God, it was so hot. In every sense of the word.
We were wearing too many clothes. But I could fix that.
I slid my hands beneath the hem of her shirt and started inching it up.
“Zane?” she whispered against my throat.
I was having a little trouble focusing on words. The bra that I’d seen earlier was now beneath my fingertips. “Yeah?” I managed.
“I want to find Ford and the other hybrids,” she said breathlessly.
“Wait. What?” I stopped, with one hand caught in the fabric of her shirt, the other searching for a fastener of some kind at the back of that undergarment that would probably play a starring role in my future fantasies.
I’d heard that wrong. Had to have. I’d caught the “I want” part, but nothing after that had made any sense.
“I figured out another option when you were sleeping,” she said. “Ford and the other hybrids. I want to find them.” She pulled away from me slightly, her cheeks flushed pink and her eyes hazy but slowly regaining focus.
Reluctantly, I let go of her shirt and scrubbed my hands over my face, not entirely sure I was awake. If I wasn’t, I was kind of disappointed at the left turn this sex dream had taken. “Right now?”
She blushed, color spreading up from her neck. “Not this second, no.”
I struggled to focus, when my whole body was screaming at me to close the distance and kiss her again, to get us both down on the floor of the van. “Why do you want to find them?” Avoiding Laughlin’s hybrids entirely seemed like a much better goal to me. Healthier.
Ariane frowned, sharp intellect replacing all the softness in her expression. “So far, we’ve just been reacting to what everyone else does. GTX, my father, your mother. An alliance with Ford and the others could give us leverage, an advantage.” She shrugged and, I noted with regret, pulled her shirt into place. “If we all refuse to cooperate, they can’t have their competition.” Her voice held a note of grim satisfaction.
I sighed, shifting her weight in my lap slightly to make it more comfortable and less distracting. Clearly the make-out portion of this conversation was over. “We’ve seen how ‘persuasive’ GTX can be. I doubt Laughlin’s any different. These hybrids probably spend half the day throwing knives at your picture on the wall,” I pointed out.
She rolled her eyes. “You watch too many movies.”
“Really? You’re saying that to me?” Based on what she’d told me, most of her early education about the outside world—in other words, anything beyond the ten-by-ten-foot space of GTX cell—had come exclusively from movies and TV they’d shown her. And it seemed, given the number of pop culture references she used, those films and shows had had a lasting effect on how she viewed things, a filter over her real-life experiences.
“Fine,” she said with an impatient exhale before pushing herself from my lap and resettling on the van floor across from me, adding distance between us. “You watch too many bad movies. That’s a cliché.”
“And this isn’t?” I asked in disbelief. “You want to approach the bad guys, hoping they’ll want to talk when it’s far more likely they’ll just try to kill you.”
Her gaze skittered away from me. “They’re not the bad guys,” she said, staring at a point somewhere to my left, her shoulders tight suddenly.
Smooth, Zane. Way to insult her. “I’m sorry,” I said with a wince. “I didn’t mean they were bad because they were hybrids. I just meant—”
“They were raised by Laughlin, just as I was raised by Dr. Jacobs,” she said. “That gives us more in common than it divides us.”
Hearing her talk about “us” and mean herself and the hybrids instead of the two of us sent a twinge of worry through me.
“How do you know that they haven’t spent the last fifteen or twenty years just waiting for the chance to prove themselves?” I argued. “What if he’s promised them freedom if they win the trials? What if they don’t even want to be free?”
“Then why would they hate the humans so much?”
Her use of the word “humans” and the cool distance in her tone—as if we were some simple inanimate object, like grapefruits or something—made me shiver despite the heat. It was easy to forget sometimes that she was more than just Ariane Tucker, the quiet girl who’d been in my math class. She blended in, just as they’d intended. But other times, like now, she seemed foreign, unknowable. Like all those Earth-like planets you hear about in the news; we can see them but we’ll never be able to get there.
Perhaps sensing what I was thinking, she reached out and touched my knee. “There’s a chance that you’re right—”
“Just a chance,” I muttered.
She ignored me. “But we have to try. It’s our best option for getting out of this”—she gestured to the van but, no doubt, meant the entire running-for-our-lives situation—“with a chance for any kind of a real future.” She wasn’t pleading, but I could feel her intensity pulling at me. She truly believed this was the best choice.
And technically, she could be correct; we didn’t have enough information about the hybrids to know one way or another. They might, in fact, welcome her with open arms. Just not me.
I swallowed a sigh and rubbed at the headache beginning to throb behind my forehead, whether from the heat or this conversation. “You’re the strategy expert,” I said with a shrug that hurt. “How do you plan on finding our new best friends?”
“She said they’re in public at times,” Ariane said. “In school, even.”
I noticed her avoidance of “your mom” or “Mara.” My mom had managed to wound her with what she’d said, I realized. Not that that was surprising, because my mom had been awful. But Ariane, most of the time, gave the appearance of being pretty impervious to the stupid shit people said about her. Rachel had only managed to goad her into reacting by attacking others. Jenna. Me.
It made me wonder if Ariane was more vulnerable than she let on and better at hiding it. And that made me want to pull her close again, as if that could shelter her from whatever people had said to or about her.
I cleared my throat. “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of public here to go around,” I said, gesturing to the mall and the now-busy parking lot, visible through the windshield.
She glanced away from me. “We do have a source.”
I gaped at her. “You’re kidding. You want to go back to my mom?” There were so many things wrong with that idea, it almost distracted me from the complete insanity of chasing after Laughlin’s hybrids. “She’s a little off her rocker at the moment. You get that, right?”
“She’s not crazy,” Ariane said with a certainty I didn’t feel. “She’s reacting to stress.”
“No,” I said. “Mainlining Swiss cake rolls while watching junk TV is reacting to stress. Putting six extra locks on your door and imagining that you’re being followed is something else entirely. Besides, I don’t think she’d be too excited to help us.” Us being anyone and anything related to Ariane.
Ariane met my gaze directly, reading through my weak subterfuge. “You’re right. She wouldn’t…what’s the phrase? Spit on me if I was on fire.”
I winced. True enough, it seemed. My mom’s guilt over working for Jacobs at GTX was enough to push her into apologizing, but that was likely the extent of it.
“But she’s not going to do it to help me. She’s going to do it to help you,” Ariane said.
I raised my eyebrows. “I assume you have a plan to convince her of that.”
“Of course,” she said easily.
I shook my head. “All right,” I said, holding up my hands in surrender. “In absence of another, better plan, I guess we can give it a try. But we’re going to need to stop for Swiss cake rolls.”
She laughed.
I got up, keeping my head down to avoid the roof, and climbed into the driver’s seat. She followed and settled herself on the passenger side.
“I also wanted to say that I…I’m sorry about earl
ier,” she said quietly, clicking her seat belt into place as I started the van and cranked up the AC.
I frowned. “What are you talking about?” I asked, backing out of the parking place.
She stared down at her hands, folding them and unfolding them in her lap. “I woke up and you were there, looking so worried about me…my contacts. It was nice. You caring. And I was just…I was just glad.” She grimaced.
Oh. She’d had so few people care about her that she felt she had to apologize for responding to affection? She’d kissed me; I’d wanted her to. End of story, as far as I was concerned. But evidently not for Ariane. And I thought my life was messed up.
“Nothing to apologize for,” I said, doing my best to keep my tone even. I didn’t want to make her self-conscious. “Anytime you want to be glad like that again, just let me know.” I grinned at her.
She nodded without looking at me, color creeping into her cheeks again.
I shifted into drive and headed for the parking lot exit.
“Is that, um, something you’d want?” she asked after a few seconds of silence. “I mean, not what we did, but what we could do.…”
I glanced over at her sharply. Sex. Was she asking about sex? My mouth worked without words coming out. I didn’t know how to answer that.
“I guess what I’m asking is”—she squirmed in her seat—“it doesn’t bother you, what I am? Some people wouldn’t even want to share a straw with me, if they knew.…”
Ah, now I was getting it. But that didn’t really help me with an answer. She was worried about being pushed away, now or sometime in the near future, whether there was some invisible line that I wouldn’t cross with her because of who or what she was. I could address that, but I didn’t want to inadvertently add pressure to an already crazy situation.
“You know I’m not expecting anything like that, right?” I asked carefully.
“That wasn’t my question,” she said.
“No, it doesn’t bother me. Obviously.” I jerked my head toward the sleeping bag.
She nodded, but she didn’t seem reassured. “But you have. Before, I mean.”
I shifted uncomfortably. I hadn’t planned on this conversation. If things had gotten this intense and so quickly under normal circumstances, then yeah, I’d have been expecting it. But this was a bizarre moment of reality intruding on a pretty surreal landscape. But then again, Ariane, in addition to being a half-alien soldier/spy/whatever, was just somebody trying to figure out how to navigate the world, just like the rest of us. “Yeah,” I admitted.
“Who?”
I sighed. She wasn’t going to like this answer. “You wouldn’t know her. She was a senior when we were freshman.”
Caught by surprise, Ariane actually looked at me. “Really?”
I let out a slow breath, trying to figure out how to word this. “It was complicated. She wanted Quinn, but he was…occupied.” Not that I’d known that at the time. I was stupid and half drunk at my first high school party; I’d taken Tara’s interest at face value. A senior cheerleader asking me if I wanted to go somewhere where we could “talk”? Uh, hell, yeah.
It was only afterward, stumbling out of a darkened bedroom at her stepfather’s house, when I heard her taunting Quinn about it, that I’d figured it out. I wasn’t sure whether she’d done it to get back at him for choosing someone else or to just make him jealous. Either way, fail.
Quinn had glanced from her to me and back again and got pissed. Just not in the way Tara had intended.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he demanded of her. “He’s not even fifteen. That’s messed up.”
Before I could protest that I’d participated voluntarily, Tara lost her shit and starting screaming at Quinn and punching his shoulder.
By then, we were attracting a crowd with our little drama: Tara, red-faced and shrieking; my brother looking disgusted, shaking the beer off his hand where Tara had caused it to slop out of his cup; and me, a foot taller but years younger than everyone else, standing there awkwardly, like a complete tool.
Eventually, Tara’s friends showed up and dragged her off, holding her arms down and whispering to her in the tone used by sane people coaxing a jumper off a ledge.
Yeah, that was the girl who’d slept with me.
And then Quinn, who normally ignored me at parties, at school, hell, even at home when he could, frowned at me, concerned. “You okay?”
Somehow that made it all the worse. Bad enough to be used as a revenge fuck, but to be pitied for it by the emotional target of said revenge fuck, who also happened to be my perfect, universally loved, older brother? God.
Pinned by the stares of those lingering to just gawk, I’d forced myself to nod. “Yeah, whatever.” I’d been terrified that my brother was going to keep talking about it when all I wanted to do was die or become invisible.
But he didn’t. Quinn had just nodded, almost absentmindedly as the incident was already fading from his mind. “All right.” Then he’d turned away from me to face the crowd. “What are all you pussies looking at? Let’s get our drink on!”
They’d followed him to the kitchen, leaving me alone. And I’d found the first door out and sneaked away. It was all anybody would talk about at school the next Monday, but among most of my friends, it became about “bagging a senior chick” instead of blinding stupidity and degradation. A small favor, I guess.
Remembering it even now, after almost two years of better experiences, still made my stomach churn and my face hot.
Ariane touched my arm. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said fiercely. Clearly, she’d picked up on at least some of my thoughts about that night.
I tried to smile. “Thanks.” I flipped the signal on to indicate our turn from the mall parking lot onto the main road. “So, in answer to your question, do I want to with you? Yeah.” I made sure to look at her so she knew I wasn’t just telling her what she wanted to hear. “But it should mean something, you know?” I shifted a little in my seat, feeling as though I were straying from the agreed-upon code of sex anytime, anywhere is good. But she’d asked, so I was answering honestly. I’d learned that lesson the hard way the first time, and I had no desire to revisit it. “And right now, we’re a little busy with just trying to stay alive,” I said.
Ariane nodded, a hint of a frown crossing her face.
“So there’s no rush,” I said firmly, as much to myself as to her. I wasn’t the type to push. Not my style. But I already felt more for her than I had for anyone else. Ever. That made it a lot harder to keep moments like the one a few minutes ago from spinning out of control.
“So, as long as you’re comfortable with everything so far…” I paused, a new thought occurring to me. I tapped my fingers nervously on the steering wheel. “Uh, I mean, assuming everything works the same way.”
She laughed, a bright, unexpected sound. “As far as I know, yeah.”
I let out an exaggerated sigh of relief. “Okay, good. Because if there’s something special about your elbow or whatever, you need to tell me.”
She cocked her head to one side with a frown. “Wait, so the elbow isn’t special? What’s third base, then?”
My face burst into flames just hearing her saying the words third base. Because apparently I hadn’t progressed past the age of twelve. “I, um…” I said, fumbling for words.
But then I caught the faint upturn at the corner of her mouth. She was teasing.
I shook my head. “You’re hilarious, you know that?”
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist. An elbow, really?” She raised her eyebrows at me.
“It was the weirdest body part I could think of off the top of my head, okay?” I said, exasperated. “I was trying to be sensitive.”
“Like my elbow.”
“Yes. No! Damn it, Ariane.…” I sighed.
Shaking with laughter, she held her hands up. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Her eyes were shining with tears of mirth, something I’d never seen from her before. I lo
ved it.
I held my hand out and with only split second of hesitation—nothing like when we’d first started talking, just days ago—she took it, intertwining her fingers with mine.
A few moments passed in silence, just the rumble of the van engine and the echoes of her laughter in my head. “I wish all of this was easier, safer,” she said quietly. “More normal.”
I shrugged. “If it were any of those things, we probably wouldn’t be here together.” Extreme circumstances had pushed us toward each other to begin with; it seemed unlikely that would change anytime soon. Plus, what was so great about normal? If we’d stuck with that, she might have still been trapped inside the cell at GTX.
“This will work,” she said with renewed determination. “We’ll find Ford and the others, and we’ll get a chance to turn things around. Then we’ll get to decide our future.”
I nodded. “Yeah, absolutely,” I said, and hoped she couldn’t hear my false certainty. She was worried about failing, which I understood, but a part of me was equally worried about what would happen if she succeeded. We were in this together for now, but would that be true if she managed to convince the other hybrids to come to our side? Her side, actually.
I was only human. And all too aware of it.
The trip to my mom’s went much faster than the first time. We were closer, of course, but it was also probably because all the anticipation and anxiety was gone, replaced solidly with dread. We knew what we were walking into this time.
Then as I started to make the last turn, Ariane sat up sharply. “Wait. Stop.”
Or, not.
I braked immediately, stopping halfway through an intersection. “What’s wrong?”
She had the alert posture—back ramrod straight, gaze sharp, concentration almost palpable—that I recognized as belonging to Ariane the soldier. Something had triggered her instincts and/or her training.
“Something’s wrong. Different,” she said, her fingers turning white where she clutched the armrest.
I fought against a pulse of panic. “My mom?” I asked. I still didn’t know how I felt about what she’d done—really, who she was—but the worry about her safety was instinctive and unstoppable.