Lily poured more chips onto her napkin “So, you turn your charm off and on like a switch? Can you explain that? I’m curious.”
Nick shook his head. “I don’t know if I’d call it charm.”
“Then what would you call it?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. My secret reserve of extrovert energy? At almost any given point, I’d rather be home reading, but you can’t get through life that way because there are things you have to do, like there was no way I was going to miss Marcus’s birthday party tonight. And I had to participate in class as a kid or else it would affect my grades. It’s just a trick I taught myself to pretend like I have energy even when I don’t. It came in handy for my old job when I had to talk to people a lot.”
He stopped abruptly, prompting Lily to ask, “What was your old job?”
He slid her a sidelong glance. “I was a journalist.”
“Oh, what publication?”
He stared down at his hands and took such a long pause, Lily was unsure if he’d heard her question. “World Traveler.”
“Oh.” Lily stilled. Strick had been a travel-magazine writer. Thinking of him caused her face to heat up in embarrassment. It was ridiculous to let someone who didn’t exist beyond a computer screen interrupt her conversation with Nick, a flesh-and-blood person who was sitting right in front of her. She pushed the embarrassment deep down. “Basically, what you’re telling me is that you’re used to hiding at parties.”
“I guess.” Nick laughed as he scooped for more chips and held the bag open for Lily, shaking some out into her palm.
“I do it too,” she said. “I’ve done it my whole life. After a while, I just reach this point where I can feel my body shutting down, like I need to plug into a wall and recharge or I’ll malfunction. It drives my sisters nuts. There was this one time in high school when I went to a house party with Violet because she was kind of a wild child and my parents thought she might behave better if she took me out with her, but I ended up spending the entire night in the laundry room, reading Graceling. Then the kid’s parents came home, and everyone ran out the back door, and I had no idea until his dad found me reading on a pile of fresh towels. He gave me a ride home. It was very uncool. Violet was so embarrassed.”
Nick grinned, motioning for Lily to pass him the chips. “I’ve got a story for you. Sophomore year in English class, I finished reading The Great Gatsby a week before everyone else—sad-ass story, by the way—so that Friday during our period of silent reading, I brought in a book from the library to read. My teacher didn’t catch on for the first half of class until she walked by my desk and noticed the book that I was reading kept mentioning a shape-shifting dragon and a lady knight named Nermana. She gave me a warning, and then because I thought I was slick, she caught me again not even twenty minutes later and gave me detention. Guess who got in trouble for reading during detention?”
Lily pictured a younger version of Nick, hunched over a book with focus, and it made her smile. “What book were you reading?”
“The Nermana Chronicles by Elena Masterson.”
“I love Elena Masterson!” Half–Korean American and half–African American, Elena Masterson was one of the few women of color fantasy writers whose work Lily was able to read growing up. “But I haven’t read that one. I haven’t even heard of it.”
“It’s a deep cut, published before her Dragons of Blood series. I have a copy. I can lend it to you.”
“Really? Thank you. I can’t believe there’s a book by her that I didn’t know about. I’m really slacking. I rarely read for fun.”
Nick tilted his head. “Why?”
“I read so much for work,” she said. “I used to think I’d be a writer when I was younger. But you know what they say. If you can’t do, teach. Or edit, I guess. I want to work on books like Elena Masterson’s, but for children. Stories about kids of color saving the world and going on adventures.”
“You’ll do it,” Nick said. “I believe in you.”
He said this with such confident ease, as if he already knew what she was capable of. Like he saw something in her that she was struggling to see in herself. Lily was so thrown, she simply gazed at him as he scooped his hands into the bag of chips.
Girl, stop! Not with this obsessive behavior again!
Clearing her throat, she asked, “So do you think you’ll go back to journalism? I remember you said you were in between things.”
She noticed the way he stilled then, his hand hovering above his mouth, filled with chips. “I’m working on stuff here and there. Still trying to figure it all out, honestly.”
He started fiddling with the bag of chips, rolling and unrolling the top.
It was a vague answer, but she understood him not wanting to go too in depth about his work. Edith had some authors who couldn’t discuss a book until they’d completed an entire draft. She imagined it might be the same for journalists.
“Well, just putting it out there that you could share your writing with me,” she said. “I do edit nonfiction. I mean, if you ever want feedback.”
He quickly shook his head. “Nah. Not a chance. My stuff is trash. You’d never look at me the same.”
Lily rolled her eyes, but she smirked. “I doubt it’s trash.”
“It is. I promise you. It’s not even regular trash. Or junkyard trash. It’s the kind that you can’t reuse so it has no business being in the junkyard in the first place. If you read it, you’d avoid me in the hallways.”
“I’d never avoid you. Who else would talk to me about early-2000s fantasy novels and music icons from North Carolina?”
“Good point. We share a wealth of random knowledge.”
Lily laughed and was suddenly struck with a strange feeling that they’d done this before, which they most definitely hadn’t. It was that deceiving sense of familiarity again, flaring up and nagging at her. She was comfortable enough to tell him things she didn’t usually tell other people she’d known for only a couple weeks. Why?
When she still hadn’t responded, Nick glanced over at her. He started to speak but stopped. She didn’t know how she was looking at him, but something in her expression must have given him pause.
An Earth, Wind & Fire song was blasting in the living room. Lily felt the bass vibrating through the floor as she and Nick stared at each other. Nick’s chest rose and fell as he breathed deeply. He began to lean closer, and she felt deliciously light-headed at the scent of his cologne. Was he going to kiss her again? This time would he pull her close, gently and carefully, before delivering soft kisses along her neck until he reached her mouth? Or would he be insistent and urgent, scooping her into his lap and grabbing either side of her face as he covered her mouth with his own? Lily squeezed her thighs together as she pictured Nick’s large hands palming her butt, him biting her bottom lip.