Where by Kit Reed

Author:Kit Reed
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466870499
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

16

Merrill

Now

Ned comes in, and night and silence blow out the door. After years spent battling Father, after a string of so-so roommates, after all the joy and confusion that came with Davy moving in, I was getting used to coming home to peace and order. I like walking into silence, everything where I left it, nothing to do, nobody expecting anything.

Now my still, featureless house is filling up with need.

Neddy slams into me and locks his arms so tight that I gasp. Clamping me in that hug, he twirls us so my back is to the door. I know he’s hiding something, but I’m so glad to see him that I let it play. We’re spinning in the moment, Neddy and me, all, not yet, make it last, it’s been too long! I could swear he’s grown. He’s so strong that I have to run my fingers up under the baggy hoodie and drum on his ribs to make him giggle and let go.

He smells like my brother but he doesn’t; I catch subtle hints of, what. Men’s deodorant and motor oil and— wait. One other thing. Oh! I get it, but I don’t want to.

I hold him off so I can study him. Instead of acknowledging the man poised on the sill, neither outside nor in, I draw on recent history. “You were smoking weed.”

“As if!”

So much for assumptions. This is not his shirt. Everything we thought before here— before this place— is long gone.

The intruder speaks. “In your dreams, lady. Hello again.”

Yes, this is what I have been avoiding. Magnetic, in spite of everything that stands between us. You’re not that person now, leave her back in high school, you’re done yearning after guys you know are bad for you. “What are you, stalking me?”

Black sweats, black hoodie, same as Ned’s, but it looks better on him because it fits. Look at him, lounging in my doorway with one foot propped on the frame, studying his buffed fingernails as though whatever he came for, whatever he wants from me, can wait. He takes his sweet time responding and when he does, it’s to piss me off. “You don’t like me, do you?”

“I don’t know you!”

Rawson Steele backs into my open door, shuts it with one hand and shoots the bolt without looking, as if he knows these buildings by heart. “My point.”

“What?” I ask him, “What do you want from us?”

“What do you think I want?”

Right. The phone. When we rounded that corner tonight the phone was still spinning in the road but the owner was long gone. “So that was you.”

This makes him laugh, but his mouth twitches and I wonder: feeling stupid because you dropped it? About running away when it was only me and Ray? Embarrassed grin. “Pretty much.”

“You were out of there too fast. Who knew? It’s not like we could give it back.”

“It’s not like you wanted to. Now, if you’ll just…”

The minute Ray scooped up that phone I flipped it open. Its screen was shattered but there was a voice coming out.

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