Page 47 of Find My Way Down to You

He examines my face. “Like you might cry.”

“I don’t.”

Cary surprises me again with a subtle smirk.

“I’m not gonna cry,” I snap quietly, then grimace. The heat in my words isn’t going to help me win him over. I adjust my expression. “Sorry. That was rude.”

Cary watches me a second longer.

I swallow. “Should we go?”

“Soon.” The breeze carries his scent closer. A nice blend of earth, fruit, and salt. It’s distracting enough that I’m unprepared for what he says next: “Why are you so eager to return?”

I bite back my instinctive response:I need to find someone.Instead, I say, “I want to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“You know…you,” I say with a shaky smile. “And your world. All of it.”

His mouth flattens. “Try again.”

My brain spins.Lie, lie, lie.

Sunlight reflects off the hospital’s tall windows and draws my attention. I can’t hide my frown. The words spill out like a river over rocks:

“I need to be somewhere else.”

Cary continues to study my face, searching for more. I give it to him, freely.

“When I was in your world, I didn’t feel any of this.” I pause. The waves inside me curl higher. Refusing to let them drag me under, I avert my eyes and say, “You know, you cared a lot less about me when we were at the pizzeria.”

There it is again. The small, almost unnoticeable twitch around the corners of his mouth. He folds his arms. The Henley’s fabric pulls tautly around his biceps, across his chest.

“Your incessant need to talk made it easy.”

“It’s part of my charm.”

“Oh, is that what you call it?”

I beam for him. “I’d be a lot more charming if we weren’t standing outside of ahospital.”

The longer we’re here, the more my neck prickles.

Huffing out a breath, Cary reaches toward me. He takes my hand in his. It’s somehow softer than I remember. Stronger too. He pulls me to the stone fountain.

I balk. “We’re getting inthere?”

“Did you not ask how I travel to my world?”

I stare at him suspiciously.

His free hand waves to the blue water, the surface rippling with the breeze. “This is how. Through water. Rivers, lakes, oceans—”

“Fountains?”

His scowl deepens. “I am theferrierof souls. If the body of water is large enough, I can travel through it.”

I squirm against his grip. “And there’s no other way?”