Walker laughed bitterly. He stepped back and caught her chin, tipping her face up to his. A tiny smudge of darkness slipped into view at the edge of his jaw, pulsing like a heartbeat.
“Believe me, we can kiss.” His eyes burned. “That was the most mind-blowing, reality-bending—” He stopped. “We can kiss. It’s just not safe for us to do it again.”
Keira shivered, still cold to the bone and aching for the warmth of Walker’s mouth on hers. “Unbelievable.”
“I’m sorry about the cold,” Walker said. “It goes away after you’ve been back and forth a few times. Until you get used to it, crossing between the worlds messes with your metabolic systems. You’re probably going to be—”
Keira’s stomach growled.
“—hungry, too,” he finished.
“Yeah. Oh, my jeans!” She twisted around, looking for evidence of the black muck that she’d fallen into, but there was nothing on her.
“With the exception of the Seekers, dark matter stays Darkside,” Walker said. “But you can sort of take baryonic matter—the stuff that makes up your world—into Darkside. Clothes and instruments. That sort of thing. As long as it’s been impregnated by enough dark matter by being in close contact with a Seeker. Or”—he looked at her—“by an Experimental.”
She could have been stripped naked each time they’d crossed. God. It was a pretty slim silver lining, but she clung to it anyway.
Wait . . .
“So if dark matter has to stay Darkside, how come the Seekers aren’t naked when they come over here?” she demanded.
Walker’s mouth twitched with amusement. “At first, they were. Now they keep a stock of things from this world to wear when they think they’re going to cross. It’s not easy.”
“So they can take clothes back to Darkside—what about people? Can a Darkling bring them across? They’re baryonic.” The word felt strange in her mouth.
Walker’s face twisted like she’d suggested microwaving a puppy. “Uh, yeah. Humans are made of baryonic matter. The thing is, once baryonic matter’s in Darkside, it disintegrates. The environment’s too foreign. It’s one reason music is such a challenge. Even if instruments are coated in dark matter, the baryonic stuff underneath disappears, and the materials we have in Darkside can’t re-create the sound they make.” He shook his head. “Anyway. The point is, stuff disintegrates. So if people come Darkside, they—”
“Disintegrate too. You can stop there. I get it.” Something snippy had crept into Keira’s voice. It was too much to absorb all at once, and she was full to the brim with surprises.
“I know this isn’t easy for you,” Walker said gently. “Why don’t you go take a hot shower and I’ll go hunt down a vending machine so that you’ll have something to eat.”
“Fine,” Keira agreed miserably. Realizing that she was being nasty to him while he was trying hard to take care of her, Keira turned back to Walker. “I mean, thanks. I’m sorry.”
Walker shook his head. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
He slipped out the door, leaving her alone in the threadbare room. She turned and headed into the bathroom, intending to stand in the shower until she’d used all the hot water in Sherwin or the world ended, whichever came first.
? ? ?
When she was finally warm, Keira climbed out of the shower and stood, wrapped in a towel, in the steamy bathroom. The reality of spending the night in a hotel room with Walker came crashing down around her. She had nothing to change into. And her mom was going to expect her to be home in a couple of hours—to be crawling into her own bed for the night.
She could hear the staccato chatter of Walker flipping through the television channels. She pulled on her shirt and underwear, wrapped a dry towel around her waist, and stepped out of the bathroom.
Walker looked over at her, his eyes widening in appreciation at the amount of thigh visible beneath the inadequate towel she was wearing.
“Wow.” He cleared his throat. “So, I got you some stuff to eat. The choices were pretty pathetic, but it’s better than nothing.”
She picked a package of cookies off the dresser and looked for somewhere to sit. She noticed that the bed had been made.
“Did you do that?” she asked.
“Yeah, I put the sheets on while you were showering,” Walker said.
It was so domestic—so cute—that Keira had to wrestle down a desire to run across the room and throw herself into his lap. Instead, she pulled a cookie out of the cellophane and perched on the edge of the bed.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” she asked.
Walker stared at her appraisingly. “I don’t need to.”
Keira swallowed the cookie carefully. “You mean you’re not hungry right now, or you don’t ever need to eat?”
“Of course I need to eat—you’ve seen me do that plenty of times,” he said. He still sounded guilty, somehow.