Instead, I turn off my phone, and as I close the cover on the piano keys, the Star Wars theme echoes through house. Elias’s ringtone, but he’s out running errands. His phone is vibrating on the edge of kitchen.
He forgot it—again.
I stare at it, because the first thing I think is that it’s my mother. Or my manager. Or a reporter. Or my mother.
And none of them I want to talk to.
The call goes to voice mail, and my anxiety begins to ebb. I shove the bench underneath the piano and start for the stairs when—
His phone goes off again.
What if it’s important? a voice inside me whispers.
My stomach flips into a knot and I make for the counter and swipe up on Elias’s phone. It’s not my publicist, or my manager, or a journalist. It’s…
My mother.
I haven’t talked with her since our fight, and I have strategically avoided her every single time she’s tried to call me, and despite everything, I do miss talking to her, even as I try to remember why I’m so bitter about it all to begin with.
Because she sided with my stepfather. She sent me here, to nowhere. To hide me away because she, like my stepfather, is ashamed of me.
That’s the part of all of this I don’t like thinking about.
“Um, Vance?” I glance behind me. Rosie stands in the doorway to the living room with her suitcase and her bookbag. Her hair is pulled behind her head in two short pigtails, and she tugs on one of them nervously. “Dad just called. He said the apartment’s back in tip-top shape! I hate to ask, but Elias has gone to the farmer’s market, so…do you think you could take me home?”
I turn around and send my mother—again—to voice mail. “Your chariot awaits, Princess.”
HE LEADS ME OUT INTO THE GARAGE, where a simple economy car sits. I buckle myself into the passenger seat. It surprises me—I didn’t think he’d be caught dead in anything less than an Aston Martin, but I suppose that would stick out too much in this town.
Out on the main street, trees unfurl around us, curling up toward the sky in a tunnel. He flicks on the brights, the radio murmuring soft pop songs.
He shifts in his seat. “So, if I liked that book…which one would you suggest next?”
I give him the strangest look. “Seriously?” I chew on the inside of my cheek to keep myself from smiling.
“…What?”
“I’m sorry—this is just so weird. I never would’ve thought that I’d ever be in a car with you, asking me for book recs.”
“Well, I will admit this is a first for me as well. But…” As he coasts to a stop at the stoplight, he tilts his head, frowning, “it’s not a bad thing, yeah?”
“No, it’s really not. Well, what kind of books do you like?”
“Ones that aren’t boring.”
“Well, that’s all of them.”
He gives me a sideways glance, and I smile and pull out my notebook from my school bag. “Fine—how about court intrigue? Assassins? Starship battles? The Star Brigade is a good one to start with.” I scrawl the name out onto the top of a spare piece of paper, tear it off, and hand it to him.
“Thank you kindly,” he replies, and tucks it into the fold in his beanie.
I shove my notebook into my backpack. “You know,” I say, and hesitate for a moment, before I continue, “I like this.”
“This?”
“We aren’t sniping at each other for once.”
“I know, it’s ghastly,” he replies with a laugh. A moment later, the light turns green, and we drive on. “We should at least be arguing.”
“I know, you’re a terrible villain.”
“I like to think of myself as an anti-hero.”
“Byronic? Take a left here,” I add as we come to the next stoplight, and he turns onto my street. I tap on the window, indicating my apartment building on the right.
“I am not nearly that broody, thank you,” he says as he slows down in front of the entrance to the building. It’s nothing like his castle-house. It’s a three-story walkup apartment complex with a smaller-than-normal kitchen and a leaky toilet, but it’s home.
“Not broody? Now I know you’re lying.”
He mocks a gasp. “And I thought we were friends!”
Friends. I like the sound of that, strange enough, even after I turned him down for a date. But a friendship—one between him and me, Vance Reigns and Rosie Thorne—doesn’t sound too terrible. I lean across the middle console toward him and when he looks back at me my breath catches in my throat, because his eyes are so blue and he smells so warm, and for a brief moment—I can see him.
The boy I fell for on the balcony of ExcelsiCon.
“There you are,” I whisper. The words slip out of my mouth before I can reel myself in. His eyebrows furrow, and I quickly pull myself back and push open the car door. “Good night, Vance.”
“See you tomorrow?” he calls.
“Tomorrow,” I promise.
He waits until I’m inside my apartment before he drives away, out of the gates, and onto the main street again, but my heart never stops racing.
I CAN’T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME I woke up before noon, but I didn’t actually sleep very well. My stupid brain kept replaying last night over and over—like the theater previews before a film. I saw her every time I closed my eyes, illuminated by the soft light of the dashboard, fiddling with the radio even though she never picked a channel, just so I wouldn’t notice the blush across her cheeks.
But I definitely did.
It could have nothing to do with you, I think as I fish for a shirt in my dresser drawer, my hair damp against my neck from a shower.
But still.
I wish I’d said something—something remotely flirty, I guess—but instead I made up cat puns. And the way she laughed, and smiled, and leaned over the console in the middle—
There you are, she had said, as if she’d been looking for me underneath Vance Reigns this whole time.
I scrub my head, abandoning any hope of finding a clean shirt, and pace my bedroom. Oh, I’m in so much trouble. I have half a mind to ask Imogen what to do, until I remember that we haven’t talked since our fight, and I haven’t seen her online since.
I really did bungle that up, didn’t I?
Elias knocks on the door before he pokes his head in. “Hey, sleepyhead—oh, you’re awake.”