She beamed up at him, delighted with the entire universe, one shoelace undone, holding out a bruised orange to a man whose name, spoken plainly, had unmade richer men than anyone she would ever meet.
"Are you one of them?"
The truth was one word long. The truth was what he was, and what he was walked into rooms three seconds before he did and left with everything warm in them. She'd hear it eventually, the way everyone did, and then she'd look at him the way everyone did, and the girl who thanked traffic would be gone from behind her own eyes.
And Valerio Le Sabre, who'd never in his life wanted to be anyone else, because it had never once been safe to be, heard himself lie.
"Yes," he said, and took the orange. "I'm one of them."
Chapter Four
EIGHT YEARS AGO
Valerio had come to say goodbye.
He'd rehearsed it, which should have been his first warning, because he'd never rehearsed anything in his life. Deals, threats, funerals, he did all of them cold. But he'd sat in the car outside her campus library for eleven minutes putting words in order, and the words were simple ones. This was the last time. He wouldn't be coming back. She'd be hurt for a week, maybe two, and then she'd be safe for the rest of her life, and those two things weren't even close to the same weight.
Men like him didn't get to keep girls like her. Men like him got girls like her killed.
He found her at their table, the one by the tall windows, buried to the elbows in books, hair escaping its knot one strand at a time, and when she looked up and saw him, her whole face did the thing it always did. Opened. Like a door in a city where nobody locked anything.
"You're early!" she whispered, delighted, because the library made her whisper and delight made her loud, and the combination was a small ongoing war. "Sit, sit. I saved your chair. Well, I defended your chair. A philosophy major tried to take it and I told him it was reserved for a working stuntman and he got so depressed about his life choices he just left."
"Aislinn."
"I have your orange." She was already digging through her bag. "It's Tuesday. Don't think I forgot, I never forget, it's a whole system now—"
"Aislinn." He didn't sit. "I came to tell you something."
She stopped digging.
He watched her read his face, watched her find something in it she didn't have a name for yet, and watched her decide, with that terrifying kindness of hers, not to make it harder for him. She just folded her hands on top of her constitutional law notes and waited, and somewhere behind her eyes a door started, very carefully, to close itself in advance, so that he wouldn't have to see it happen.
That. That was what did it.
He had a speech. It was a good speech. It was eleven minutes old and structurally sound and it would've kept her alive until she was ninety, and he opened his mouth to give it, and instead he leaned down across the table, across the books and the notes and the orange rolling loose between them, and kissed her.
Her breath caught. Her hand came up, not to push him away, but to hold on to his sleeve like the floor had tilted, and somewhere a chair scraped and a librarian made a small disapproving sound, and none of it mattered even a little, because he was kissing her, actually kissing her, in the actual library, and some small shrieking part of her brain was already composing the text she would never send anyone, not in a hundred years, not even Steph.
When he finally pulled back, her eyes stayed shut a second longer. Just to make sure it had really happened. Just in case opening them made it stop being true.
"Um." She touched her own mouth like it belonged to someone else now. Then, with tremendous, wobbling scholarly composure, she managed a whole sentence. "Riiiight. So. What did you come to tell me?"
"That."
"That," she repeated.
"I've been meaning to say it for five weeks."
Her smile started small and got away from her, the way everything did.
"Well," she managed, going back to her notes and reading absolutely none of them, "I hope you're not expecting the chair back."
THE SECOND TIME VALERIOcame to end it, three weeks had passed, but he only made it as far as the diner window.
This time the speech was shorter, because he'd learned. This time there had been a reason, a real one, a name from his world spoken too close to hers, a reminder delivered on schedule that his life had teeth and hers had none, and he'd driven to the diner where she worked the closing shift with two sentences prepared and a plan to be cruel enough that it would stick.
Through the window, under the tired fluorescent hum, Aislinn was laughing at something a customer had said.
