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After watching the show and slowly recovering from the food coma and sugar rush, Luna, who was sitting next to me on the dark brown leather sofa, turned her head in my direction and grinned, staring at my ribcage.
“What is it, Germs?” I frowned. She pointed at my neck, and I looked down.
“This?” I fingered the seashell on my necklace, made out of black shoelace and dark cerith shell. It looked like a dagger, and it felt like one, too. Luna nodded, her hand tapping her thigh. She wanted to touch it. I removed it from my neck, placing it in her hand. “Watch out, though. It’s sharp.”
She pressed her fingertip to the end, sucking in a breath.
“I was running on the sand one day—it was really hot and I left my flip-flops in my car because I like walking barefoot, when I stumbled over something. It cut my heel so deep I could see my tendon. I picked the prickly thing up. I couldn’t believe something so pretty could hurt me so badly. So I decided to keep it. Because sometimes, our favorite things are the ones that make us cry.” I chuckled at the skeptical look on this girl’s face.
“Have you ever swum in the ocean?” I asked. I had a feeling I knew the answer to that one. She hesitated for a moment before shrugging.
“I’ll take that as a no.”
It was definitely a no.
“Would you like to?”
Luna shrugged again, but in a totally different way. Her first shrug was disappointed, resentful. Her shoulders sagging down. Her second shrug was more wistful. Maybe I was reading too much into it, but I clung to nuances like they were my lifeline. After all, sometimes, they were the only thing I could squeeze out of Theo.
“Would you? If I took you? If I…taught you,” I probed, my skin catching flames at her intense stare.
She nodded, her head snapping up, as if she remembered something. She put her little hand on my forearm, telling me to wait, and jumped from the sofa, padding down the hallway. This girl was living directly in front of the ocean, yet all she was ever allowed to do was go to Funny Felix parties on the dry, boring sand, without dipping a toe. Her dad seemed like such a self-centered prick. I wondered if she was able to share any of her likes and dislikes with him. I sat on their couch, gawking at the walls around me. The feature wall was decorated like some big shot artist had thrown dark paint on it on purpose. Grays and blacks and deep purples. It was half-graffitied, and looked exactly like something you would find in a bachelor’s pad. But Trent wasn’t a bachelor anymore, no matter how emotionally unavailable and single he was. He had a daughter.
This place looked like him.
Dark. Brooding. Moody.
It didn’t look like Luna.
Hesitant. Curious. Gentle.
Luna came back with a big children’s book, square, thin, and flat. She dumped it on my legs, climbed on the sofa, and started flipping through it until she found what she was looking for. She stabbed her finger to the image.
“Seahorse?” I asked, furrowing my brows. She nodded, staring at me expectedly.
“Oh, you want to know if I ever see any seahorses when I surf? No. They’re hard to find. They’re shy creatures, I think. They live in reefs and sheltered places.”
The disappointment on her face made my heart twist. I rubbed the back of my neck and looked around. Trent’s laptop sat on the dining table across the room. I knew it wasn’t an afterthought. He wanted me to see it. Wanted me to touch it. It was a test, and I was about to fail it—jeopardizing my father’s plan—to try to pacify Luna.
“Hey, why don’t we read more about seahorses on Wikipedia? Maybe there’s a good documentary on them on YouTube.”
Her eyes lit up like Christmas, and it was worth all the shit he was going to give me when he found out.
“I’m kind of bending the rules for you. Are you going to tell on me?”
She scrunched her nose, shaking her head like the mere idea was insulting. And that gesture—the nose wrinkling—it was so me.
For the next forty minutes, Luna and I learned everything there was to know about seahorses. We watched a male seahorse giving birth to a gazillion baby seahorses and laughed. She laughed because there were so many. I did because it looked like a man shooting his load after watching the filthiest porn ever recorded.
Then before we knew it, it was ten o’clock and bedtime became non-negotiable, because I was pretty sure Trent would hang me from his balcony if he found us still hanging out in the living room when he got home. Luna didn’t put up a fight, which I thought was strange, because Theo always had. He would yell and plead and bargain and try to manipulate me, just like his father.
