“My mom died just after I turned three. Cancer. I don’t know my dad.” I kept my voice casual as I unfolded the portfolio. “I don’t even know who he was. Or is, if he’s still alive.”
“No clue at all, then?”
“Just that he has brown eyes.”
“How do you know that?”
“I have brown eyes and my mom had blue. Brown’s dominant genetically, so if I have them, it means my father did. Does. Whatever.” I replaced the top sheet in the portfolio-last month’s star map-with a blank one. “Oh, and he might be Irish.”
“Really?” Zachary said with a note of curiosity-or maybe disbelief.
“I think my mom was in Ireland when I was conceived.” I gestured to my face. “I know, I don’t look it, right? My grandmom always jokes that I look more Italian than the rest of my family put together. Her parents came from Tuscany, which is in northern Italy.” I took a breath to pause the babble. “Which I’m sure you, uh, already know, being from Europe.”
“What was your mum doing in Ireland?”
I’d said too much already. “Just travel. So what about you? I know you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but did you do anything fun on your days off?”
Ugh. I sounded like the people at Gina’s office, who would ask each other how their weekends were, without sounding like they cared about the answers. But I felt a great need for a subject change.
“My dad cooked a turkey. When in Rome, he says. It was bloody awful. I did like the pumpkin pie, though.”
“That reminds me.” I dug into my book bag and pulled out a white cardboard box tied with a string. “I brought these back for you.”
He looked at the box, then at me, before slowly reaching out. “What are they?”
“Poisonous snakes. Open it.”
Zachary untied the string. “They seem like very quiet snakes.”
“They’re stealthy. Or maybe dead.”
He opened the box, and his face melted into a smile. “You brought me biscuits?”
“Italian cookies. My grandmom has a bakery that’s kinda famous-in Philadelphia, at least.”
He picked out a crescent-shaped cookie and bit into the end. Powdered sugar made a small blizzard on the front of his brown sweater. I had a sudden impulse to dust it off.
“Mm, almond,” he said. “And-is it rum?”
“Yep, but don’t worry. The alcohol bakes off. And besides, I’m your designated driver tonight.”
“It’s pure braw. Delicious, I mean.” He set the box between us. “Thanks very much.” His voice was muted and a little strained. He stared into the distant woods as he munched the other half of the cookie.
I wondered if I’d made some huge cross-cultural faux pas. “Are you okay?”
“Hmm? Yeah.” Zachary rubbed his thumb and first two fingers together, as if to make the powdered sugar part of his skin. “My mum used to bake a lot.”
Ah. I fidgeted with my pencil, deciding whether to leave the touchy subject alone or push forward. Either way, things would be tense.
I chose talking-tense instead of silent-tense. “You don’t have any idea where she went?”
“All I know is that she left on purpose. My dad’s job is-I can’t tell you what it is exactly, and I sort of lied when I said he was a political science professor.” Zachary looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. A lot of people around here have classified jobs.”
“Anyway, it’s the kind of career that takes over your life. Mum got tired of placing second to his work. She hated moving around all the time, and when Dad got assigned here in the States, I guess that was the last straw. She left.”
“Why didn’t she take you with her?” I winced as soon as the question left my mouth.
“I didn’t want to go.” Zachary creased the corner of the bakery box lid. “I thought if I went with her, she would never come back to him. So I said I wanted to stay with Dad.”
“Was that true?”
“Not really. He’s not bad or anything, just obsessed with his job. And they’re still married, so maybe one day…” He folded his lips in, as if afraid to voice the hope.
“What happened when you told her you wanted to stay?”
Zachary didn’t speak for several seconds. “She cried.”
I had the worst desire to hug him. Even though I sometimes wondered if my father had left because of something I did, I knew it was crazy, since I hadn’t been born at the time. But Zachary had to live with the fact that he’d made his mother leave him.
“You haven’t talked to her since?”
“No’ exactly.” He scratched his ear. “I get e-mails sometimes, but they could be coming from anywhere.”
“Why doesn’t she want to be found?”
He leaned back on his hands and scanned the sky. “Bollocks. There’s clouds moving in.”
I looked to the east, where a single thin, stringy cirrus cloud stretched over Orion’s Belt. That was all. It was Zachary’s turn to change the subject.
Maybe his secrecy had to do with his dad’s classified dealings. It seemed like half the people I knew had parents who worked at NSA or DMP or some other semicovert agency. Maybe Zachary’s mom-whether she was an agent herself or not-would be in danger if anyone, even her son, knew where she was.
“We can work around the cloud,” I told him. “Let’s start before it gets worse.”
Surprisingly, it wasn’t as cold that night as it had been on our first sky-mapping trip in October. But it was just as hard not to shiver every time Zachary leaned in close to add another star. I tried not to notice the way his dark lashes flickered as his eyes searched the page, or the way he bit his lip as he figured out the perfect placement. I tried not to stare at the curve of his neck as he craned it to gaze at the sky, and wonder what it would feel like to kiss it, right at the hollow of his throat.
I failed.
Maybe it was the sugar rush of eating all those cookies, but my hands were trembling so hard I had to draw super slowly to keep the lines straight. It was taking forever to finish this stupid map.
“Wait a minute.” I flipped the sheet to look at last month’s chart of the southeastern sky. “That bright yellow one wasn’t there before. Maybe it was too hazy that night?”
“Maybe. Let me see the other page.”
I moved the flashlight closer and bent low over the chart. “It should have been here, in Taurus.”
“Let me see.”
“What star would be that bright? How could we have missed it last month?”
“Aura.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Zachary’s hand near my face. Slowly he brushed back my hair, sliding it behind my shoulder. His fingertip grazed my bare neck right under my ear.
My entire body tensed. I held my breath to keep from gasping.
“Sorry.” He quickly tucked the ends of my hair inside my hood. “It was in the way. I couldn’t see.”
I stared at the page in front of me. If I turned to look at him, it would be a
ll over. I’d ask him to do it again. This time, put all ten fingers in my hair and on my neck and my shoulders and-
This was definitely not the sugar talking.
“What do you think it is?” I heard the huskiness of my voice.
“I know what it is,” Zachary said softly. “But I think you should figure it out yourself.”
I tried to force my mind back to the project instead of counting how many weeks it had been since anyone had touched me-really touched me, the way I wanted Zach to. I mean, the way I wanted Logan to.
Breathe. Blink. Focus.
Okay. A star where there hadn’t been one before. A supernova? A comet?
I smacked my forehead. “Duh.” I checked the steady yellow-white glow in the sky. “It’s Jupiter.”
“Is that your final answer?”
I finally dared to look at him. “It’s my final answer.”
In the faint red flashlight glow, his green eyes had turned almost black. “I think you’re right.”
“Good.” I laughed a little, to relieve the tension.
“Yeah. Good.” Zachary shifted, pulling one knee up and resting his elbow on it. I wondered if he knew this was one of his hottest poses.
“Your turn to draw.” I tossed the pencil at his chest.
“At least my hair won’t block your view.”
“No, but your big head might.” I crawled behind him so he could take my place in front of the chart.
“I’ll have you know, my head is a perfectly average size.” He spread his fingers. “My hands, though, are enormous, and you know what they say-”
“Shut up and draw, lad,” I said in my best attempt at a Scottish accent.
“Ouch.” Zachary covered his ears. “Don’t try this at home, children.”
“I thought it sounded good.”
“In your head, maybe.” He put down the pencil. “A few pointers on talking like a Scotsman. First, you don’t trill your r’s, you gently roll them. Try it. Say ‘no trill, just roll.’”
“No trill, just roll.” I bit my lip. I had trilled. Possibly even spit on him.
“No, no, it’s not Italian or Spanish. Don’t bludgeon that poor r with your tongue.”
“I can’t help it.” Must change topic from what tongues should do. “I took Spanish. And my family’s Italian.”
“They tell you to relax your mouth and let it go, right?” When I nodded, he replied, “That’s the thing, then. Keep in mind, my people are extremely uptight. So to talk like a Scotsman, you’ve got to keep that mouth under control.”
“That’s no fun.”
Zachary closed his lips. He blinked and looked to the right, then blinked again and looked back at me, as if preparing to share a secret. His voice came low and growly. “You’d be surprised how much fun it can be.”
My heart slammed in my chest so hard, I thought it would pop open my ribs. “Surprise me.”
Where had that come from?
Zachary hesitated, like he was waiting for me to take it back, then shifted so he was sitting in front of me. He took my face in his hands-which actually were pretty big-and placed his thumbs under my cheekbones, his little fingers under the curve of my jaw. “Now say it.”
“Say what?”
“Anything,” Zachary whispered.
My brain scrambled for a sentence that was suitably seductive, or at least funny. But at that moment of supreme panic, the only thing whirling around my mind was the Gettysburg Address.
“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty.”
Zachary’s grip kept my mouth from opening too far. The r’s rolled out softly, tapped by my tongue with a gentle restraint.
“And dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” I switched back to my regular accent. “I forget the rest.”
“That was perfect.” He stared into my eyes, breaking our gaze only to glance at my lips. His warm hands still held my face, and the energy from his touch sent shocks zinging down my spine and out into my limbs.
An extra-strong vibration came from my left side, near my heart. I closed my eyes and lifted my chin.
“Aura.”
“Hmm?”
“Your, uh, your chest is humming.” He let go of me.
“Huh?” I blinked at the sudden loss of his touch. “Oh, my phone!” I unzipped my jacket and fumbled in the inside pocket.
It was my dear aunt and her impeccable timing.
“What’s wrong?” I answered.
“I’m just checking in,” Gina said. “Making sure you haven’t been eaten by wolves or hit by a stray bullet from a hunter.”
“I’m on a farm, not in the Yukon.”
“You know me. I have to be Turbo Godmother sometimes.”
“It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“You sure? You sound out of breath.”
“Yeah! I mean, we just moved our stuff because of the-uh, the smell. Of cows.”
“Ew. Are you almost finished?”
Zachary was already bent over our map, adding stars with a new urgency.
“Yes,” I told her through gritted teeth. “I’ll be home soon.”
When she said good-bye, I clicked off and put the phone back in my jacket.
“I also found Mars,” Zachary said. “In Gemini.” He pointed to the southeast without looking at me. “See the reddish orange one? It’s barely risen.”
“I see it.” I flipped the page in our book to a new quadrant of the sky, my hands still shaking. I hadn’t felt like this since the night Logan and I had first kissed, after his first concert a year ago.
A year ago tomorrow, I realized. I’d almost kissed another guy a few hours from our anniversary. Shame flushed my cheeks and forehead.
At least, I thought it was shame.
The moment I pulled away from Zachary’s apartment building, I heard a voice beside me.
“Late for a school night, isn’t it?”
My foot jammed the brake pedal in reflex. “Damn it, Logan! Not while I’m driving.”
“Sorry.” He laid his arm along the passenger-side window. “I got worried.”
“You too? Gina thinks I’ll be eaten by boll weevils or something.” I got the car moving again. “I’m probably a lot safer there than I am on my own street.”
“I bet it’s nice out in the country.”
“It’s gorgeous. I can’t get over how quiet it is.”
He snorted. “Mr. Ed doesn’t say much while you’re making your maps?”
I squinted at him, not getting the joke. “Mr. Ed?”
“I said, ‘Mr. Red.’ Your friend or whatever he is.”
“Zachary? Why do you call him that?”
“I can’t even look at him. Dude wears red shirts like they’re going out of style. Which unfortunately they never will,” he grumbled.
“What are you talking about? Zach never wears red. He doesn’t have to, because he’s a pre-Shifter. I told you that.”
“So now he’s ‘Zach’ to you? I never got a nickname.”
I though
t of several nicknames he wouldn’t like. “Watch it, Logan. The jealousy routine does not give me warm fuzzies.”
“I don’t know anything about this guy. Maybe if you filled me in, I wouldn’t be so-I don’t know-”
“Threatened?”
“I’m not threatened.” His voice rose, and the edges of his form flickered and faded. The sight sent a chill ricocheting through me.
I had to calm him down. “There’s not much to tell,” I said as I turned onto the parkway, which this late at night held none of its usual traffic. “He’s a junior, he’s in my history class. Oh, and he’s from Scotland.”
“Did you know bagpipes were actually invented in Ireland?”
“No, I didn’t.”
Logan snickered. “Yeah, we gave them to Scotland as a practical joke. They still haven’t figured it out.”
I chuckled, if only to indulge him. I couldn’t expect him not to be jealous-after all, Zachary could touch me, and Logan couldn’t. All I had to do to get rid of Logan, even now, was take a turn down a new road. If I were standing in his shoes-his violet high-top Vans, to be exact-I’d be exploding with fear and frustration.
We reached a stoplight. “Logan, do you ever think about plans?”
“Plans for what?”
“For the future. Beyond next week or next month.”
He didn’t reply at first. The traffic light turned green before he spoke.
“I do have a plan,” he said quietly, but didn’t elaborate.
“Can you tell me?”
“I don’t want to ruin the time we have together. Can we just enjoy this for now?”
My fingers grew cold on the steering wheel. “What are you planning? Are you going to-change?”
“Huh?” Logan sounded genuinely confused. “Change how?”
“I don’t know.” I turned onto my street a little too fast, and the tires made a tiny squeal. “Into a shade?”
“What?” Logan’s shout echoed in the car. “Are you kidding? Aura, I would never in a million years. That’s insane.” He leaned toward me, his glow almost burning my eyes. “How can you even think it? Why would I want to be a”-his voice plummeted to a whisper-“shade?”
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