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“You’re an idiot.”
“Yes.”
That pulls a grin from her. She looks at me thoughtfully, as if deciding something.
“I hope you prove us all wrong,” she says finally, before turning on her heels and walking back inside.
I get in my car and wait like I promised I would, but Nera doesn’t come down and I don’t hear from her.
At around midnight, I’m peering out of my backseat window towards her apartment when I see a shadow move in her room. I’d know the outline of her body anywhere, even when no part of her is recognizable.
It’s her.
She’s standing at her own window, looking down at the parking lot.
I forget to uncross my legs in my hurry to exit the car and end up tripping over my feet on my way out. Thankfully, I right myself before I fall flat on my face.
I’m in the cold in nothing more than my sweater, but I barely feel it. My face is upturned towards her, desperately seeking out any sort of connection between us. I raise my hand in a greeting.
She moves and her face comes into the light, haloed by a small lamp on her bookshelf.
Something tugs violently at my stomach and I stagger almost drunkenly towards her. My breath hitches and my heart wrenches as time stops. We stare at each other.
My lips part to confess just how much I love her. She couldn’t hear me from here, but I know she’d understand.
Before I can say anything, her hands come up and she closes the drapes with two swift flicks of her wrist. She disappears from my sight as quickly as she appeared, leaving me standing in the physical and metaphorical cold with unsaid words of worship on my lips.
???
Early April.
The sound of knuckles rapping on glass wake me up with brutal effectiveness. Groaning, I peel open a groggy eyelid only to make eye contact with Rhys. He’s bent halfway at the waist and peering through my backseat window, his critical gaze roaming over the entirety of the interior of my car before coming back to me.
“Rise and shine, sleeping beauty,” he exclaims, much too loudly for this hour in the morning. He punctuates his words with a slap of his hand against my window, really waking me up now.
“The fuck do you want?” I mutter, sitting up and unzipping my sleeping bag.
“Sassy,” a familiar voice drawls from the other side of the car. “I’d say you must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, but clearly that’s not a problem you’re currently burdened with. Was the sleeping bag perhaps too snug last night?” Rogue inquires.
I stare at him and then look over my shoulder, seeing Phoenix through my back windshield. A pained groan rips from my throat alongside a sudden urge to mummify myself completely in my sleeping bag and ignore them altogether.
I flip my middle finger at Rogue and slam it against the window pane for emphasis. He chuckles darkly and lifts one of the two coffee cups in his hands up to his mouth, imperturbable.
This is the closest I assume I’ll ever be to feeling like an animal in a zoo and I hate it. I throw on my shoes and sweater and climb down towards the backseat door before throwing it open.
“To what do I owe the displeasure of your company?” I ask. “Come to meddle in things that don’t concern you again?”
I haven’t seen any of them since they outed me to Nera without giving me a chance to explain myself.
“Don’t blame us, Nera fell in love with you. We didn’t have a choice but to make sure you were clean,” Phoenix tells me, crossing his arms and leaning nonchalantly against the car.
Rhys walks over to join us on this side of the car and explains, “We look after our own. They’re the only family we have.”
I can’t blame them for what they did. Both because it was my lies, my inaction, that got me in this mess, but also because I understand the primal need to protect the ones you love and those they love in return.
Rogue speaks, his face impassive but his words somehow impassioned, “I get why you did what you did,” he says, nodding once. “For your mum.”
An understanding passes between us but neither of us acknowledges it.
