Page 44 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

She snorts into her tea, and the kitchen lights come on below us again.

"It gets quieter when you know where to put it," I tell her. "That's all we're doing up here. Finding you somewhere to put it."

"Okay." She drinks her tea and looks out over the empty quad. "Thank you, Atlas."

"Drink your tea." I bump her shoulder with mine so she knows I heard her.

She's better at it every day. It took me years to learn what she picks up in a week. By the middle of August she can hold all four in her hands at once without shaking, then let them go so smoothly the slate barely hums. She can call a cloud the size of a dinner plate and keep it from raining, which is harder than it sounds, and which I still can't always pull off myself.

She's going to be stronger than me. Hell, she's going to be stronger than any of us except maybe Everly, and I'm so proud of her I could bust. I never thought I'd like teaching, but I come down off that roof feeling like I won something.

It's like having a little sister. I never had one. After the kitchen I didn't have anyone, just an uncle who dropped me at Nyxhaven and drove off, and for years I told myself I didn't need anyone. That was bullshit.

What I want is a house full of people. I want a kitchen with too many chairs in it and kids yelling over each other, and I want to be the dad who stays, the one who takes them up on the roof when the storm comes in and shows them where to put it. No one did that for my mom, and no one did it for me.

Evenings on the roof belong to Everly.

She comes up after supper, once the slate has stopped cooking, and makes me throw sparks at her so she can try to catch them. I hate it. I've spent my whole life making sure my sparks don't land on people, and now she stands between the chimneys with her hands up, yelling at me to throw harder.

Tonight she's in one of my T-shirts, knotted at her hip, barefoot on the tar paper, with her hair coming out of its ponytail. She's got little pink burns all over her palms from the last time we did this, and she's heckling me because I keep throwing them too soft.

"Atlas, a toddler could catch that."

"Good," I tell her. "Then no one gets hurt."

"Throw it like you mean it!"

I throw it like I mean it. She doesn't catch it. She never catches them when she's trying. After a while she gives up, sits down against the warm bricks next to me, shoulder to shoulder, and blows on her palms, and the sun goes down on her face.

I want her all the time. It's stupid how much. I want her when she's yelling at me to throw harder, and when she's eating cereal over the sink, and when she's asleep with her cold feet jammed under my leg. I sat behind her all night on the common room floor while she pulled the Well out of Nell, and I've never been that scared for anyone or that proud of anyone in my life.

What scares the shit out of me is what's under all that wanting. I know what it is. I'm in love with her. I'm not an idiot.

I've never said it to anyone, though, not even my mom and dad. I was seven, standing in our kitchen doorway, and then there wasn't a kitchen anymore, and there wasn't anyone left to say it to. Every time I get close to it with Everly, I'm back in that doorway.

"What?" Everly's caught me staring.

"Nothing."

"You're doing the jaw thing."

"I don't have a jaw thing."

"You have a huge jaw thing." She reaches over and pokes it. Then she leaves her hand there, warm against my face, with the little burns on her palm rough on my stubble. "You can tell me, you know."

I can't. If I open my mouth right now I don't know what's going to come out of it, and I'm not saying it for the first time ever on a roof that smells like pigeon shit.

So I kiss her instead. I take her face in both hands and kiss her hard, and she makes a happy noise and climbs right into my lap, with her knees on either side of my hips on the hot tar paper, and kisses me back. She tastes like iced tea. Static jumps off my hands into her hair, and she grins against my mouth and doesn't pull away. My hands find her waist under my shirt, and I'm hard almost at once, and she knows it, so she rolls her hips once, slow, just to be mean.

"Later," she says against my mouth. "Brittany's going to come up here looking for us."

"Brittany can mind her own business."

She kisses me again, softer this time, and then she climbs off me and ducks back in through the hatch. I sit up there against the chimney until it's full dark and the bats come out, thinking about how much I love her, and how I still don't know how to say it. When I picture that house full of people now, she's in it. She's at the stove giving me shit, in a kitchen where nothing ever blows up.

I can't sleep, though it isn't the dream keeping me up. I've had the same one since I was seven—the kitchen doorway, the light going wrong, the air turning to ozone—and I'd wake up from it with my heart slamming and sparks crawling over the sheets. I haven't had it once since the hill. Tonight it's just Everly in my head, so in the middle of the night I go down to the kitchen for a cold drink, and Callum's already there.

He's sitting at the table in the dark with a mug of tea and the window open, still in a pressed shirt, because he's Callum. One of his shadows is stretched across the tabletop like a cat in the heat. When I turn on the light over the stove, it slides off onto the floor and goes under his chair.