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“Yes sir,” Zach said—which in one way felt weird. Ben meant to take a patch. They’d be equals, and you didn’t call an equal ‘sir.’ But in the other way, he was older and the father of the girl in Zach’s arms, so ... yeah. Sir. “Wouldn’t do anything else.”
With a curt nod, Ben turned to Lyra. “Alright then.”
Lyra beamed at her father, then turned the same light on Zach. “You want to stay here tonight?”
Zach didn’t bother to check in with his brothers. It meant, no doubt, he’d get the shittiest bedroom in the rental because he wouldn’t be there when the others picked later tonight, but who the fuck cared.
But he did check in with Ben. He looked up at Lyra’s father, who stared long and hard at him and then offered another of those curt, singular nods before he turned and headed into the house.
Zach had told Lyra he’d drop her over his shoulder, but he let that promise go. Instead, he let her take his hand and lead him.
“Oh, look, honey,” Cooper called after them in a terrible attempt at a female voice. “Our little boy’s all grown up. Be safe, tiger!”
Zach flipped him off and went in with Lyra.
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~oOo~
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Lyra led him into thehouse, up the stairs, and down the hall to her bedroom. She got noticeably shy as they neared the door, and let go of his hand as he came into the room. She flipped on the light and closed the door.
It was strange to see this space in person and whole, after seeing it in tiny segments behind her head almost every night for the past couple of months. His brain had filled in the rest of the room from those few details, and now he saw he’d gotten it pretty wrong.
It was smaller than he’d imagined, for one thing. Like half or two-thirds the size of his own. Probably because it was fairly small, it was a lot more cluttered than he’d expected, almost chaotic.
Her bed was perfectly familiar and still managed to surprise him. It was a canopy bed, with white cotton panels drawn to the posts like curtains. He recognized the bed, the panels, her linens (orangey-pink sheets and a striped comforter to match), the watercolor desert landscape on an unframed canvas hanging over the headboard, the lamp and bedside table on one side and the matching lamp on a low dresser on the other side. That setup took the whole of one wall, and one of the two windows in the room brought natural light in from the bedside-table side. At this late hour, the light was both natural, from the nearly full moon, and manmade, from the streetlight at the dead end of their street. Her room overlooked the front of the house; he hadn’t realized that.
It was the other side of the room, though, that surprised him most. He’d seen bits and pieces of this, too, but in person it looked nothing like he’d imagined. Here was her ‘studio’ area. Two desks, one a regular kneehole desk and the other a drafting table, with a large set of rolling drawers between them, took up the whole of the wall opposite her bed. That entire wall and half of another—all the space that wasn’t taken up by her closet door and the entry door—was covered in her artwork, sketches torn from pads and stuck to the walls with pushpins, unframed canvases, framed canvases and papers—and, painted directly onto the walls, flowers and trees and curlicues and even words and phrases, like calligraphic graffiti.CourageandlonelinessandLOVE!andmake life beautifulandWHY?andWHY NOT?and, most poignantly,Don’t leave me behind.
He’d never seen the graffiti before. Even if he’d never seen a single inch of this room before, though, he’d know it was Lyra’s. The girl he’d gotten to know pulsed from every line of paint, every piece of paper, everything and everywhere in these four walls.
“This is really cool,” he said and then sighed at himself for being lame.
“Thanks,” she said.
And then they just stood there, side by side, staring at the wall above her desks.
They’d gotten so close over these weeks of being apart. Zach had come to really, really like her, more than any other girl he’d known, and he’d thought he’d gotten to know her really, really well. They’d spent hours connected across the miles. They’d beenintimate—as physically intimate as it was possible to be through apps, but so much more than that. They’dtalked. About their families, their childhoods, their brothers. He knew she was having trouble with her mom. She knew his mom was upset about him coming to Laughlin and trying not to be. She knew why he was here, even the reason that had nothing to do with her. And he knew how restless she was, wanting more in her life but not sure what, exactly, that ‘more’ should be.
He understood that one with soul-deep empathy.
He knew this girl. Intimately.
But now, standing in the same room with her, her room, beside her bed, Zach felt like a stranger. That single evening they’d spent actually together, those few real kisses, suddenly felt like the sum total of their knowing. And he didn’t know what to do.
“This feels weird,” she said on a self-conscious little chuckle.
“Yeah,” he agreed, again adding nothing but lameness to the situation. To compensate, he turned to her and took her hand. The only way he could think to get over this weird block was to jump it and get back on plan. They’d talked about getting busy as soon as they saw each other again, and here they were, in her room. Her bedroom. Where there was a bed.
So he drew her close and bent toward her, meaning to kiss her.
Before he could, she said, “It’s not weird that my dad and everybody’s downstairs?”
Zach smiled and shook his head. “Feels like your dad figures this is happening. And I’ve fucked in a lot of different places, basically in front of my own father a couple times, so I’ve got a pretty high tolerance for weird, I guess.” With that he continued on his path, with her mouth his destination.
But Lyra threw up another roadblock and wriggled out of his arms. She walked away, to the center of the room, facing the crammed bookcase between her two windows. “What’s that mean? How much fucking? And when?”
