Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 97537 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 488(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 97537 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 488(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
Ozzy nudges me, gentler than he acts. “You going to tell her you played CIA with Bob’s coworker?”
“Yes,” I say. “And I’m going to tell her I’m sorry I didn’t tell her first.”
Gage buckles in, voice quiet. “You picked the speed that kept her out of an arrest. You tell her that, too.”
“Names to Huxley tonight?” Ozzy asks, already composing the anonymous courier plan he will tell me is extremely legal and absolutely not.
“Tonight,” I say. “She gets a present on her desk that says ‘follow the ring.’”
The masks stare at me from the seatbacks like disappointed history teachers. I flip Hoover around so he doesn’t have to watch me figure out how to be the man I promised Juno I’d be.
We pull away from Pinecrest, the city opening its usual maze of roads and bad decisions. Ahead of us: Stonehouse, Cicely’s, a warehouse with a keypad and a blind spot. A saint named Gray who doesn’t like sharp edges. A ferry with a ring. And five men who waltzed into Pride like they owned the room and finger-gunned a public servant like it was a joke.
“Let’s go write names on mirrors,” Ozzy says.
“Let’s go teach tassel loafers what humility looks like,” Gage adds.
“Bagels at eight,” I say, and the promise sits in my mouth like something I can keep.
31
Juno
At 7:59 a.m. I’m standing in my doorway like a haunted doorman, pretending I’m not. The apartment smells like sleep and lemon cleaner. I’ve straightened the throw pillows twice, which is hilarious because I never cared if they were straightened or not. That was always Arby’s thing.
I shut the door, my nerves getting the better of me.
Bagels and truth. That’s what he promised. I’ve been repeating it like a spell since midnight: bagels and truth, bagels and truth. I want the second half so badly my teeth ache, and the first half because sesame is the only religion I practice.
Three knocks. Our code. My spine turns into a tuning fork.
I open the door.
Arrow’s on the mat with a paper bag, two coffees in a carrier, hair still damp from a shower he must’ve sprinted through. He is all clean clothes and warm eyes and the kind of tired that looks better on him than it has any right to. For two seconds he just… looks at me. Not past me. Not at the houseplants or the crime wall or the way my hoodie is half-zipped and doing nothing to hide the fact that I slept maybe three hours.
Then, simply, like he’s saying his name for the first time, he whispers, “I love you.”
My throat goes tight so fast I make a tiny, embarrassing sound. It’s not a surprise-love. It's a finally love. Heat breaks behind my eyes. I grip the door and breathe around it.
“Say it again,” I whisper, greedily.
“I love you,” he says, with that earnest, infuriating steadiness that makes me want to kiss him and yell at him and hand him my future to hold all at once. “I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to say it.”
The tears tip over. I let them. “I love you too,” I say, because I do, because I’m not doing the casual deflection version of this anymore, because if we’re in a horror movie we’re in the scene where the final girl picks up the axe and tells the truth. “You ridiculous, careful man.”
He exhales like I handed him oxygen. The coffees and the bagel bag hit the entry table with a thunk. His hands find my face—warm palms, careful thumbs at my jaw—and I’m already rising on my toes before he’s even halfway to me.
The first kiss is relief. The second is hunger. The third—God, the third—is the sound your heart makes when it sees home and runs.
He presses me gently back into the door, not trapping, just guiding, like the world is a big dangerous room and he’s making us a corner.
He kisses like he did the first time—meticulous, a little bossy, entirely focused. His mouth is warm and sure. His thumbs tilt my chin, micro-adjusting, finding the angle that makes me gasp. He swallows the sound, and the apartment narrows to the square of space where his body is pressed to mine and the door is pressed to my back and I feel held on both sides.
“Don’t stop,” I say, wanting so much more of him. All of him. The truth can wait.
“Demand noted,” he says, and obeys—kissing me deeper, then slower, then deeper again, that maddening rhythm he uses when he’s trying to make me forget words. It works. The world blurs. The paper bag rustles as one of my hands flails for balance and lands in nothing. He steadies me with a palm at the small of my back.
He goes very still for a second, like a man being careful with a live wire, and then—oh—then he moves. He’s demanding without being a jerk, guiding without grabbing, the kind of hungry that asks before it takes. He lifts me just enough that my boots squeak against the door and my laugh hits his mouth and gets turned into something softer, deeper. His hands roam over my body.