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“Well, care to share with the class?”
He looks at me for a long time until everything else drifts away. It’s like this couch has become an island, me and him. Nothing else matters or exists.
“I’ve never told anybody this before,” he says.
Is that a line, a lie?
He doesn’t seem like he’s lying, but it’s impossible to know.
“I’ve never told anybody I’m a virgin,” I say.
He raises his hand as if to touch me, then drops it.
“I buried the real story. It wasn’t difficult. It only ever appeared in local newspapers. My dad was an early adopter of computers and the Internet. He was a writer, a fantasy writer. I never understood it, but I understood his passion, Jane. I understood his love for it.”
The same passion and love—that word gets my heart thumping—infuses him now.
“Somebody hacked into his computer and stole his work. It was a long, long book. He’d been working on it for seven years. It was all he ever talked about. It was his life’s work. The hacker tried to blackmail him, but my dad didn’t have that kind of money. This is what I mean by fear. Dad was terrified of never getting that book back, or worse, somebody else publishing it and claiming it as their own.”
Luke pauses, sighing darkly. There’s so much pain contained within that one breath. The urge to somehow comfort him is overwhelming. I have to grab my leg to stop myself from taking his hand, squeezing it, and letting him know I’m here for him and always will be. Jeez, there I go again. I always will be. He’d freak out if I said something like that to him.
“What happened?” I whisper.
He turns to me slowly, his eyes even more intense than upstairs when he turned feral and leaped on me like some wild animal.
“He couldn’t get the book back. In the end, the thieves stopped contacting him. They couldn’t get their ransom. Dad waited for half a year, and in that time, it was like watching him melt in front of my eyes. All the things that made him who he was disappeared, and then he—”
Luke clenches both fists, shuddering.
“He took his own life,” he finally says.
“Oh, God,” I whisper. “Luke, I’m so sorry.”
I reach out, meaning to touch him, but then he suddenly stands up, moving away from me as if touching is simply too much. He stares down, and I try to mask my hurt. I try not to let him see the emotional knives cutting into me at the sight of him wanting to get as far away from me as quickly as possible.
“I shouldn’t have brought this up,” he says savagely. “I… I have to go. You’ll be safe here. Stay inside. Listen to Christopher.”
“Where are you going?” I ask when he turns and begins walking away.
My voice cracks, and I realize I’m close to tears. Any second, I could burst into pathetic sobbing. He doesn’t answer and strides across the lobby. This is it. I know it. My crush is ending how I always knew it would when I peeled back the layer of my wildest fantasies and stared bluntly at the reality of the situation.
It’s ending in disappointment.
CHAPTER TEN
Luke
I’m on the treadmill, my phone propped on the supporting bracket so I can speak with Kenny simultaneously. He sits in his office in Australia, the sun beaming behind him. He’s let his brown hair grow long since the move, tangled sheets falling around his face, framing it.
“So you just left her there?” he asks.
“You don’t have to sound so surprised,” I grunt, my sneakers slapping against the treadmill. “You know I’m not much of a dater. I never have been. There’s no reason to start now.”
Kenny steeples his fingers, showing his hippie-style bracelets, a rope piece with small stones linked onto it, making a slight clicking sound.
“Yeah, maybe that’s true—”
“There’s no maybe about it.”
“Fine. So it’s true, but it doesn’t always have to be that way. Hell, Luke, I’ve never seen you like this before. You won’t even tell me what happened with your dad.”
“It’s not interesting,” I grunt.
He tilts his head. “Bull. Crap. If that were true, you wouldn’t be so torn up now. Was she supportive when you told her?”
My lips curve into a near smile, but I can’t shake the darkness clinging to every moment since I left Jane in the lobby of her building, that soul-aching look on her face, betrayal mixed with sympathy mixed with something else I can’t even think about… Love.
Jesus. Calming down would probably be a good idea.
“Yeah,” I say, hitting the stop button on the treadmill. “She was the best. I could tell she would’ve talked about it for hours if I’d wanted to, but I have to be careful.”
“The Russians?”
“They can’t know I care about her,” I say, picking up my phone and carrying it through the apartment.
