Camille rested in my arms as Anton drove us back to the apartment. She’d been spooked at the restaurant, and I’d sent Timothy to catch whoever it was that had watched us through the glass. He’d barely missed them, but reported it had been a couple. Camille had gone pale, one hand at her throat as she stared at the glass doors. I’d scooped her up and assured her no one would know it was us. She nodded, but the haunted look hadn’t left her eyes.

Once she was in the car, she let me hold her as we returned to the penthouse. No words passed her lips and her eyes were closed, but I knew she was awake. I would have given a substantial portion of my fortune to know what she was thinking during those moments. My thoughts jumbled together in an atypical mess. My logic was pocked with the same sensation I’d felt when I realized I loved parts of Camille’s personality. I expected the feeling to fade, for my usual calculation to return. It didn’t. After she’d given herself to me, and I’d had the most intense fuck of my life, maybe it was impossible for my brain to heal from its shattered state.

Anton pulled into the parking garage, and Timothy opened my door. I hefted Camille into my arms and carried her to the elevator. She didn’t protest as we rose to the penthouse and I laid her in my bed. Too much silence. I did the math with what little faculties I had left. No words meant something was wrong.

A knock at my door filtered through the beat from my headphones. I didn’t particularly care for music, but my father insisted I show at least some interest in it since most boys my age did.

Slipping off my headphones, I turned as he walked in and sat on my bed.

“Good morning.”

He didn’t say anything, simply stared at the wood floor beneath his feet. He clasped his hands between his knees, and his shoulders stooped at a defeated angle.

I waited for him to speak. When he didn’t, I put my headphones back on and tapped my foot along to the beat so he could see I was taking his advice.

Minutes passed, but he never looked over at my rhythmic efforts. My foot tired, so I gave up and put the headphones down on my desk, the music tinny and far away. Why was he silent?

It occurred to me all this was odd. If he came to my room, he usually had something to say. Why not this time? I cycled through my list of possible responses, but he’d never prepared me for silence. I needed some sort of a cue. Or was this a test? Was silence a cue in and of itself?

A faint thump-thump added to the hum of the earphones’ incessant hum. I flicked off my iPod, killing the noise. It was a plop, not a thump. Dad hadn’t moved, but tears were dropping to the floor beneath him. Otherwise, silence.

“Dad?” Tears meant sad, unless it was a wedding, and then tears meant happy. Unless it was a wedding of someone you hated, in which case it could cut either way. I generally just offered a handkerchief and avoided trying to parse the reason behind the tears. But Dad didn’t cry, so I couldn’t gauge what his tears meant. “Is something wrong?”

Silence. It was oppressive. I’d never minded it before, but this sort of silence seemed to speak. The hackles along the back of my neck rose. Something was off. I couldn’t feel it like normal people, but I could sense it on a basic, animal level. Something that had been whole was now broken. But what?

“Dad?”

He cleared his throat and pressed his fingertips to his closed eyes. “Your mother.”

“Is she upset with you?”

“No, son.” He finally met my gaze, his watery eyes throwing emotions I couldn’t catch. “She died this morning.”

“Died?” I knew the concept, and not just from my experience with the neighbor’s rooster. But I’d never dealt with it like this. So close that it seemed unreal.

“She passed in her sleep. I woke up and she was—”

His voice caught in his throat, and he hung his head again.

“Where is she?”

“Still in bed.” His voice was strained. “Paramedics are coming, but it’s too late.”

“But she’s not there. So where is she? Where did she pass to?” I wrestled with the concept.

“She’s just gone, son.”

“But you said she’s still in bed.” I shook my head.

He broke into a sob. “I can’t do this. I can’t. Not without her. It’s too much.” More sobs followed, each one wracking his body as sirens whined in the distance.

As my father cried, I filed away his behavior in my notebook of human reactions: nothing good comes of silence.

“Camille?” I stripped off my jacket and tossed it to a side chair, then knelt at her feet and removed her heels.

“Yes?” She kept her eyes closed.

“What’s wrong?” After yanking my tie loose, I unbuttoned my shirt, tossed it to join my jacket, then crawled into bed next to her.

“How do you know something is wrong?” She turned her head away.

“Your silence.”

“Did your robot brain do the math on that one?”

I reached up to touch her face, but she flinched away. “Please tell me.”

Fear, sudden and strong, overtook me. Did she regret what we’d done in the restaurant? “Was it the sex?”

She pinned her thumbnail between her teeth. “No. I mean yes.” She rolled away from me. “Not exactly…I don’t know.”

“The people watching, then?” I wanted to touch her, to soothe whatever thoughts plagued her.

“Yes.”

“I can have the security camera footage pulled and find out who they were.”

She groaned and buried her face in the pillow. “Please don’t. I’ll die of mortification.”

Settling next to her, I stared at the blonde strands hiding her from me. “If you don’t explain, I’ll never know. My robot brain, as you call it, simply isn’t capable of seeing into the heart of someone else. It can’t even see into mine, if I have one.”

Her shoulders relaxed a faint bit, and she rolled over so she faced me. “Do you know how disarming that is?”

“What?” I couldn’t help myself. I ran my fingers along her bare upper arm.

“When you admit your flaws like that.”

“Why is it disarming?” I peered into her light eyes.

“Because most people spend countless hours of their lives trying to cover them up.”

“I’m not most people.”

“No.” She rested her palm on my cheek, her warmth flooding my veins. “You aren’t.”

“Neither are you.” I pulled her closer, and she rested in the crook of my arm. “Are you going to tell me why you’re upset?”

“I thought you couldn’t read emotions?”

“I can read yours sometimes, when you let me see them. But other times you hide from me.”

“It’s safer that way.”

A question formed in my mind, one I hadn’t thought to ask. “Will you tell me about you?” Her words came back to me: “Ask the right questions.” Maybe this was one of them.

“What do you want to know?”

“I know the mechanics of your childhood—where you went to school, what your parents did, that you loved them, the names of your friends. But would you tell me something you remember vividly?”

“Why?”

Wasn’t it obvious? “I want to know you. All your secrets—I want to keep them. You can tell me anything, and I wouldn’t judge you. Had an unhealthy obsession with One Direction? Fine. Slutted it up senior year to get back at mommy? No problem, though admittedly that wouldn’t be my favorite. Fifty bodies in the back yard? I don’t give a shit.”

She snorted. “I think that last one is more your speed.”

Yes. “But I want to know about you.” I thought I’d collected all the data I needed, but the closer I got to her, the more I realized how much I didn’t know. “I want to see things through your eyes.”

“Empathy. The one thing psychopaths lack.” She shook her head against my shoulder. “You want the one thing that it’s impossible for you to have.”

“Humor me?”

“Fine. Let me think.” She fell into another silence, one that put me on edge. Silence was bad. But when she spoke again, I could hear the smile in her voice. “One summer, my friends and I got into our heads that we were going to be runners. It was this whole craze at the time. I’m not sure why, maybe the summer Olympics or something. Anyway, I don’t know if you’ve noticed from our exercise in the yard, but I’m not particularly suited to running.”

“You looked good to me. I rather liked watching you move, though I had wished you’d been running toward me instead of away.”

“Then it wouldn’t have been a very clever escape attempt, now would it?”

“True.”

She rested her palm on my stomach. “So, one morning, we’re out running around my neighborhood. The sun’s already hot, and I’m hustling along in the middle of the slower girls’ group. We’re making decent time, and turn the corner to pass by my house. My dad is out in the yard setting up the sprinkler before he leaves for work. He pauses and waves at us as we approach. Then my mom steps out of the front door and walks over to the hose pipe. I begin to laugh before she even finishes her mischief. Sure enough, the sprinkler starts up and sprays my dad. He stands there for, I don’t know, like a five-second count.” She giggled and stopped to collect herself, and I found my lips twitching along with her laughter. “He’s wearing his work suit and is soaked. By this time, the slow group has stopped, and we are all laughing. He turns and sees my mom trying to sneak back into the house. Then he takes off running. She screams and tries to hurry up the steps, but he grabs her and hugs her to him, soaking her just the same.” Her laughter infected me, and I smiled at the mental image.

“They sound like a pair.”

“They were.” Her laughter tapered off. “They had me late. A surprise baby to a couple who’d tried a decade prior to have a child. Mom was forty-three when I was born. Dad was almost fifty.” Sadness colored the memory, softening her voice. “I knew, you know? I knew when Mom died that Dad wouldn’t be far behind. They were inseparable, even when she got sick. He never strayed far from her side. It was like he was going through the treatments, too. The chemo was so hard on her, sapping her strength. But her spirit never waned. She always had a smile for me, even when she was too tired to lift her arms to hug me. And my dad was like a plant under her sun. When she burned out, he withered away soon after.”

“I’m sorry.” I squeezed her tighter.

“Me too. I miss them.” She sniffled. “What about your mom?”

“She died when I was a kid.”

She pushed up and rested on my chest, her stunning eyes pinning me. “That’s all?”

I would have talked for hours if it kept her perched on top of me. “She was sort of cold. Not like my father. They were opposites. My dad was the one who tried to teach me. She sort of…I don’t know. I guess when I look back on it now, she didn’t know what to do with me. Dad was patient and taught me everything I needed to know to pass in the real world.”

“Pass?”

“As a person, just like everyone else. With feelings and empathy, and all those tools that normal people are born with but I lack.”

“Hmm.” She rested her chin on my chest.

“What?”

“I’ve never really thought about it like that, like you were disadvantaged.”

“I wasn’t.”

“If you say so.”

“I had everything. Mom didn’t take an interest in me, but Dad more than made up for it. I think maybe she was his strength. He leaned on her, and I leaned on him.”

“Were you sad when she died?”

I wanted to say yes. That was the correct answer. Instead, I told the truth. “I don’t know. I knew Dad was sad, which wasn’t a good thing. The whole thing just struck me as unbelievably odd. One minute she was there, the next she was gone. Death didn’t make sense to me. Still doesn’t, I guess.”

“I think that’s a common existential issue.”

“So maybe I’m not as odd as I seem?” I threaded her hair through my fingers.

“Don’t get too far ahead of yourself.”

I loved how quick she was. Loved. That deep feeling, the one that shot fear and excitement through me in equal measures, roared back to life. And there was nothing else to it. Not really. The simple truth had been there all along. I loved Camille.

She shifted off me.

“Where are you going?”

“I need to get out of this dress.”

My cock woke at her words.

I must have given away my thoughts, because she rolled her eyes. “No. I still can’t believe I—we…yeah.” She covered her face with her palms. “In a public place.”

I wanted her again, her body, her heart, her everything. “It wasn’t public. Except the part where you were up against the window.”

She squeaked beneath her hands. “And you’re a psycho.”

“I think we both know you love my psycho.” Shit, did I just say love?

Peeking through her fingers, she said, “You’re overselling it.”

“Don’t be shy now.” I licked my lips and noted her nipples hardening beneath the crimson fabric. “Not after our little understanding earlier this evening.”

“That was a one-time thing.”

“If you say so.” I smirked.

She whirled and retreated into the bathroom. “By the way, no more kissing. Not in the deal anymore, remember?” Her words echoed off the marble tile.

We’ll see about that.