“Does it have something to do with Sir Charley Ward?” the Elder asked, his voice innocent.
“How did you . . . ?” Tamsin started, then gave up, realizing what a foolish question it had been. She had been aware the Elder knew everything, but until that moment she had thought it was restricted to things like the names of all the plants in the kingdom. She hadn’t realized it also included knowledge of her first kiss.
“Be careful there,” the Elder cautioned.
“It’s fine,” Tamsin said, turning back to the bird. She would prefer not to discuss Charley with anyone, but especially not someone old enough to be her grandfather.
“It’s always a risk,” the Elder said, but more quietly now, like perhaps he was no longer speaking to her. “Wherever there is great emotion. Because there is power in that. And few people handle power well.”
“It was only a kiss,” Tamsin said, focusing back on the owl.
“Oh,” the Elder said, shaking this head, “that is where you are mistaken. Believing that such a thing—just a kiss—has ever, for even a second, existed in this world.”
—C. B. McCallister, A Murder of Crows. Hightower & Jax, New York.
Chapter TEN
Almost without my noticing it, the summer started to find its rhythm. I had dogs to walk, I had my friends to hang out with, and my dad and I were finding a little more to say to each other day by day. But mostly, I had Clark.
“So Karl and Marjorie duck into a roadside tavern,” he said to me as we walked three hyperactive terriers, all straining desperately at their leashes, like the trees up ahead of us were just so much better.
“But they’re going under false names,” I reminded him, and Clark nodded.
“Of course. They can’t let their real identities be known, not with the bounty on their heads.”
“And it’s raining.”
“Naturally,” he said, taking my hand and squeezing it. “It’s a proverbial dark and stormy night.”
I looked over at him and smiled. “And then what happens?”
It had been two weeks since Clark and I kissed, and things were going well. I had been grounded for the first eight days—dropped down from ten, with some careful negotiation on my part—so he’d started coming with me when I walked Bertie. We’d hold hands while we walked, stopping to kiss multiple times, or as much as we could with Bert yanking on the leash. Clark would sometimes come with me on other walks, which I always appreciated, since a full day of walking dogs by myself led to me talking way too much to animals who were never going to answer me back.
But even though we hadn’t been able to go on another real date that first week, we’d ended up talking on the phone nearly every night, conversations that happened while he took Bertie for his nightly walk and I sat up on the roof and looked out at the stars. I’d never had conversations like that with a boyfriend before, conversations that were easy and free-flowing, hours passing in what felt like seconds.
I was still getting my head around how Clark seemed happy to talk about almost anything, including sharing how he felt about things. The only thing he really hadn’t told me much about was his father. Whenever we got close to the subject, I could sense Clark’s walls—which were so rarely present—start to go up, and I changed the subject quickly.
But I’d begun to fill in the picture of Clark Bruce McCallister in a way I never had with any of my other boyfriends. I knew now that his favorite color was green, that when he was little, he’d wanted to be a wildfire firefighter (“they fight fires from helicopters, how cool is that?”), that he talked to his older sister, Kara, on the phone every Sunday, that he still refused to watch Jaws because it had given him nightmares for weeks as a kid, that he hated cinnamon, and that he had found a spot, just below my earlobe, that drove me crazy when he kissed it. I didn’t know these types of things about any other guy, including Topher, and none of them would have known them about me. It was different with Clark. And one way I knew this, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was the fact that we were getting close to the three-week mark and I had no interest in seeing it end. It was pretty much the opposite, as a matter of fact—it was feeling like something was just getting started.
? ? ?