Page 107 of Colliding with Ten

She tugged the sheet higher as if her nakedness had just occurred to her.

“No one’s out there.”

“You don’t know that.”

“We’re three hundred feet above the nearest property line, facing a hill nobody hikes after dark. The glass is treated. We can see out, but nobody can see in.”

She looked skeptical.

“I’ve tested it.”

“How?”

“I walked outside. Looked up. Nothing.”

“Oh.” She relaxed and turned back to the glass. “It’s so different from New York. I can hear myself think out here.”

“That can be a good thing or a bad thing.”

“Tonight, it’s a good thing. I miss a quieter living.” She paused, looking at me. “Do you ever get used to this?”

“The quiet?”

“The view. All of it.”

I shrugged. “I go into the city every day, which isn’t quiet. And up here, you get used to the view.”

She looked back out at the hills. “That’s sad.”

She was right. I’d stopped noticing the view years ago. After driving past it every day and sleeping beside it every night, it had become furniture. Tonight, with her beside me, I saw it again.

Her head drifted to my shoulder, curls pressed against my jaw. The smell of her shampoo filled the air. Her hair took over the pillow, the strands tickling my nose when I pressed my lips to her head.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“Yeah”

“You told me your mother passed from Huntington’s.”

She stilled. “I did.”

Weeks ago, after she mentioned it, I looked it up. Twenty minutes of research later, I closed the laptop and sat in the dark.

Huntington’s was genetic. You needed only one copy of the gene from one parent to have a 50% chance of inheriting it. It was a coin flip for a disease that dismantled your nervous system and killed you between your forties and sixties, sometimes earlier. No cure or treatment beyond managing symptoms. Just the test, the knowing, and whatever you did with the rest of your time. She was twenty-one.

I’d agonized for weeks, afraid for her, but my fear wouldn’t change anything. “Did you ever get tested?”

She waited before nodding. “When I was seventeen, AJ took me, and waited with me.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. She turned the glass in her hands. “I don’t have the gene.”

I released a breath, the grip around my torso relaxing.

She pulled back and looked up at me. “You were scared?”

I gathered her into me and kissed her. This kiss didn’t have the heat of before. I pressed my lips against her forehead, her temple, the bridge of her nose, both cheeks, and the corner of her jaw, everywhere I could reach. By the fourth or fifth one, she was laughing. It was bright and full of life, as her hands pushed against my chest.

“Lennox—”

I kissed her eyelid.