Page 83 of Fox

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“Fox.”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing?”

“Softening you. Is it working?”

I push him off of me.

He laughs as he falls onto the pillows.

Then, he lifts up, and his eyes hold mine, earnest and sincere. “I want to hold you tonight in bed. Let me.”

How am I supposed to say no to that?

29

NOW THIS?

LUCY

Iam not eavesdropping.

I want to be clear about that, for the record, for the court of my own conscience.

I am not eavesdropping.

I am coming downstairs at nine-fifteen in the morning to go to the diner, like I do, because I work there.

I hear Fox’s voice first.

I stop on the third step from the bottom because the window is cracked open to the morning air, and his voice carries. And the sound of it—the unguarded quality of it—stops me the way it always has.

“—wasn’t like anything I’d been told it would be.”

A pause. A glass clinks softly.

“I kept waiting for it to be loud.”

Dina says something I can’t hear.

“Exactly,” Fox says. “Everyone said you’d know. Like a door slamming. That didn’t happen for me.”

Another pause.

“My father talked about my mother like she was a decision he’d made. The right one. The logical one.”

Dina murmurs something.

“Yeah,” Fox says softly. “Percy’s parents are the real thing. You can see it from across the room. It looks like?—”

Another murmur.

“—like the weather. Something atmospheric. Something you feel before you name it.”

A beat.

“I spent four years with Reina telling myself what I felt was love because it was loud.”

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