“No,” I replied. “Just today.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “You smell like lemons.”
I rose up on my toes.
He turned, his hands finding my waist, his lips finding mine like he’d been preparing himself for this moment.
Saying I wasn’t ready for it was an understatement.
I wasn’t ready for the emotion, and I wasn’t ready for the way his long, chilly fingers worked their way under my jacket and sweatshirt and shirt and pressed into my hips, raising goose bumps on my skin. Everything around us drifted away. Miles groaned. The vibration rippled through my lips.
The heat. How did I not notice the heat? There was a furnace between the layers of clothing that separated us.
I pushed away. He breathed heavily, watching me with alert, hungry eyes.
“Miles.”
“Sorry.” His huskier-than-usual voice didn’t sound sorry.
“No—I—do you want to come back to my house?”
He hesitated for a moment; in his eyes, I saw him working out the meaning of my words. It took him so much longer to figure it out than a math problem or a word puzzle. Those he got immediately. This took all his brain power.
I had to believe he’d been born with this confusion, this inability to understand people, because the alternative was that he’d been conditioned to think no one would ever suggest something like this to him, and he simply couldn’t process it when someone did. And that was too sad to believe.
“You . . . you mean . . . ?” His eyebrows creased.
“Yes.”
His breath hitched. “Are you sure?”
I let my fingers wander to the waistband of his jeans. “Yes.”
Chapter Thirty-four
We didn’t talk on the way to my house. Miles’s knuckles were white against the steering wheel, and he kept glancing over at me every few seconds. I knew this because I kept glancing over at him, too. Something wiggling and strange tunneled through my stomach, half excitement, half terror. When he pulled up the driveway and reached over to unbuckle his seatbelt, I held him back.
“Wait. Let me go in first. Drive down the street some, then walk back. You know which window is my room?”
“No.”
I showed him. “Come to the window. I’ll let you in.”
I marched up to the front door, perimeter checking the yard as I went, trying to be as casual as possible when I stepped into the house and flipped the bolt behind me. I kicked my shoes off in the hallway and tiptoed past the family room.
“Alex?”
My mother.
“Hey, Mom.”
“I’m glad you’re home.” She stood from the couch and held out her hand. “I didn’t realize you’d be out so late— you need to take this.”
She gave me a pill. I swallowed it dry. “We stopped for dinner.”
“Did you have fun?”
“Um, yeah, I guess.” I wanted to be in my bedroom. Wanted to be shut in, safe, away from prying eyes. With Miles.
“How was Miles?”
“Good? I don’t know what you mean.”
“He was visiting his mother in a mental hospital. You’d think he’d have some sort of issues. Heaven knows the boy already seems a little . . . emotionally stunted. I’m half convinced he’s autistic.”
“So what if he is?”
She blinked at me. “What?”
“So what if Miles is autistic? And he’s not ‘emotionally stunted’—he has emotions like the rest of us. He just has trouble figuring out what they are, sometimes.”
“Alex, he seems very smart, but I don’t think he’s the best influence.”
I scoffed. If only she knew. “Then why’d you get so excited about the idea of me going with him? Because you wanted me to see where I’d be living after high school?”
“No, of course not! I didn’t mean it like that.”
I shrugged my jacket off and hung it on the coatrack. “I’m going to bed. Please don’t bother me.”
I left her standing in the dark entryway and slipped back to my room, closing and locking the door behind me. I didn’t bother with a perimeter check. I didn’t care. Joseph Stalin himself could’ve been standing in the corner and I wouldn’t have cared. I lifted the window and popped out the screen.
“Be quiet,” I said.
Miles had no trouble with that. He slinked into the room, blending into the darkness. I found him by touch and brought him close, helping him slide out of his jacket. The smell of pastries and mint soap filled my room. With him here, I knew everything really was okay. I wrapped my arms around him and pressed my face into his shirt. We tottered back, through the narrow shaft of yellow light from the streetlamp outside, and fell onto the bed.