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“Trouble,” he said in a long, drawn out almost-whine. He clamped his hand over mine, to push it back against my mouth. “Don’t do that.”
I flattened my lips as he squished my hand against my mouth. I couldn’t talk, so I just looked at his face, staring him down.
“Fuck, I don’t know,” he said. “It’s making me think a lot, though.” He tugged my hand from my mouth, and his gaze shifted from my eyes to my lips. “And I…like this.”
“Like what?” I said, assuming he meant being able to kiss me.
“We talk,” he said, his eyes lifting again to meet mine. “Sang, we talked before, but now… I don’t know. I love this part. You and me here and we’re talking. But it’s deeper.”
I hadn’t thought about it, but before when we would talk, it was about clothes or goofing off. But maybe he was right. I’d never thought of relationships much before. Now I was thinking about them all the time, and I’d never been as open to talking.
“This isn’t the same as the shit you get in high school romances,” he said. “I don’t ask you out, you say yes, and then we’re just boyfriend and girlfriend.” He paused and then he squinted a little at me. “We are that now, aren’t we?”
I started to nod and then hesitated. “Is that what you want…”
“Fuck yeah,” he said. “Though I probably can’t call you that in front of other people.”
“Oh, that’s the other thing,” I said, squeezing his hand. “Uncle thinks I’m too close to North and wants me to stay away from him.”
“Yeah, see, Pam’s on my ass about you. And I know Erica thinks you and Kota are a thing. What happens if one day Pam and Erica and Uncle are at the grocery store?”
My eyes widened, staring at his face, but picturing Pam and Uncle…maybe Erica and even Charlie, Silas’s dad. If one of them brought up my name… “They might not understand.”
Gabriel growled in frustration and then sighed. He brought my hand to his face, covering his eyes with my palm. “Fuck us both, this is a lot harder than we thought.”
“How did Lily handle it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He left my hand over his face, talking to me with his eyes covered. “I’ll have to ask Liam. He’s the one I’ve been talking to.”
I was trying to work it out when there was a gentle knock at the door. “Sang?” Kota’s voice drifted in.
“Yeah?” I said quickly. “Need something?” I started pulling my hand back, expecting Kota to ask us to come out.
Instead, the door opened slowly, his head peeking in.
Gabriel rose up on his elbow, looking over his legs toward Kota as I lay next to him, wondering if we looked awkward.
Kota looked at Gabriel and then at me, tilting his head, his glasses flashing a reflection from the overhead light. “You okay?”
“We were just talking…” I said quickly.
“About Luke,” Gabriel finished for me.
Kota’s lips twisted up into a smirk and then he chuckled. He came in toward the bed and sat on it. “There’s a whole half of a bed here you aren’t using. You’re all squished up on top of each other.”
I twisted my lips as I smiled, trying to appear nonchalant about it. “Just sort of happened.”
Gabriel sat up, pushing himself back to sit against the wall. “What’s up?”
“I just came in to ask Sang about Luke,” Kota said, reaching out for my ankle, patting it gently, and then wrapping his hand around it, holding me. “Nathan said you checked all over, and he said he was out at an Academy job?”
“He told me earlier, before we left to go look for him,” I said, feeling awkward lying down on the bed, so I got up and sat cross-legged. “And then he told Nathan when we called him from his house.”
“I’m usually told about those assignments,” Kota said. “Although if it was last minute, Mr. Blackbourne might have asked him to go and not have been able to get back to me yet about it.”
“He used his own cell phone to redirect the call,” I said. “He didn’t take his own.”
“But he usually leaves the emergency phone off, right? I don’t remember him redirecting the calls. And that’s why I’m usually told. So that I don’t try to call him during something dangerous.”
I hadn’t thought of that. I just assumed it could be done and that’s just how it worked somehow. I shook my head without an answer for him.
Kota sighed. He twisted to face me, one knee up on the bed with the other foot still on the floor. “It’s probably nothing. If he said it was Academy work, that’s probably what it is.”
“It’s the Volto masks throwing us off,” Nathan said, coming in with a basket full of crumpled clothes. He dropped it on the corner of the bed near Kota and picked up one of his T-shirts and started folding it. “If it wasn’t for those masks you found, then we wouldn’t think twice about this.”
“I agree,” Kota said, reaching for a pair of jeans in the basket. He folded as he spoke. “I might have to ask him directly if he left the masks on the windows. I wanted to give him a break, given he seems to be upset. He can’t lie, but if he confesses, he might get grounded. We just need to know.”
Gabriel crawled to the edge of the bed and then reached over the basket for the jeans Kota was folding. “Nathan hangs his jeans. Are you folding them at your house?”
Kota gave up the jeans to Gabriel. “He used to fold them.”
“It’s easier to match if I just hang a shirt with pants,” Gabriel said. “If I fold the jeans and leave them on top, he gets them mixed up, even though I tell him left to right, up to down…” He shot a look at Nathan and carried the jeans with him to the closet.
“Yes, Mooooom,” Nathan said in a grumbly whine, and tossed the shirt he’d just folded at him.
Gabriel caught it, snubbed his nose at Nathan and disappeared into the closet.
I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to ground Luke right now. “Maybe…maybe you could ask and then tell him I grounded him?”
Kota touched the corner of his glasses, adjusting them. “You’re grounding him?”
“Tell him…the masks scared me and if he did it, I’m grounding him?” I looked between Nathan and Kota. “Is that how grounding works?”
“Why do you think it’s different coming from you?” Nathan asked. “He’d still be grounded.”
“Can’t we be grounded together? I don’t know. Like I ground him to me?”
Nathan and Kota looked at each other, having a silent conversation between them.
Eventually, Nathan shrugged. “It’s your call.”
“I don’t see a problem with it,” Kota said. “That’s just if he did it. We still don’t know for sure.”
“Do we have them do something if he did? Some sort of retribution?” Nathan asked. “Or do we just keep them here?”
“They could just do some of the work at the diner this week,” Kota said, looking at me. “They’re getting ready for the Thanksgiving rush.”
The diner would get busy around Thanksgiving? How did they know, since the diner hadn’t been around during Thanksgiving before? I nodded to his idea though. A couple of days making pies with Luke after school wasn’t a bad idea. And it might get Uncle off of North’s case about him spending too much time with me. Maybe it would prove to Uncle that I really did like Luke. “I’d do it anyway,” I said.
Kota smiled and shook his head. “I know you would. We’ll all probably be there sometime in the next few days.”
Gabriel stepped out of the closet, tugging the basket of clothes closer as he got to the bed, going through it. “Shit, Nathan.”
“What?” Nathan asked, an eyebrow going up. “I didn’t fold anything.”
“All your T-shirts are stretched out. They won’t even stay on the hangers.”
Nathan pouted. “Are you calling me fat?”
“Fuck, no. You’ve got the shoulders of Batman and I’m putting you in Robin’s clothes.” He shook his head, tossing T-shirts over his shoulders.
A pink one flew by and Nathan caught it. “Hey, that’s Sang’s.”
“I don’t like it.”
Kota let out a sigh as he looked at me and winked.
I shared a small smile with him, still concerned about Luke, but grateful we’d come up with a solution.
The only trouble now was…when would we get to talk to Luke if he was out on an Academy mission?
