Page 14 of Cross Checked
“I’m asking him because he’s interesting,” I said.
“Mm-hmm,” Charm said.
Aura emerged with my boots. “He is interesting. He’s also intense, rich, emotionally complicated, and clearly watching you.”
“That sounds like your dream client.”
“That sounds like a liability with dimples.”
Charm snapped her fingers. “Put that on a shirt.”
I laughed despite myself, and for a second everything felt normal enough to hurt. My room was crowded with the scent ofA Thousand Wishesbody spray, rain dampening the window screen, Charm’s expensive perfume, and the faint buttery grease of the pizza we had sworn we weren’t going to eat before going out. Clothes were scattered everywhere. My makeup bag had exploded across the vanity. Aura’s phone kept buzzing with texts she pretended not to care about, which meant they were absolutely from Easton Wade, and Charm was dancing softly to music coming from my speaker while trying to curl the back pieces of my hair without burning either of us.
This was our ritual.
Getting ready was never just getting ready.
It was surveillance, strategy, fashion, therapy, comedy, and damage control wrapped into one chaotic hour where they pretended not to be worried and I pretended not to need them to be.
Aura handed me my boots, but her expression had shifted before she even spoke. “Have you heard from him?”
The room did not go quiet. Not exactly. Charm still moved behind me. The music still played low from the speaker. Rain still tapped softly against the glass. But something in the air tightened with the kind of familiarity none of us ever acknowledged too directly because if we named it too clearly, it became harder to laugh around.
I looked down at the boots in my hands. “Not really.”
Aura’s eyes sharpened. “Bliss.”
“I haven’t seen him in a while,” I said, which was true if I kept the sentence narrow enough. “I mean, I can always feel him watching. That doesn’t exactly go away. But he hasn’t done the dramatic parking-lot lurking thing or the jump-out-of-the-bushes-at-night thing lately.”
Charm’s hand paused near my hair. “That’s not funny.”
“I know.”
But I smiled anyway because not smiling made people scared, and scared people asked questions they weren’t ready to hear the answers to.
My fingers slipped into the pocket of my jeans before I could stop them. The marble was there. Smooth. Cool. Familiar.
My thumb rolled over the tiny glass sphere with the delicate moth trapped forever inside the swirl of white and silver. Mom had always loved moths more than butterflies. She said butterflies got all the credit for becoming beautiful, but moths were the ones brave enough to chase light through the dark.
After she died, I started collecting marbles for all the nevers I would face without her. Grief did weird things to people, and apparently mine had decided a marble could become a lifeline if I held it hard enough.
A tiny moth trapped in glass. A never for my mom and a reminder that I wasn’t trapped in a cage like the moth was. I escaped my cage, well as best as I could anyway.
I curled my hand around it once, just long enough to let the sharp edge of panic dull into something I could swallow.
Aura crossed her arms. “Sunday barbecue?”
I let out a breath through my nose and released the marble. “Yeah. I have to go.”
“Is he going to be there?”
“He wasn’t there last week.” I tried to make that sound casual, like Luke Dempsey’s absence from my family barbecuewas just a scheduling note and not the only reason I had slept through the night afterward. “But he’ll probably show his face this week. He usually does.”
Charm set the curling iron down carefully. Too carefully. “Stay glued to Ryker.”
“I know.”
“No,” Aura said, stepping closer. “Actually glued. Annoy him if you have to. Sit by him. Walk in with him. Walk out with him. If Luke tries to get you alone, you go find your brother, your dad, literally anyone.”
