“It needs to hang out in there before I can shape and solder it,” he explained to me. “But, Sadie, I want to do a wire wrap on this, string a few stones on. I can leave it plain, if you want, but—”
“No way. I love it when you go all nutty on my jewelry. Now make one for Lane.”
“Oh no,” I said, instantly awkward. “You don’t have to make me anything.”
“Of course he will. Won’t you, Connor?”
“Sure. It’s no problem. Let me grab some more wire, and—” He went quiet, studying me with his head to one side, one finger pressed to his chin. He reached over and took my hand, turned it palm up next to his, comparing the insides of our wrists.
“I think …” He trailed off, bit his lip, and squinted at our arms. “Not silver. Not with your undertones. And not a bangle. Hold on a second.”
He dropped my arm and beelined back to the shelves, pulled down about six bins and started going through them, lip still caught in his teeth. I sent a quizzical glance at Sadie, but she was grinning, nodding her head, bouncing on her tiptoes as Connor headed back to us at a fast walk, laid a square of copper sheet metal on the table. He took my hand and placed it on the copper, bent so close his hair nearly brushed my fingers.
“Perfect. Hold still.”
There wasn’t a force in the universe strong enough to budge me as he measured my wrist, then hunched over his sketchbook. I stood there, staring, until he turned his focus back to the copper, marked his measurements, and went to work on it with a set of shears.
“I’m doing a foldform cuff for you, instead of a bangle,” he said. “I won’t finish it today, but I have a design idea that’s fucking brilliant.”
“You don’t have to do this, Connor. I mean, I appreciate it, but—”
“Lane, it’s happening. You don’t have to take it, but no way am I not making this, now that I’ve envisioned it. It’ll be amazing, as long as you don’t mind—ow.” He jerked his finger away and stuck it in his mouth. “Hand me that Kleenex box, will you, Sadie?”
The edges of the world went dark, shrank to a cave to a tunnel to a slit, and all I saw was the blood edging the freshly shorn copper—fat crimson drops streaking to a smear, as Connor absently rubbed them with the side of his fist. And then my head went bad, and there were two Connors. Then none, as my eyes slid closed, the world listing gently to the side.
“Lane? Oh Lord. Connor, where’s the stool? Lane, sit here, honey. Head down.”
Someone’s hands were on me, one to my forehead, the other on the back of my neck. Another hand held my shoulder, another my hip.
“I don’t know what’s wrong. She’s been fine all day.” Sadie’s voice threaded through the fog. “Should I call Grey? Or an ambulance? Lane, can you hear me? Do you need a doctor?”
I shook my head, forcing myself back to lucidity, opened my eyes to Sadie’s flushed, frightened face.
“No, no doctor. I’ll be okay. I have”—I paused, breathing through a wave of nausea—“sort of a problem. With cuts and knives, and stuff.”
“Oh my word, honey, and I went and brought you here?”
“Way to go, Sadie,” Connor sighed. “I don’t make my living on cuts and knives, or anything.”
“Shut up, Connor. Lane, are you okay? Why didn’t you say something?”
“I didn’t know this would happen. I’ll be fine.” I swiveled on the stool to face Connor. Sadie slid into view beside him, hand still hovering near my shoulder. “My mom killed herself when I was five. I found her. Seeing people get cut still fucks me up.”
They blinked at me, two sets of the same wide eyes over frozen, parted lips. It had been ages since I’d had to see that look. When I’d returned to kindergarten after the funeral, my teacher had taken me aside and made it abundantly goddamn clear that the details of my absence should be left at the classroom door. The number of people I’d subsequently told fit on one hand’s worth of fingers, with room to spare. Not that that little tale surfaced often in conversation; it was the kind of thing most people tripped on or scuttled around, before desperately tackling a change of topic. Which, honestly, was fine with me.
Connor recovered first.
“Shit, that’s awful,” he muttered, dragging a hand through his thicket of hair. “I’m sorry, Lane. I didn’t know.”
“It’s not your fault. It just means I have a thing about sharp edges. And blood. Really only when one results in the other, but still.” My eyes darted between them, a single concern bobbing to the surface of my infinite supply. “Could we maybe not mention this to Grey? Like, in any capacity? I don’t want him bringing it up at home. Getting my dad all worried, stuff like that.”
“Absolutely, honey.” Sadie’s reply was immediate and sincere. “We won’t say a word, will we, Connor?”
“I don’t mention much to Grey in general. It stays in this room until Lane says otherwise.”
“Thanks.” It was easier than I expected, returning his smile. “Are you okay?”
“Me?” He looked genuinely confused, until I nodded to his hand, redirecting the focus along with his gaze. “What, this? This is nothing. I don’t even need a Band-Aid. Do you need anything?”
When I shook my head, Connor sat back and studied me, stared at the shears, then at his fingertip. At the remaining smudge, dark against the copper gleam.
“Well, if you’re hanging out in here, blades and blood are unavoidable. And … to paraphrase … the best way around a problem is to go right the fuck on through it. So—yeah. Let’s fix it.”
He pushed aside the shears and selected something from the worktable drawer—something long and silver, shiny and sharp. My insides turned to acid.
“When I moved in here,” he said, setting it down between us, “Paul had a pet tarantula. Scared the shit out of me, but I had to live with it, so I’d carry it around on my shoulder. To desensitize me.”
“Ohhhkaaaay. Did it work?”
“It worked in the sense that I no longer fear that particular tarantula. Just as you will no longer fear this brand-new, super-sharp X-Acto blade, once you cut me with it.”
His words took root, seethed and sprouted, choked my automatic laugh with whip-strong vines of panic.
“No. No way. Cut you?” My lungs closed off, vision wobbling at the edges once again. “You think I can hurt you like that, and be okay with it?”
“You won’t hurt me. Look at my hands.” He stretched them toward me—they were fine-boned but strong, rough with calluses, threaded with scars. “I work with knives every single day. Do you know how many times I’ve bled? Go on. I trust you.”
“This is not about trust. I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. Do it.”
“Connor, I literally can’t. I—”
“Do it.”
His voice went dark and alpha; his eyes burned through me and out the other side. He was the Connor Hall of rumor—he was the warehouse itself, dark and labyrinthine and halfway to crumbled. Brimming with strange people and stranger creations.
Someone else’s arm reached for the knife. Someone else’s fingers gripped the handle, turned the blade. Took hold of his left hand, drawing it closer.
“That’s it,” he said, low. “Steady.”
When I was nine, Dad took me to a swimming hole in Pisgah National Forest—a long-anticipated day trip, cut short when I slipped and went under, got myself stuck in a waterfall. Not behind the curtain, but beneath the falls itself, trapped and blind and clawing, unable to breathe without choking. That single word from Connor put me right back between water and rock. Right back between two very different heartbeats.
“What did you say?”
“Keep your hands steady. You can do this, Lane. You’re in control.”
I touched the knife tip to the pad of his thumb, paused, looked up. He hadn’t blinked. He hadn’t even flinched. And he didn’t flinch in the next second, when I bore down, dragged it across. Felt the flesh give beneath the blade.
It was over i
n less than a breath, about the same amount of time it took for me to break.
He never took his eyes off mine even as my hand revolted. The knife clattered to the table, scattered drops of his blood across the surface. His good hand reached for one of mine, gripping it tightly as I wept.
“That was perfect. I’m proud of you.”
“You’re proud of me? What the fuck, Connor. You’re deranged.”
“Lane, look at me. I’m fine. It’s barely a scratch.”
“But I made it happen.” I practically tore the top off the Kleenex box as I grabbed a wad of tissues, squeezed them hard as I could around his thumb. The pressure only made it worse. “Oh God. I made you bleed. I’m so sorry.”
“Yes, you made me bleed. You did this, and look—you’re still on your feet. You’re already stronger than you were this morning. And now, you’re going to fix me.”
I stared at him, gasping around my sobs as he gently pulled his hand from my tissue grip and laid it, palm up, between us. The cut was already clotting, the bleeding slowing to a trickle. He pulled a small first aid kit from the drawer, set it between us, and looked at me. Waited.
Connor was quiet as I cleaned up my mess, soaked cotton balls bright red, fumbled with gauze and iodine and medical tape. He was quiet when I broke down again, and as he cleaned his blood off my fingertips and closed his bandaged hand over both of mine, holding them still until my tears dried up and my tremors subsided.
And Sadie, for once, was also quiet. So quiet, I’d forgotten she was even there until her voice drifted over from across the table.
“You guys,” she said, breathless as me but twice as calm. “I mean, I love y’all to death and all, but seriously? Y’all are a special kind of crazy.”
8
“COME IN.”
His voice scurried up my back on chilly feet, burst between my shoulder blades, and trickled down my arms as I pushed open his bedroom door, my chin held high in what I hoped would play as confidence. I’d been standing in the hallway for a solid two minutes, working up the nerve to knock; things had been awkward enough between us without me scuttling along the baseboards like a shamed rat at the first hint of necessary interaction.
I hadn’t been in the room since it became his. It was surreal—a space in my house, once used for storage, that I’d never thought twice about entering—that space now overflowed with Grey McIntyre: his constellation bedspread and Star Wars posters, and teetering stacks of comic books; a book of matches on a stoneware plate, half-hidden by a burnt smudge stick. Sadie’s senior portrait framed on his nightstand, her smile reflected over and over in the pictures tacked to his walls and stuck in the edges of his mirror. The dried boutonniere he’d worn to Homecoming. A worn, stuffed bear, with a frayed-stitched nose that broke my heart, peering from the lowest corner of his bookshelf.
Grey sat cross-legged in the middle of his bed, two different textbooks and his laptop open in front of him. A fan of handwritten notes covered the lower half of the mattress. A bread-crumb-strewn plate and crumpled napkin perched on the pillow next to an empty microwave-popcorn bag. He grinned at me over the mess, made eye contact for the first time since that night in the kitchen, and if that grin was a shade too hectic, I wasn’t one to judge. My own eyes slid away and then back again, and I matched him, tooth by overcompensating tooth. To stand there in his bedroom after everything that had and hadn’t happened stirred a storm of memories and trepidation; I forced my posture into neutral, determined not to cringe, or stammer, or shuffle around like an asshole. This was my territory—this was my home. It would be fine. I could do this.
“Oh. I didn’t—sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t want to interrupt.” Real nice, Lane. So much for that.
“It’s no problem. What did you need?”
“Dad left us a grocery list. Are you up for a Trader Joe’s run before dinner? It can wait, if you’re busy. Or I could go myself, if you don’t mind me driving your car.”
“I could use a break, actually, before I pass out all over these equations.” He slid off his bed and stretched. My eyes ate up the lines of his arms. “I’ll drop you off and hang out at Starbucks until you’re done. Sound good to you?”
“That sounds perfect.” I turned my face away, swinging my hair forward to hide the heat in my cheeks. “Have you been studying all this time? It’s been hours.”
“Yep. The 4.0 won’t earn itself.”
“Seriously?” I peeked out at him, expecting the smugness, catching him instead with a bashful grin that rushed warm around my heart. “Wow. I knew you were smart, but—”
“I’m ambitious. If it was just about being smart, I wouldn’t have to work so hard.”
“Still, that’s awesome. Any big, ambitious plans for the 4.0?”
“Yeah.” It was his turn to drop his head. “Duke.”
“Duke? As in, Duke University? Are you kidding me?”
“It’s my dream school. I’m sending my early-decision application in November. But—” He broke off and started fiddling with his pentacle, tucking it inside his shirt, then pulling it out again. Tracing the five-point pattern with the tip of his finger as he slipped into his Converse. “Do me a favor, will you? Don’t mention this to anyone else. Not now.”
“Oh. Okay, but—doesn’t Skye know? Or Sadie?”
He wouldn’t look at me. Something strange and apprehensive slithered between my shoulder blades.
“Greyson? What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing. I don’t want everyone making a big deal about it, in case I’m rejected.” He raised his head and leveled me with a shy, hopeful smile, an anvil dropped from the top of the clouds. “I’d rather keep it quiet for now. Just between us.”
It was a full-body shiver, those words. A mist of water over sun-warm skin, shocking and cooling, jolting me awake. Did I mean so much to him already, that he’d trust me with something this big? Or was it that I didn’t mean enough to matter?
My father was a magnet for secrets—people stopped him in the market, or the library, or at one of the many shops that stocked our products. Told him all sorts of random shit, from illnesses to divorce, love affairs, and joyous news—unsolicited words that swelled and bubbled, demanding release at the first sign of a friendly face. Dad ate it up with a goddamn spoon, reveled in being an emotional dumping ground for strangers and friends alike. A personality trait he’d decidedly failed to pass on to his child.
But this was Grey. This was a dream he’d spent years nurturing—a hope so fragile and sacred even Sadie didn’t know, yet he’d shared it with me.
In this one tiny way, he’d chosen me.
My answering smile formed softly, wiped the worry from his wary eyes. They held mine right to the edge of just enough before shifting back to his hands.
“Consider it our secret,” I said, filling the following silence.
“I knew I could count on you.” He stood and walked toward me, playfully bumped my shoulder with his on his way to the door. Sent a glow from his grin to the tips of my fingers. “Let’s go.”
* * *
I browsed the aisles in a fog, mind stumbling over thoughts of Grey. He’d been quiet on the drive, and though he claimed it was study fatigue, he’d barely looked at me when he dropped me off. The thrill of a thing told in confidence warred with the unease of that same thing kept from Sadie. She was my friend, his girlfriend—or future wife, or almost-fiancée, or whatever label she chose on any given day—yet here we were, adding another secret to the ever-growing collection between us. Seeing as West Asheville hadn’t yet been reduced to literal burning rubble, I was pretty sure he still hadn’t told her about the whole I-accidentally-saw-Lane’s-rack incident either. But I’d made him a promise regarding Duke—it wasn’t my news to share, and that was that. Still, the knowledge hung sour on the edge of my tongue.
“Hey there, Lane.”
So weird, how my Sadie-centric guilt seemed to summon her brother from the very ether. I smiled as he approached, raising an
eyebrow at his companion: the boyfriend, I assumed, big and broad and long-legged, with dreads to his waist and large, solid hands. He carried their shopping basket over one forearm and texted while walking, unconcerned by his surroundings. At the sound of my name, though, he looked up, interest flitting across his face.
“Ohhhhh shit. This is Lane? This is the Lane? Lord. I’m not sure whether to run away screaming or give you a big old hug.”
“That’s … interesting?” I blinked at his enormous grin and hyper eyes, a lovely brown just a shade lighter than his skin. “I feel like I should take the hug, but I’m not sure who you are.”
“That’s Paul.” Connor shook his head. “Paul was very impressed by your recent wielding of my X-Acto.”
“Damn straight I was,” Paul said, smirking as I cringed at the week-old memory. “What are you doing after this? Oh, come back with us. Please.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to get in the way.”
“Like I’d even be talking to you if I thought you would.”
“Well, when you put it that way.” I couldn’t help but smile at his excited squeal. “I need to text Grey, though. He’s waiting for me at the Starbucks.”
“Grey? Sadie’s Grey?” He turned to Connor. “Why would Grey be waiting for her at the Starbucks?”
“He’s my stepbrother.” The word formed heavy in my mouth, a rough-cut stone too big to swallow. Paul looked back and forth between Connor and me, phone hanging forgotten from his hand.
“Oh. That means y’all two will be—oh, that’s hilarious.”
“What’s hilarious?” I furrowed my brow at Connor, who shrugged, clearly unaffected.
“You’ll learn to take Paul with a grain of salt. And a grain of every other damn thing. So.” He leaned past me and snagged a box of crackers off the shelf. “We’ll be another fifteen minutes or so, if you’re coming back with us.”
Together We Caught Fire Page 5