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“Despair,” Liam said at last. “It’s not the first time I’ve felt that way. Likemewas being compressed, cleaned up like so much clutter. But this time it was all at once, and it wasn’t my own mind doing it to me.” His hands were slack in his lap now, his gaze fixed on a knot in the wood paneling on the far wall. I touchedhis forearm gently. He jerked it away. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“You’re not the first person that’s called me a sociopath,” I told him. The words were like fingers pressed against a bruise, a hurt I didn’t often admit aloud. “When I start to get too frightened or sad or anything, I just—push it away. Don’t feel it. It’s useful. It means that I can just do what I need to do without freezing up or getting weepy. Would it help Lily if I’d fallen apart? Would it have helped us get out of there alive?”
“It would let me know you were human,” Liam said. “You ought to feelsomething.”
“I do,” I snapped. I shut the laptop with more force than I should have and shoved it back into my bag. “I feel horrible. Is that what you want me to say? I just...”
“Bottle it up?” Liam offered.
I frowned, thinking it through. I’d never had to describe it to someone before. “Not really. More like—step outside of it.”
“I think you might be describing dissociation,” Liam said. “Not exactly healthy.”
“It is when it keeps you from getting killed,” I pointed out. I kept my grip on the strap of my bag, expecting him at any moment to tell me to leave. I was already angry at him for it, scraping together rage so that I wouldn’t have to wallow in the disappointment of yet another rejection.
“Fair point,” he said instead. The fight went out of me. I slumped back, and we sat in weary silence for a while. Then he said, “That was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Me too. Obviously.”
“How do you live with a thing like that in your head?” heasked. He looked me in the eye at last, and his expression was one of utter sorrow. “We can’t even tell anyone what really happened.”
“We just have each other.”
“I’m sorry I called you a sociopath,” he said.
“Sometimes I worry that it’s true,” I admitted.
“I’m pretty sure that a real sociopath wouldn’t be bothered by being a sociopath,” Liam said. I chuckled wryly, and then was surprised when he slid his hand over mine. “At least you were useful. I just stood there like a lump.”
“It happened too fast for anyone to stop it,” I said.
“I know. I know, but...”
“It doesn’t make it better,” I whispered. I leaned against him, and he put an arm around me, his cheek against my brow. I don’t know how long we stayed like that, taking comfort from each other’s presence. I listened to the sound of his heartbeat, felt the rise and fall of his chest. I let the moments and the minutes slip away.
I wanted to stay like that forever, suspended between moments, far from the mist.
The mist. I jerked upright and twisted to look out the window over the bed. The air was already growing hazy.
“I thought I had more time,” I said, standing. “It was supposed to be another hour.”
“The weather doesn’t follow a set schedule even in normal places,” Liam pointed out, still sitting at the edge of the bed.
“Maybe if I hurry—”
“You don’t need to.” He put his hand on my hip. “You can stay. Until the mist is gone.” He eased me toward him with the lightestof pressure until I stood directly in front of him, too close to simply be friendly.
His eyes weren’t perfectly brown, I realized; they were ringed with amber, so bright it was almost gold. It matched the faint golden highlights in his wind-tousled curls, the kind of unruly that models spent hours to achieve. It was made to run your hands through. He was skinny, but I liked skinny. And I liked his sharp features, his smooth brown skin, the one dark freckle right next to the corner of his eye.
Before I could overthink it, I kissed him. His lips were warm, and he kissed me back without any hesitation. I slid closer, and his hand moved higher on my hip, the other brushing back my hair, which had started to come free of its braid. I matched his movements carefully as he deepened the kiss.
He pulled away slightly. A flash of doubt went through me, but he stroked his thumb along my jaw. “It’s okay to feel this,” he whispered. “Don’t push it away.”
He was right. I’d been stepping outside myself. Managing the moment from a remove, the way I always did. “I’ll try,” I promised, and let my emotions rush in.
We lay together for a long time, fully clothed and without having ventured too far past simple kissing. The narrow confines of the bed made for a kind of default intimacy that was pleasant, though, his arms around me, my head nestled against his chest. We talked, but not about Bitter Rock or the mist. He told me about his mother—Dr. Kapoor’s ex.
He said that at first people always thought they were strikingly similar. They were both women, both academics, both dedicated to their research and their fields, and both always seemed to be smarter than anyone else in the room. But spend any real time with them and it became obvious that they were actually complete opposites. He called his British motheretherealandromantic, and I could imagine how odd that would be against the sharp practicality of Dr. Kapoor.
