“I read you like a book,” Luke said to him, then put the Milk-Bone down on the far cushion of the couch. And just like that, Bob had moved over as commanded, allowing Luke to sit next to me. Bob gave him a reproachful look, as if offended by the dastardly trick, but he got over it quickly and made himself comfortable on Luke’s other side.
To my surprise, Luke put his arm around me, pulling my body close against his. I knew it was supposed to be a comforting gesture, not a romantic one, but the feel of his arm around my shoulders, the warmth of his body against mine, filled my senses, almost enough to drive my misery away.
“Even if he’s telling the truth,” Luke said, “you have nothing to feel bad about.”
That brought my misery back to full strength in a heartbeat. “Nothing to feel bad about?” I cried, trying to pull away. Luke’s firm arm wouldn’t let me. “If he’s telling the truth, every awful thing that’s happened since that night is all because of me. My father died because of me! And there’s worse to come.” The tears were rising in my throat, hard though I tried to hold them back. Maybe if I hadn’t let Aleric get to me so much, I could have questioned him some more, gotten him to explain who or what the Night Makers were—and what might happen if they came. But I hadn’t been in the right frame of mind to ask rational questions, and I wouldn’t have trusted the answers anyway.
“It’s not because of you,” Luke said, giving my shoulders a squeeze for emphasis. “You tried to save the life of a helpless baby. What were you supposed to do? Walk away and let it die?”
“I knew there was something wrong,” I protested. “Bob tried to tell me, and my instincts tried to tell me, and—”
“And what kind of person would have believed those instincts and let the baby lie there abandoned in the cold?” he persisted.
I couldn’t answer that. It was easy to say I should have walked away when I knew the consequences of trying to help. But without the twenty-twenty hindsight, was there any chance I’d have let my instincts trump my common sense and compassion?
“I’ll tell you what kind of person,” Luke said more softly. “A heartless, selfish, cowardly scumbag of a person. Not the kind of person you would want to be.”
He put his other arm around me and pulled me into a hug. A hug I needed more desperately than light, than food, than air. I forgot all my normal self-consciousness, clinging to him, pressing my face against his shoulder as the tears shook me and he held me and stroked my hair.
I didn’t cry for long. I’d cried so much over the past week that it was like my body couldn’t take any more. As wretched as I still felt, the tears dried up and my breath evened out. I had the vague feeling that I should pull away, now that the crying jag had run its course, but it felt so good to have Luke’s arms around me. I couldn’t force myself to end it a second earlier than necessary.
“You’re one of the most amazing people I know,” Luke said softly. “Don’t let Aleric or Piper or anyone else convince you otherwise.”
Luke thought I was amazing? Pleasure chased some of the chill from my body, though I hardly felt deserving of the praise. No matter what Luke said, I knew Aleric had been telling me the truth, that I had somehow let the magic into our world and was directly responsible for everything that had happened since. That was the opposite of amazing.
I was still cuddled up against Luke’s chest, and he was showing no sign that he planned to let go anytime soon. I told myself I should take the initiative and sit up straight, put some distance between us. But that was when his fingers started skimming over my shoulder.
It was a light, tentative caress, but it definitely did not feel like a gesture of comfort. My breath hitched in my throat and my pulse fluttered.
Surely I was misinterpreting things. Luke was just holding a damsel in distress and trying to make her feel better. I was reading things into that soft movement of his fingers, things that couldn’t possibly be there. If Luke were interested in me in that way, he’d have shown it long before now.
Whatever the meaning of that gentle touch, I didn’t have the willpower to pull away while he was doing it. I lay still, almost frozen in his arms, willing him to keep doing it, practically holding my breath. He stirred beside me, turning his body slightly more toward me, and I felt a brief pressure on the top of my head.
Did he just kiss me?
No way. That must have been his chin brushing the top of my head as he changed position. He just hadn’t been able to avoid my head because it was resting against his shoulder.
But it hadn’t felt like a chin. A chin was hard and bony, and that was not at all what I’d felt pressing into my hair.
Maybe he’d thought it was just another reassuring gesture. Maybe his mom had kissed the top of his head when he was a little kid, and he thought that was what you did when you wanted to comfort someone.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want it to be something more. It was just that I was terrified of getting my hopes up—or making a fool of myself. We spent every night cooped up in the same house together, and if I acted like he was coming on to me and I was wrong, I didn’t know how I could bear the humiliation of it.
There was that pressure on my head again. It lasted longer this time, long enough for me to hyperanalyze the sensation and determine that yes, that was a kiss.
Luke’s fingers moved slowly from my shoulder to the bare skin of my neck, and goose bumps erupted all over my body. His touch skimmed up to my face, his hand deliciously warm against my chilled skin.
I could bend, twist, and otherwise contort the kiss on the top of the head into a gesture of comfort, but there was no way to misinterpret this as anything but a caress. I swallowed hard, hardly daring to believe this was happening—and almost panicked with the realization that I had no idea what to do. The sum total of my experience with boys was an uncomfortable date at my junior prom with the son of one of my dad’s friends. We hadn’t known each other, and it turned out we were both equally shy, which made for stilted, awkward conversation. We’d kissed when he dropped me off at home, but only because we thought we ought to, not because we particularly wanted to.
Luke cupped my chin and gently tipped my face up toward his. His eyes were huge and dark, and there was an intensity in them I’d never seen before. There was no question that he was going to kiss me, and not on the top of the head this time, and I fought a swell of panic. He was used to kissing Piper, who had never been shy and never lacked confidence. She also had considerable experience by the time she and Luke started dating. There was no way I could measure up to that standard, no way I could set myself up for a comparison with Piper and come out the winner.
There was also no way I was going to pass up the opportunity to kiss Luke, no matter how potentially complicated it would make things between us in the future.
The first brush of his lips against mine was surprisingly tentative. He’d always seemed to me like a good match for Piper in the confidence department. He wasn’t as much of an extrovert as she was, but I’d never seen much in the way of self-consciousness.
Stop thinking about Piper! I commanded myself.
Luke deepened the kiss, his lips stroking more firmly, his mouth open. I drank it all in: the warmth and softness of his lips, the scent of his skin, the gentle rasp of his five o’clock shadow. Technically I didn’t really know what I was doing, but it was like a dance, and I was happy to follow where Luke led.
When Luke’s tongue brushed against the seam of my lips, I obediently opened my mouth wider. The first touch of his tongue inside my mouth was so strange, so foreign, that it almost knocked me out of the moment. I don’t know what I’d expected a tongue to feel like—to be honest, hadn’t ever given it any thought—but it wasn’t like this.
If it had been anyone but Luke, I might have balked at the unfamiliarity of that sensation. I wouldn’t necessarily have stopped, it’s just that I might have felt the need for a little time to mentally regroup and readjust my expectations. But I wasn’t about to risk lo
sing this moment with him, not when I couldn’t help fearing it was the only moment we would ever have. I kept expecting him to pull away, to come to his senses and remember that I was his neighbor, the girl he’d never had any interest in.
It didn’t take long for me to adjust to the sensation of Luke’s tongue in my mouth. Not long at all. In a second or two, I was kissing him back with equal enthusiasm, if not with the same skill. He didn’t seem to mind, endlessly patient with my awkward fumblings.
We made out for what felt like somewhere between two seconds and forever, until I no longer felt like I was clueless and out of my league, until I forgot my fear that I would pale in comparison to Piper, until I practically forgot the rest of the world existed.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world did exist, in all of its current craziness. Our kiss was interrupted by a burst of raucous laughter right outside the front window. Luke broke away from me lightning quick, grabbing hold of Bob’s collar before the injured dog could leap from the couch and charge at the front door. Bob barked and tried to struggle away from Luke’s grip, but Luke was practically lying on top of him, holding him down, keeping him away from the potential danger of that mail slot. It was a good thing he’d won Bob over already or he might have had his face bitten off.
Lips still tingling from the glory of the kiss, I held my breath and once more pulled the gun from my ankle holster. But apparently this group of Nightstruck was just passing through, not stopping by to torment me. They were loud, and from the sound of it, they were idly smashing things as they went by, but they kept moving.
I didn’t relax and put the gun away until the last echoes of their voices faded into the distance.
“I’d better clear the table,” I said, standing up and pretending not to see Luke’s puzzled frown. Guess that wasn’t the kind of thing he was used to a girl saying to him after a nice make out session, but the interruption had brought all of my self-consciousness rushing back. I didn’t know what to make of him kissing me like that. Was it just one of those things that happens in the heat of the moment? Was he already regretting it, wondering what he’d been thinking? I’d just lost my father, and he’d basically just lost Piper, and people tend to act impulsively when they’re in that kind of emotional turmoil. If that was why Luke had kissed me, I didn’t want to face reality. Not yet.
So I acted like Ms. Fifties Housewife instead, taking longer than necessary to clear the dishes we’d abandoned on the dining room table when Aleric had come calling. When Luke tried to help, I brushed him off with a false, perky smile. And when that busywork was done, I decided I was in need of a long, hot shower, which gave me the excuse to flee to my bedroom and be alone.
Was I being an abject coward? Yes. But knowing that wasn’t enough to make me go back downstairs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I had feared that the kiss would make things awkward between Luke and me, and I was right. I’m pretty sure it was all my fault, that I was being a neurotic train wreck about the whole thing, but I couldn’t shake the suspicion that the kiss had been some kind of mistake on Luke’s part. That he’d just done it because he felt sorry for me, or because we had both been scared by Aleric’s visit, or just because he was your stereotypical guy and I’d been available. It was a suspicion I didn’t want to have confirmed, so anytime Luke tried to talk to me about it or ask me what was wrong, I changed the subject so fast I gave myself whiplash.
I missed Piper—my Piper, not the creature she’d become—so badly it hurt like a physical pain. She was the only person I could even imagine talking to about the emotional jumble I couldn’t seem to deal with. She’d always been the one I talked to about girl stuff, about my thoughts and feelings and fears. She’d been there for me during the terrible last few months of my parents’ marriage, when our house had been like a verbal war zone and I felt like a helpless witness, watching the two people I loved most in the world tearing each other apart. How I wished she could be there for me now.
Though I don’t suppose I’d have been able to talk this particular dilemma over with her anyway, seeing as Luke was her boyfriend. If Piper were still in the picture, none of this would have happened in the first place and I wouldn’t have anything to be confused about.
The quarantine dragged on, though the government’s assertion that the city’s madness was the result of some contagious disease grew increasingly absurd. With my dad gone, I no longer had a way to get inside information about what was really going on, but there was no way the government hadn’t sent people in hazmat suits into the city at night. Surely those people had seen what the rest of us were seeing, and the hazmat suits would prove it wasn’t some disease or hallucinogen. But the quarantine stayed in effect anyway, and people who tried to sneak out were arrested and thrown in jail.
The continued quarantine meant there was little to no chance I would be able to make my planned trip to Boston to spend Thanksgiving with my mom and sister. Unlike me, Luke had family who lived within the city limits, and Dr. Gilliam didn’t so much ask me to join them for Thanksgiving as assume I would. Sitting in on some other family’s Thanksgiving dinner was an incredibly unappealing option. However, my other option was to spend the day alone in my house, which sucked even more.
I wished the dinner were happening at Dr. Gilliam’s place, so that if I found it unbearable I could slip home. Unfortunately, her father and her stepmother would be hosting us in their condo down by the Delaware River.
“We’ll all spend the night there,” Dr. Gilliam told me. “That way we won’t have to worry about trying to get home before curfew.”
“But I can’t leave Bob home alone all night!” I protested, thinking I’d found a way out of going, and wondering if that was a victory or not.
Dr. Gilliam smiled. “Of course not. Bob’s invited, too. My folks have a black Lab who’d be delighted to make his acquaintance.”
I doubted Bob would be similarly delighted. He wasn’t particularly aggressive with other dogs, as long as they weren’t aggressive with him, but he was … let’s just call it standoffish.
“We’ll be careful about introducing them,” Dr. Gilliam assured me. “If it seems like they won’t get along, we’ll separate them. It’ll be fine; you’ll see. And I’m sure he’ll forgive you for uprooting him when you give him his own turkey dinner.”
I had to admit, a turkey dinner would be a big hit with Bob. So apparently I was going to have Thanksgiving dinner and spend the night at a stranger’s house. It was going to be one hell of a tough day, full of memories of my dad. I was going to have a hard time thinking of things to be thankful for. But when I called and told my mom about it, she burst into tears and said how very happy she was that I wouldn’t have to spend the holiday alone, and I realized that in spite of my ambivalence, I was pretty glad about that, too.
* * *
Thanks to my family being scattered all over the country—and out of it, because of one aunt and set of cousins who live in England—the biggest family gathering I’d ever been to had been no more than eight people, counting me and my folks. Luke had warned me that his family was a big one, and when we arrived at his grandparents’ condo, I found he’d been telling nothing but the truth. There were fifteen people, most of whom were in his parents’ generation. There were a couple of bratty boys, aged four and six, and one cousin named Marlene, who was sixteen, but that was it for young folk. Which was actually kind of fine with me, because it made it easier not to be overly social.
Sometimes I felt fine, if a little removed. But other times grief snuck up on me and smacked me hard in the face. More than once I felt like I was going to lose it and go off on a crying jag right in front of all these strangers.
What struck me hardest was watching Dr. Gilliam interact with her father. There was such affection and mutual respect between them, and I was achingly aware that I would never have a chance to relate to my own father like that, as one adult to another. I would never know how our relationship would have evolved wh
en I left the nest and when the immediate aftermath of the divorce had blown over. That hurt so much that I had to duck into the bathroom to have a good cry a couple of times.
Both times, I’d slipped away in what I thought was an unobtrusive fashion, and both times, when I stepped out of the bathroom, Luke was there waiting for me. The awkwardness was still there between us, but I didn’t have the willpower to refuse the hugs he offered me.
If Thanksgiving was this bad, I hated to think what Christmas would be like. Even if the government finally lifted the quarantine—which I flat-out didn’t believe would happen—and I got to spend that holiday with my own family, the sense of loss would still cling to me.
No, I wasn’t in the most thankful state of mind, and I probably came off as dull and standoffish. A few of the adults tried to engage me in conversation, but though I tried my best, words were hard to find and those conversations died before they were born. The only person I felt even mildly myself around—other than Luke and his mom—was Luke’s cousin Marlene, but that was because she kind of reminded me of Piper, with her bubbly nature and her amazing facility for carrying on one-sided conversations.
Despite the gloom that hovered over me, I found that I couldn’t help liking Marlene. She was charmingly unconventional, a combination of jock and artist. She was into rowing and volleyball, but she was also an avid painter and had apparently painted the portrait of her grandparents that hung over the mantelpiece of the gas fireplace. I know practically nothing about art, but I thought the painting was damn good and couldn’t help being impressed. Marlene sat to my left at dinner and kept up an effortless stream of chatter, despite my own reticence.
“She started talking when she was in the womb,” Luke teased, “and hasn’t shut up since.”
I leaned back out of the line of fire as Marlene tossed a crumbly bit of roll at him, something the three of us found more amusing than the adults did.