"Zero!” I shout.
"—cross between a whimper and a prayer, and I was supposed to just stop? On a timer? Bane's standing in the doorway like a hall monitor with his arms crossed and Max is underneath me sayingpleaseand I'm expected to honor a gentleman's agreement about wineglasses?"
"Yes," Bane says. "That is exactly what you were expected to do."
"Well. I didn't."
"No. You didn't. I had to pull the blanket off both of you and practically carry him to my room."
"And I let you," Zero says, "because I'm generous."
"You threw a pillow at my head."
"Generously."
I have my hands over my face. My ears are on fire. Atlas is laughing—actually laughing, his stomach shaking next to my head, his hand still in my hair—and the sound is so unexpected and so warm that I stop trying to die and just listen to it.
I've never heard Atlas laugh like that. Not the controlled exhale. Not the polite acknowledgment. A real laugh. The kind that uses his whole chest. The free kind.
"I hate all of you," I mumble through my fingers.
"Liar," three voices say, nearly in unison, and that sets Atlas off again.
The bond is wide open. All four threads humming, bright and easy. The dread from the office hasn't disappeared—it's still there, underneath, the way a bruise is still there under clothes—but it's not the loudest thing anymore. Right now the loudest thing is Atlas's laugh and Zero's smugness and Bane's ankle-grip and the grass under my back under the blanket and the moon over all of us.
This. This is exactly what I wanted.
I look at the pond.
The moonlight shivers on the surface. The water is black underneath it. The dock stretches out over the deeper end, the same dock I've sat on probably a dozen times now, and the light at the end of it is doing its thing—flickering on, off, on, like it can't decide whether it wants to work tonight.
A breeze comes off the water and I shiver. Not dramatic, not a full-body thing, just the kind of chill that reminds you summer is over and fall is here.
"Dock," Zero says, already standing. He nods at it like it's a challenge. "Come on."
"It's dark, Zero."
"It's a dock, Bane. Not Everest."
He's already walking, crooning his finger for the rest of us to follow.
Bane sighs and gets up. I follow him. Atlas follows without comment, beer-less, hands in his pockets.
The dock creaks under our weight. The boards are rough and silvered with age and I can feel them through my shoes. Zero walks all the way to the end, turns, sits down with his legs dangling over the edge. I stand beside him. Bane leans against one of the posts a few feet back. Atlas stands to the other side of me, close enough that I can feel his warmth.
The water from the end of the dock is different than the water from the bank. Deeper. Blacker. I can't see the bottom at all out here.
Zero flicks his bottle cap into the pond. It hits the surface with a smallplnkand disappears.
"Littering," Bane says.
"Returning metal to the earth. It's environmental."
"That's not how—"
"I'm an environmentalist now, Bane. Accept it."
I'm laughing. Bane is shaking his head. Zero tips his face up at me from where he's sitting, his eyes catching the dock light, and something in them shifts from amused to hungry in the space of a blink.
