Page 17 of Cross Checked
Aura looked over and went still for half a second before nodding once. “Good.”
I stared at myself in the mirror. The girl looking back at me did not look scared and that was always the trick.
She looked pretty and warm and a little amused, with soft curls falling around her face and a black top that made her eyes look brighter. She looked like someone going to a party with her best friends. Someone with normal problems. Someone whocould ask the captain of the Fury to be the subject of her year-long project without wondering if wanting something simple would somehow make the dangerous parts of her life worse.
My fingers brushed my pocket again. The marble waited there like a secret.
Losing mom had shown me that a Never had two sides. The ache of what we wouldn’t get, and the proof that love had been big enough to leave an empty place behind.
I hadn’t understood that at fourteen, some days, I still didn’t.
But I knew this much: Mom would have wanted me to go. She would have wanted me to wear the black top, laugh with my friends, ask the too-hot hockey captain about my project, and pretend for a few hours that wanting something didn’t have to cost me anything.
For one night, I wanted to be that girl.
Charm rested her chin on my shoulder. “Cade is going to malfunction.”
“He is not.”
Aura picked up her phone and glanced down, mouth twitching. “Easton says the party starts at nine.”
Charm gasped. “Aura, are you texting the obsessed puppy dog of a defenseman?”
“I’m gathering logistical information.”
“You’re flirting.”
“I’m coordinating.”
“With a man who has been trying to get you since sophomore year?”
Aura’s face stayed composed, but a faint blush betrayed her. “Persistence is not a personality.”
“No,” Charm said. “But apparently it is working.”
Aura pointed at her. “Careful, Charm.”
Charm blew her a kiss.
I laughed again, and this time it felt real enough that something inside me loosened. Not all the way. Never all the way. But enough.
Aura grabbed her jacket. Charm stole my lip gloss. I shoved my phone into my back pocket after checking it once, then twice, because habit lived in my hands even when I wished it didn’t. No new messages. No missed calls. No Luke lighting up my screen.
Still, as we headed for the door, I felt it. That familiar pressure between my shoulder blades. The one that whispered Luke Dempsey did not have to be present to take up space. I paused in the doorway just long enough for them to notice.
Aura’s hand found mine, quick and firm. Charm hooked her arm through my other one, warm and dramatic and already talking about how if Briggs Lawson tried to hit on her again, she was going to invoice him for emotional labor.
The three of us walked out together.
Like always.
Like ritual.
Like armor.
4
Bliss
