"So you're really not going to tell me?"
"Nope." The way he pops the p is very annoying.
"Not even a hint?"
"Not even a direction."
He's watching the road like his life depends on it, both hands fixed on the wheel. Avoidance looks good on him too, unfortunately.
"Okay."
He glances at me, suspicious of the easy surrender. "Okay?"
"You don't have to tell me." I look out the window. We're on my street now, the familiar buildings sliding past. "I just think it's interesting that you go out of town because you don't want Harbor Hill knowing. But you'll tell me."
"I will tell you nothing."
"You told me they exist. That's more than you'd tell anyone else." I turn to him. "And we both know it."
He pulls up in front of my building and puts the car in park. The streetlamp outside comes through the windshield at a low angle. I'm looking at my hands in my lap. He's watching the street ahead. Neither of us is moving toward the door.
When his hand lifts from the wheel, I pick up my bag from the floor and reach for the door handle.
It's a decision made quickly, because I'm not going to be the one undone in this car tonight. I've already done that once on a porch, and I have my dignity to consider. What's left of it, anyway.
I glance back at him. "Goodnight, Callahan."
"Night, Lily."
I almost turn around at the low husk of his voice. Almost.
17
CAL
The tennis ball hits the wall, comes back, and I catch it without looking. It's two in the morning.
Throw, catch.
I've been staring at the same stain on my ceiling for forty minutes now, which is forty minutes longer than I intended when I lay down and told myself I was going to sleep. Sleep did not cooperate. Sleep took one look at the state of things and quietly let itself out.
Throw, catch.
The problem is I keep thinking about the her laugh. Her whole face changes and there's this half-second where she looks almost surprised at herself, and then she's laughing, really laughing, and I want to spend the rest of my life figuring out how to make that happen again.
She's funny. That's the other problem.
I expected, when she moved here, to find her charming in that surface way. The way of someone who knows they're charming and has learned to lean on it. What I didn't expectwas genuine. Effortless. The kind of funny that doesn't need a setup. And when I do laugh, she looks at me like she's won something. Which makes me want to do it again.
Throw, catch.
I think about her face in the car the other night, the way she turned toward me in the passenger seat, completely comfortable taking up space, asking about my tastes with the same energy she might use to ask about the weather. And somehow I have the nerve to think it's just so her, like I know her enough.
The way she worked through the worst possible options in descending order, starting with cannibalism, for fuck's sake, because apparently that's where her brain goes. And my brain, unhelpfully, tells me everything about her is just perfect.
Which. No. That's not a thought I'm allowed to have.
"I know I'm too much," she told my dad once, after he laughed at something she said. She actually believes that and I can't think of a single person in my life who has made me feel more at ease by being completely out of control.
