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Ethan gapes at me. “What did you do?”
“Well, Diego wasn’t going to climb that last stretch, so he was there standing over me, acting like his plan was to pee on my hand. Thankfully the ranger came over and had some antivenin, and it was okay.”
“See?” Ethan says. “That’s lucky.”
“To be bitten? To fall?”
He laughs incredulously. “Lucky that they had the antivenin. You didn’t die on Half Dome.”
I shrug, dropping a couple of bananas in the backpack. “I see what you’re saying.”
I can feel him still watching me.
“You don’t really believe this, though, right?” Off my look, he adds, “That you have some sort of chronically bad luck?”
“Absolutely. I’ve already shared a couple of winners, but just to keep it recent: I lost my job the day after my roommate moved out. In June, I g
ot some car repairs done and a ticket when a hit-and-run shoved my brand-new car into a no-parking zone. And this summer an old woman fell asleep on my shoulder on the bus, and I only realized she was dead, and not actually asleep, after I’d missed my stop.”
His eyes go wide.
“I’m kidding about that last one. I don’t even take the bus.”
Ethan bends, cupping his hands over his knees. “I don’t know what I would actually do if someone died on me.”
“I think the odds are pretty slim.” Even half-asleep, I grin as I pour our coffee into two paper cups and slide one in front of Ethan.
Straightening, he says, “I guess I’m suggesting that you give the idea of luck too much power.”
“You mean how positivity breeds positivity? Please don’t tell me you think you’re the first one to mention this to me. I realize part of it is outlook, but honestly—it’s luck, too.”
“Okay, but . . . my lucky penny is just a coin. It doesn’t have any great power, it’s not magic, it’s just something I found before a bunch of awesome things happened. So now I associate it with those awesome things.” He lifts his chin to me. “I had my penny the night we ran into Sophie. Logically, if everything was about luck, that wouldn’t have happened.”
“Unless my bad luck countered your good luck.”
His arms come around my waist, and he pulls me into the heat of his chest. I’m still so unaccustomed to the ease of his affection that thrill passes in a shiver down my spine.
“You’re a menace,” he says into the top of my head.
“It’s just how I’m built,” I tell him. “Ami and I are like photo negatives.”
“It’s not a bad thing.” He tilts my chin, kissing me once, slowly. “We’re not supposed to be carbon copies of our siblings . . . even when we are outwardly identical.”
I think about all this as we move into the hallway. I’ve spent my entire life being compared to Ami; it’s nice having someone like me for me.
But, of course, this awareness—that he likes me the way I am—trips the following one, and once we’re in the elevator and headed to the lobby, the thought bursts out of me, unattended. “I guess I’m a pretty firm one-eighty from Sophie, too.”
I immediately want to sift the words out of the air and shove them back into my face.
“I guess, yeah,” he says.
I want him to add, “But not in a bad way,” again, or even “I’m glad,” but he just grins down at me, waiting for me to spew some more nonsense.
I will not indulge him. I bite my lips closed and glare up at him: he knows exactly what he’s doing. What a monster.
Ethan continues to smile down at me. “Are you jealous?”
“Should I be?” I ask, and then immediately amend, “I mean, we’re just having a vacation fling, aren’t we?”
