He heaved a sigh, looking down at me through those lashes. “I do love spending time with you . . . when we’re not fighting, someone’s not fighting me, and you’re not bashing my head in.”
“So that’s to say exactly five minutes of our time together,” I said.
He huffed out a chuckle. “Something like that.” He pried my hand from my side to draw me back to him. I let him. I felt so weary all of a sudden. And strange. Like I was spiraling through space, hurtling towards my death, yet couldn’t even get worked up enough to pull the string on my parachute. My chin dropped to my chest. He put his arm around me and rubbed at my arm as though trying to bring feeling back, but I was emotionally numb, in a near-catatonic state.
After an indeterminate amount of time, I straightened up. “I don’t believe in the power of my intuition—you had me fooled, Reese and Ryan had me fooled, you all had me fooled. God! How y’all must’ve laughed at me!”
“Don’t do this to yourself.” He took my hand and squeezed. “It’s not just you. Can’t you see? I do have feelings for you—inappropriate feelings. Wrong on so many levels.” He sighed and dropped my hand, staring up through the emaciated limbs of the elder tree. “I already have a hard enough time living with myself for being part of this whole sordid mess. If I took advantage of you, I’d never be able to live with myself.”
I let silence speak for me.
“Kate, listen—your intuition was working, because I wasn’t faking with you. I love spending time with you! Nothing was a lie there. You pretty much busted me on every single lie I’ve told since I met you . . . and they all had to do with Academy business.”
I was listening.
“And the chemistry is also working both ways,” he whispered, looking at me in a way that made my thigh yearn for the warmth of his palm again. “Trust me. It was the best and worst part of the job. The best—for obvious reasons. And the worst . . . because it was almost impossible to stop myself when I was around you.”
I gave him a watery smile and leaned into him now, reabsorbing his warmth.
“You’re just so young and inexperienced,” he explained. “It would’ve been a crime to take that away from you.”
I was silent awhile longer, cuddled up in the nook of his arm, thawing out my body and my heart. I stared out at the black bleakness, thwarted by a million stars and wondered what they had in store for us.
“Do you still hate me?” His voice sounded thick.
How could I? He was risking his neck to warn me, to tell me the truth. Inhaling as deeply as I could through a stuffed nose, I shook my head. “Nope. But I don’t think I love you anymore either.”
Pete tried a smile that didn’t take hold. “Good.” He squeezed me to him. “I don’t deserve your love anyway.”
“So, my first crush ended up crushing me in the end.”
“God, Kate. Don’t say that . . . our timing’s off is all. You’re everything a guy could want and more: loving, passionate, loyal, not to mention beautiful . . . but more, like, on the inside, if you can believe it,” he said, using my words about my mother. (I think my face was out glowing the moon by this point.) “I could go on all night, but unfortunately, I don’t think I’m gonna last much longer.”
I was busy swallowing the lump in my throat when he said, “I know I’ve hit you with a lot of heavy stuff, but there’s one more thing I need to tell you.”
I searched his face in the moonlight and watched as his eyes turned sober on me. Oh God. I felt so fragile—like I’d shatter into a million pieces at the slightest provocation.
“Is there anything left in the flask?” It felt like I was barely able to get my mouth to move.
He gave me a watchful look before handing over the offending thing. “Just for God’s sake don’t hit me with it again!”
I tried forming both a smile and an apology, and couldn’t quite make either one happen. Instead, I gracelessly sputtered my way through the last dregs of alcohol. “Okay, so where were we?” At this moment of suspension, dread was my most dominant emotion.
“This concerns your mother.”
My heart quit pumping. “My mother?”
“I think she was an ex-cadet,” he said, not mincing words.
“What?”
“I think she escaped and hid out here in the middle of nowhere, hiding her gifted children from the world because she was afraid The Academy would find you and snatch you back for themselves.”
Even as my eyes bugged out of my head, I instantly knew he was right. Images from my childhood began whirring through my mind, things clicking into place, stacking evidence in favor of this new theory. It sure explained a lot—the paranoia about special schools, her lack of family outside our core unit, never allowing outsiders in, always reminding me to miss a few test questions. Then, when Andrew attracted so much attention in kindergarten, just giving up to home-school us. And she certainly fit the profile, I thought, seeing her natural beauty in a whole new light.
I was quiet so long Pete squeezed my leg. “Kate, think about it—it makes sense. I had my suspicions before, but when your father informed me you were so paranoid about The Academy because your mother had poisoned you against schools for gifted children, that’s when I knew for sure.”
I stared out into the minefield of my past so shell-shocked I couldn’t even appreciate how intimately his fingers were gripping my inner thigh.
“There’s other evidence too: organic farming, raising your own livestock, and I had the well water checked for impurities—it’s clean. That’s Academy all the way,” Pete continued on as though having to convince me. I was only half tuned-in, reevaluating the whole of my existence.
“Kate . . . are you listening?” I dummy-nodded. “Good because there’s more.”
“More?” I whispered even as I knew what he was going to say. I thought back to how Mama always knew the right thing to do, her uncanny way with people, how she always got Daddy to do her bidding—he was like a whole different person since she died. I no longer thought it was just grief that made the immediate difference.
“Not only do I think she was an ex-cadet,” he said, “but I also think she was gifted.”
My head bobbled around for a while before I found my voice again. “She was.”
“You knew?”
“Just found out ten seconds ago.”
Pete studied my face. “One more thing . . .”
I huffed out an incredulous laugh. “Hit me with it.”
“My mother is a neurobiologist and at one time headed up the Gifted Program. One of the markers of the gifted is . . .”—his eyes locked onto mine—“enlarged pupils.” We stared into each other’s eyes until I blinked.
“So that’s why Mama always made me wear those stupid glasses in public . . . so my large pupils could be explained by the lens magnifying them?” I wondered aloud.
“Sounds reasonable,” he agreed. “That and to help hide your beauty— not that it did much good.”
“Is that why you told me not to look Ranger directly in the eyes?”
He nodded. “His father was a biopsychologist who did research with my mother in the GAP program, so he would’ve also been familiar with that marker.”