d you get so excited about the idea of me going with him? Because you wanted me to see where I’d be living after high school?”
“No, of course not! I didn’t mean it like that.”
I shrugged my jacket off and hung it on the coatrack. “I’m going to bed. Please don’t bother me.”
I left her standing in the dark entryway and slipped back to my room, closing and locking the door behind me. I didn’t bother with a perimeter check. I didn’t care. Joseph Stalin himself could’ve been standing in the corner and I wouldn’t have cared. I lifted the window and popped out the screen.
“Be quiet,” I said.
Miles had no trouble with that. He slinked into the room, blending into the darkness. I found him by touch and brought him close, helping him slide out of his jacket. The smell of pastries and mint soap filled my room. With him here, I knew everything really was okay. I wrapped my arms around him and pressed my face into his shirt. We tottered back, through the narrow shaft of yellow light from the streetlamp outside, and fell onto the bed.
The artifacts on the shelves rattled and my pictures fluttered. I sat up and pressed a finger to my lips. He nodded. The streetlight hit his eyes and turned them into blue stained glass.
He had to be real. Out of everything, he had to be real. I slipped his glasses off and set them on the nightstand. It struck me how open his face was, all clear blue eyes and sandy hair and golden freckles. My heart stuttered, but he hadn’t done anything. I wondered for a second if maybe I was the one who’d been conditioned to think this couldn’t happen. He laid there staring up at me, and while I was sure he couldn’t see much, it still felt like he was analyzing the tiniest details.
My fingers fanned out over his abdomen. His muscles clenched and he released a breathless laugh. Ticklish. I smiled, but he’d closed his eyes. I eased the shirt up over his chest and he sat up to let me pull it off.
The feel of his skin under my fingers sent little jolts of fire up my arms, and when he carefully peeled my shirt off, I thought I would combust. I hated things like swimming and changing in locker rooms because I hated being so bare in front of other people. I was too exposed. It made me think of torture. But this wasn’t torture at all.
Miles paused, wrapped around me, his neck craned over my shoulder. I felt a small tug on my bra and I realized he was examining the clasp. I stifled my laugh in his shoulder. He’d gotten it unhooked and was re-hooking it. He unhooked and re-hooked it a few more times.
“Stop stalling,” I whispered.
He unhooked it one last time and let me pull it off.
The rest of our clothes joined the shirts on the floor. I shivered and pressed myself closer to him, letting the heat build between our stomachs again, hiding my face in the crook of his neck. I rolled us to the side and he curled around me. I pulled the blanket up over us to create a little cocoon.
I loved being this close to him. I loved being able to touch so much of him. I loved how tightly he held me, the soft in-out of his breathing, and how I didn’t feel the need to look over my shoulder when he was here. I loved being able to pretend that I was a normal teenager, sneaking around, and everything and everyone was
Just
All
Right.
Miles’s fingers pressed into the small of my back. “Basorexia,” he mumbled.
“Gesundheit.”
He laughed. “It’s an overwhelming desire to kiss.”
“I thought you weren’t good at figuring out what you felt.”
“I’m probably using the word in the wrong context. But I’m pretty sure that’s what this is.”
I pressed a kiss to his shoulder. One of his thumbs brushed across my spine and. . . .
It was too much.
Too much, too fast.
“Don’t hate me,” I said. “But I don’t think I want to do this. Not . . . not right now. Not here. I’m sorry; I didn’t think I would change my mind.”
He let out a whispery, relieved laugh. “That’s actually good. I think I’m going to have a heart attack just from this. Anything more might kill me.”
I wedged a hand between us. His heart beat fast and hard against my palm. I whipped it back. “Jesus, you’re right, I think you might actually have a heart attack!”
I was mostly joking, but he pulled back, bashful. His breathing came a little harder. “It would help. If we could . . . reposition . . .”
We shifted away from each other. His breathing returned to normal. We faced each other in the dark, the covers pulled up over us. His hand found mine.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m not used to people touching me.”
“Neither am I.”
There was silence for a few long minutes, until I had an idea.
“Pick someone,” I said.
“What?”
I smiled. “Pick someone.”
He hesitated, then smiled back. “Okay. Go.”
“Are you dead?”
“No.”
“Are you a man?”
“No.”
“Do you live in a foreign country?”
“No.”
Female, alive, from the US. Maybe he hadn’t gone for obscure.
“Do you have anything to do with East Shoal?” I asked.
“Yes.”
Shot in the dark. “Are you in the club?”
