“Hey,” Vince says, and his voice is heat, melting all the ice in my veins. In that one word I hear I want you and I need you and I love you.
I wish I couldn’t hear him at all.
Against my will I remember how hot his breath was when I nearly let him kiss me last month, at that party. I remember how his eyes and skin shimmered bronze, like a key, in the golden glow of the porch light, and I could imagine him unlocking the cage around my heart that Aunt Gigi had always warned me to keep shut tight.
Talia had failed to mention that her brother would be riding to school with us. I wouldn’t have worn the red lipstick if I’d known.
I’m a little pissed, but she and I are so newly mended, I don’t want to break us again by scrambling out away from her just to get away from him. I swallow hard and find his eyes in her rearview mirror so I don’t have to look at him directly.
“Oh,” I say. “Hi.”
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
The whole ride to school, Aubrey thought ceaselessly about her aunts and her mother and all they’d given up. She did everything she could not to think about the boy in the back seat, for whom she might be willing to make the same ultimate sacrifice.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
When Talia pulls into the school parking lot, I hop out of the car so quickly I nearly trip over the untied laces in my boots.
“Later,” I mumble, without looking at Talia or Vince as I walk away. But I don’t get very far before I feel Talia’s warm hand encircle my wrist. She yanks my arm back hard to stop me, and I scream, “Ow!”
“Seriously? We’re back to this already?” Talia nearly shouts. Other kids leaning against their parked cars turn to stare, and Vince lingers by the still-open back door of Talia’s 4x4.
Things have been uneasy between me and Talia ever since she realized I was keeping a secret. I’d never kept a thing from her before this thing with Vince.
So as soon as I left that party without saying why, everything changed. And while I thought I’d patched things up with a phone call and the Dunn charm that had yet to let me down, things aren’t as “fixed” as I thought. Talia’s clearly still full of sparks, a wildfire just waiting to be stoked. I try to tread lightly.
“Back to what?” I ask, lying with a question that only seems to make Talia angrier.
My friend crosses her arms. “You think you’re too good for my brother. That’s it, isn’t it? You think you’re too good for both of us. That’s why you haven’t wanted to ride with me to school, right? That’s why you’ve been avoiding Vince since that party.”
“That’s not it,” I say. And then I try to explain. But when I tell her that I smell like lavender and honey, and that I’m wearing red lipstick, I can tell I’m not making any sense. When I explain that I’m blessed with beauty and bleeding desire, Talia actually laughs.
“Riiight,” Talia says, rolling her eyes. “Conceited much?” There’s a venom in her tone that poisons the comment, turning the would-be tease toxic.
I wish I could laugh it off, but I can’t. Because Talia is a friend I love too much to lose. She’s angry about something she doesn’t even understand; something I’m only just beginning to.
Then Vince is there, and my heart is suddenly trying to beat its way out of my chest. I don’t want to leave things unresolved with Talia. But I can’t stand to be this close to Vince.
Don’t wear it unless you ready for the attention that comes along with them lips, Bree.
You liable to drive them boys crazy.
Before he can get any closer—before he can look at me for longer than I’m able to hold his gaze, or worse still, brush a fallen braid from my shoulder—I move away from his tender eyes, his dangerous hands.
“Wait for me after school,” I call to Talia, who still looks pissed. “I’ll explain everything, I promise.”
But that afternoon, goddammit, it’s Vince who finds me first.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
It happened when she wasn’t watching—a slow kind of falling for Vince.
It all started with him noticing.
He noticed the way she spoke softly, so one day he stepped closer to hear her when they were talking in the dense and crowded halls of their high school.
He noticed that she was often cold, so a week after their close conversation, he offered her his scarf as they stepped out into the crisp afternoon air.
A month after that, when they and a few of their friends were gathered in a dimly lit basement, he noticed her cautious eyes. He saw the way she made herself small until she couldn’t anymore and all her loveliness burst forth in a brilliant grin or a dazzling look or a charming comment. He noticed how she steered clear of the boys who threw themselves at her, and how she manipulated some of them, but only the ones who refused to listen to her very firm nos.
He waited until Talia skipped up the stairs for another drink. He waited until the other guys scattered. He stepped closer to Aubrey and asked, “Why do you hide?”
Though she didn’t—couldn’t—answer, she looked him right in his eyes and said, “It’s for your own good.”
He believed her. And it was then that she began noticing him, too.
It stayed that way for quite a while—each of them noticing, and quietly appreciating the other. They found a delicate balance, and they loved each other, but never too much and never at quite the same times.
But it all went to hell the day Aubrey made a joke in Talia’s car, and the rich sound of Vince’s laughter, the unexpected light in his eyes when he looked at her, the warmth of his hands when he gently touched her shoulder—all caught her off guard. She gasped and he stopped laughing and Talia stared at the two of them until she began to grin.
“You into my brother?” Talia asked Aubrey that night on the phone, and Aubrey denied it all.
Then, at a party that weekend, Vince touched the back of her hand, the back of her arm, the delicate skin on the back of her neck. And she got lost in the softness of his fingers, the lingering sound of his laugh, the way he noticed every part of herself she tried to bury.
“Can I kiss you?” he asked. And Aubrey felt herself lean in too easily. She was too ready, too eager to say yes.
She couldn’t let herself love him. Not without risking everything.
So she ran.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
He’s waiting for me by my locker, his messy black hair somehow flickering like a flame of dark fire. And while I know loving him can hurt me, when he’s standing there, looking like that, I don’t know if I can keep him at arm’s length for much longer.