“What smile?” I so wasn’t smiling.
“This is serious,” he says.
“I know.”
“Do you?” Niles swings down a side street, where bulky residential towers glower above tiny well-kept shops. The fringes of Low South before it turns into grime. Niles pulls along the curb outside a pet shop, powers down the engine, and stares out the window.
We sit in silence.
“What if she’d been somebody else?” he asks.
“Who?”
“The one with the daughter. What if she’d been the kind who didn’t stop?”
“Then she wouldn’t have stopped.”
And I’d have a lot more bruises.
Outside, the pet shop sports a digitized window with a digitized puppy. Its neon ears bounce with its wagging tail. It wriggles and rolls happily across the glass for ten whole seconds, its world an open possibility.
Then the loop repeats.
“You don’t get it,” Niles says. “There were fifty-eight people in that group. If even half joined in . . . I’d have got you out, but it would have been bad.”
“No.” I face him. “You don’t get in the middle of that. You don’t ever—”
“You think I’d just stand by and watch?”
“I think your mother didn’t kill their kids, and it’s not your fight.” The words come gritty.
Niles leans in, blocks out the street. “Was that what that was? A fight?”
I cross my arms and don’t answer.
His reaches for my jaw, light fingers at odds with his biting glare. “You’re going to have a helluva shiner.”
“So what? Is my health more important than their hurt?”
“Who even thinks that way?” He glances from my cheek to me.
I straighten. Put us nose to nose so he’ll back the hell up. “And how am I supposed to think?”
He doesn’t move an inch. Stares back with brown-black eyes and parted lips that forgot to close. His palm slides along my jaw, fingertips brushing my ear, breath rising on an upbeat. Mine is almost gone. It wouldn’t take much to kiss him. I’d barely have to move.
“No,” I say, but there’s no air.
His “What?” comes near as soundless.
I pull away, far away, press into the passenger side.
His hand lifts, hovers where I was. “Kit?”
“No.” Stronger now. “Been here, done that, got it the first time.”
I yank open the door, slam out of the hover, and take off down the street.
Two beats and his door echoes mine. “Kit!”
“Stop.”
I swing around. He skids to a halt an arm’s length away. The sun picks out his hair and cheekbones, the round tip of his nose.
“If you’re going to kiss me, kiss me. Otherwise I don’t care how nice you are—hands off. It’s not a game. I’m not a game.”
Even if my skin has mapped the shape of his fingers and wants them back. Especially since I want him back.
I turn and head for home. Not two steps later, his hand catches mine.
Apparently, the boy has a death wish.
And I am not going to bawl.
“Niles,” I growl.
“Just to clarify.” He swallows and steps closer. “The kissing’s okay?”
“What?”
Another step, his half smile shaky and wholly un-Niles-like. “Assuming I get my shit together, a kiss would be fine?”
Oh yeah.
No.
I don’t know.
“Depends.” I can’t meet his eyes, so I stare at his lips—like that’s less dangerous. The upper one is a little uneven, lower one almost too full.
“On what?” he asks.
He is very, very close.
“Will it mean something?”
Because that matters. It didn’t last night, but it does now. Except it mattered then, too.
His free hand brushes my unbruised cheek, thumb finding the corner of my mouth. “That’s what scares me.”
“You’re scared?” It’s impossible to see his face as a whole. He is skin and undercurrents, clarity and heat.
“Terrif—” he whispers, except his mouth presses soft and close.
Or else it wasn’t a whisper to begin with.
He tastes like him. Niles. Careful, measured intent and contradictions. Messy assurance, sliding smiles. Laughter that lives in his lips, on his tongue, warming even when it isn’t there. His palm slides along my back. I wrap my arms around his neck. My dress bunches with his fingers, his collar crinkled under mine, and every breath I snatch, he steals.
The world explodes in horns. A horn. A single streethover wailing past.
We jump, percussion and jitters, and I press my face to his neck.
“Yeah, yeah.” Niles glares after the streethover, then squeezes me tight. “Want to get breakfast?”
I smile into his skin. “What is it with you and breakfast?”
“Best meal of the day.”
I raise my head. “But isn’t it lunch . . . time . . .”
Something’s wrong with the pet shop behind him. I lean past his shoulder for a better view.
The digital puppy is gone, replaced by Mom’s soft smile.
She looks right at me. Even the low-grade window-screen catches the full spectrum of her eyes, their woven brown and gray. The perfect red of her lipstick. She only wore red to work; normally she favored brown. She told me that once.
Niles kisses my jaw. I feel it; it registers. My face must be working.
I can’t speak.