Page 51 of Furious

Her voice comes out muffled from beneath the blankets, but I can’t help but laugh in relief. She wants to kiss me.

I pull the covers down and kneel in front of her. “For what it’s worth, I didn’t even notice,” I say, brushing a piece of her blond hair behind her ears. “What are the chances I could get you to spit out that retainer and we pick up where we left off?”

“High,” says El, turning her head and removing her orthodontic hardware. She plops it on the bedside table and turns off the light.

A thin strip of light from under the door is enough to show me El’s eyes as she snuggles under the covers next to me.

“Hey, Jo,” she says, her lips right beside my ear.

“Hey, El,” I whisper back, stealing a quick kiss.

“I’m so glad you came with me on this trip.” She cups my face with her hand, and I lean into the touch for a moment.

“I’m so glad you asked me, Motorcycle Girl™,” I say softly. “Now, can we please stop talking?”

El leans in for a kiss at that and I pull the covers over us, shutting out the storm, the scent of dried roses, and the rest of the world. Just for tonight.

CHAPTER TWENTY

El

The sun is so bright through the wax-paper-like motel curtains the next morning, it feels as if I fell asleep in the attic again and the harsh rectangle of sun through the skylight is beating down on me. I think that’s a romance cliché: waking up the morning “after” and for a moment, not remembering where you are or who you’re with. Except that JoJo’s warm back is pressed against my chest and our legs are braided like a loaf of challah, which makes it impossible to forget. I hate to move an inch, but I’m usually a stomach sleeper, and lying curled forward has my spine cramping. I stretch slowly, without moving my arm looped over JoJo’s waist.

But she shifts, yawns, and turns over to face me anyway. “Hey.”

“Oh, fuck …” I clap my hand across my mouth.

“What?” JoJo’s eyes widen inches from mine, awake and alarmed. “What’s wrong? Are you … is everything okay?”

“I forgot to put my retainer back in.” I drag my tongue across my front teeth, tasting shamefully unlike metal.

“El!” she shrieks, punching me in the shoulder as best she can at point-blank range. “Don’t scare me, you jerk.” But she’s laughing now.

“You should be scared. I never sleep without my retainer. If my overbite regresses, my parents are gonna be pissed.”

And that’s when I remember my parents. Rolling away, I scoop my phone off the particleboard nightstand, where it’s been charging overnight. Now, it’s after eight, and no angry, panicked texts from them yet, just a text from Zaynah asking if I’m opening today at Putt by the Pond, which I thumb past—I’ll answer her later. Weirdly, even as I let out a breath of relief, my stomach sinks. It makes sense that they haven’t noticed I’m gone. Dad heads to the gym earlier than I get up during summer vacation, and Mom has yoga on Sunday mornings. Unless I have an early cleaning shift at Putt by the Pond, they’d have no reason to see me in the morning, or to check in on me.

Except we had that fight last night, probably the biggest we’ve ever had (we’re not a screaming-match kind of family so much as a silent, two-day-freeze kind of family) and I guess they still didn’t feel the need to check on me.

Whatever. It’s good. It gives us time. Today, we’ll make it to Richmond. Today, we’ll find my sister, and I’ll bring her home. And when I get back to Dell’s Hollow with Max—or when Max gets back to Dell’s Hollow on the R1, and JoJo and I follow behind on an Amtrak train or whatever—our parents will have to forgive us both. Everything will be okay again, like it was before. Better, even, because Max and my parents won’t fight like they did when she dropped out of school, and now I have JoJo.

I roll back over to face her.

“Still in the clear,” I say, pasting on a smile that turns real the longer I look at her.

Because I am so lucky, and JoJo is so pretty, her shower hair dried wild, with her eyes golden-green in a slice of pure sunlight that cuts between the crappy curtains, and her leg both soft and strong as granite as she slides it between my ankles to hook around my calf and pull me closer. “We’re good, then?”

“Yeah,” I say, suddenly feeling shy again. “That wasn’t, um, you’ve done this before, right?”

“Yeah.” She’s smiling back at me, but there’s a quirk between her eyebrows. “Not for a while, though—like months before we moved out of Charleston. And I was always safe, and um, should we have talked about this before? We should’ve talked about this.”

“No, that’s okay! I knew you’d dated and everything. I don’t mind. Not that it’s like, my business to mind. Can you tell I’ve never done this?” I wedge my arm up between us to cover my eyes.

“Like, you’ve never had this exact conversation, or never …?”

“Never had sex.” Sliding two fingers apart, I peek at her from between them. “Is that okay? I’ve had relationships, like I said, we just never did … this much. Was I—”

“Eliana Blum!” JoJo grabs my wrist to peel my hand from my face, wrapping it back around her waist. “You were fantastic.” She says it like she means it.