My mouth felt coated. I’d never get the taste out. “Why?”
“I’m pretty sure they don’t taste good.” She sat back in her chair, letting her hands fall to her lap. “They don’t look like the pancakes my mom makes.”
Nope.
These pancakes were a strange whitish yellow that was somehow nowhere near the color of normal pancakes. I willed my glass of milk closer and then picked it up, downing nearly half the tall glass.
Kat giggled again.
“Okay. These are terrible,” I admitted, placing the cup on the table. “How can you mess up pancakes?”
“I don’t know. I never made them.” She raised a shoulder. “I kind of eyeballed the whole ‘add water’ part.”
I stared at her, sort of dumbfounded. “All you have to do is add water. It’s not that hard.”
Her lips twitched as she ducked her chin. “Guess you should’ve gone with Waffle House then.”
My eyes narrowed as I pushed my plate back. “There’s a huge part of me that hopes you messed them up on purpose.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because if you can’t make pancakes then I’m not sure we can be friends.”
“Oh.” She placed her hand to her chest. “I’m so heartbroken.”
“You should be,” I told her, lowering my lashes. “I’m a good friend.”
Kat snorted, but what she didn’t say hung in the air between us. Kat and I had not gotten off on the right foot and spent the whole summer and most of autumn at war, mainly because of me. I fully admitted that, and if I could go back and change the way I treated her, I would. I’d realized that when I was fighting Baruck and had come close to losing not only my life, but also my sister’s and hers. The thing was, even I couldn’t go back in time. I could only move forward.
It was time to change the subject. “Has anyone said anything to you about the trace—Dee or Matthew?” I asked, knowing the Thompsons wouldn’t talk to her. Well, Adam would talk to her, but he wasn’t a problem.
“Dee said something in the beginning, but it’s been easy to explain away. Everyone knows I was there when…” She wet her lower lip, the action drawing my attention. “When you fought Baruck. So they don’t think anything is too strange.”
“Good,” I murmured.
She yawned loudly as she stood and picked up our plates. Her steps were slow as she walked the plates over to the trash. I glanced at the wall clock. It wasn’t even six in the evening. “Is your mom working tonight?”
“Of course,” she replied, dumping the pancakes into the trash. The line of her spine stiffened as she walked over to the dishwasher. “She’s always working.”
My head cocked to the side, and a moment passed. “You don’t like that, do you?”
She glanced over her shoulder at me as she opened the dishwasher’s door. “Mom has to work a lot.” She shoved the plates in and then went for the bowl, placing it in the sink. “The bills don’t pay themselves.”
“I get that.”
She looked away from me as she fiddled with the faucets. “Not all of us have the government dumping money on us because we’re aliens.”
I raised a brow at that.
Kat yawned again. “It does get kind of…lonely here.”
“I can imagine,” I murmured, not liking the idea of her being alone whenever she was home and she wasn’t with one of her friends or me.
She didn’t say anything for a long moment. “I get you feel like you have to do the babysitting thing, but I’m not going anywhere. I have a test to study for and biology homework. You don’t have to stay here.”
Pushing to my feet, I made my way to where she was standing. “You can—”
Kat gasped as she spun around. “God, Daemon! Do you constantly have to do that? Geez,” she said, leaning back against the counter. “You’re like a ninja stealth alien.”
One side of my lips tipped up. “I wasn’t even that quiet.”
“Yeah, you were. Like a ghost,” she said, lifting her chin so our eyes met. “A creepy ghost.”
I chuckled. “Why am I a creepy ghost?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured, her gaze dropping to my mouth and then lower, to my chest. “You’re all up in my personal space.”
I was totally up in her personal space. There wasn’t more than an inch or two between our bodies. When I forced my lungs to inhale, I caught the peachy scent that was all hers. “Sorry.”
“You’re not sorry at all.”