RYLIN LEANED BACK in the swivel chair and stretched out her legs, frowning up at the holo she was slowly stitching together. She had been here in the school’s edit bay all afternoon. Right now, it was the only place she could try to make sense of all the unresolved questions in her life.
She still felt blindsided by Hiral’s abrupt departure. And she missed him. As a boyfriend, yes, but also as a person in her life. It saddened her that after everything they had been through—the death of Rylin’s mom, Hiral’s dropping out of school, his arrest and subsequent release—that it had ended like this, with a brief and unceremonious good-bye at the monorail.
She couldn’t help thinking that Chrissa had been right all along. Rylin had been so certain that she and Hiral could have a fresh start. But their secrets and lies had caught up with them once again.
This weekend, while she sorted through the bruised confusion of her thoughts, Rylin had found herself reaching for her silver holo-cam. Before she quite knew what she was doing, she’d started filming.
She filmed Chrissa, and Hiral’s family. She scanned instaphotos from the early days of their relationship—a painstaking process, adapting those into holographic 3-D images; she’d been forced to borrow Raquel’s transmuter at the library. She surreptitiously filmed young couples at the mall and old couples on the Ifty. She wandered out onto the 32nd-floor deck and filmed the sunset, the vibrant orange clouds lined with deep dusky purple, like a quiet sigh.
As she sorted through all her raw material in the comforting darkness of the edit bay, Rylin began to see this impromptu film project for what it was. Somehow she was crafting a memoir of, or maybe a tribute to, her time with Hiral. This holo was her way of mourning their relationship, all the good as well as the bad.
She kept remembering things, small incidents she hadn’t thought of in years. Like the first time she’d tried to bake a cake for Chrissa and burned herself on the stove, and Hiral cradled her hand to his chest with a cool-pack while feeding her raw batter with a spoon. That time they were stuck on the monorail together, during the Tower’s one and only blackout, and they held tightly to each other’s hands until the lights flashed back on.
It felt somehow easier to make sense of their relationship like this—as vignettes, as a series of disconnected and highly visual moments—than to confront it in its entirety. Maybe when she finished she would send it to Hiral. He would understand what it meant.
She was still filtering through the footage when the door to the edit bay slid open.
Rylin squinted into the brightness. Somehow she wasn’t all that surprised to see Cord—as if she’d felt his presence even before he walked in, like a slight shift in temperature.
He had taken off his tie and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt. It made him look rumpled and sloppy and so unabashedly sexy that Rylin caught her breath.
“What are you doing on campus so late?” She wasn’t used to seeing Cord here in the edit bay.
“Actually, Myers, I was looking for you. I tried pinging you a few times, but it kept going straight to message, which meant that you were either still inside the tech-net or off-planet. I figured this was more likely.”
Rylin didn’t answer. Her heart had given a funny sideways lurch, anticipation searing up and down her body. She had tried so hard not to think about Cord after this breakup with Hiral. She needed time to process everything that had happened, to focus on herself. It had been a while since Rylin was single. Maybe she could use the time alone. She certainly didn’t want to be that girl, the type who Ping-Ponged instantly from one boy to another.
Cord took a step closer and clasped his hands behind his back, adopting the formal sort of pose in which people studied art. His gaze lifted to the holo that flickered before them. “Is Lux starring in this one too? What is it?” he asked.
Just a memorial to my newly ended relationship. Rylin stood up slowly—to see it from his angle. “A new project. It’s about . . . endings,” she explained as the hologram zoomed in on a couple’s clasped hands.
“Endings?”
“Hiral and I broke up. He left New York, actually.”
Cord slowly crossed the distance between them. He stood distractingly close, so close that Rylin could see herself reflected in the pale blue of his irises, could trace the faint shadow along his jaw.
“I don’t really believe in endings,” he said laconically. “At least, I don’t believe in calling them endings. There’s something too depressingly final about it.”
“What would you call them?”
“Opportunities. A value change. The beginning of something new.”
Rylin’s eyes fluttered shut. She shivered hot and cold at once.
“Rylin,” Cord said, “I’m not going to kiss you.”
She recoiled a step, stiff with wounded pride, but Cord’s expression gave her pause. “I want to—I really do,” he croaked. “But I refuse to be that asshole who makes a move on you when you’re fresh out of a relationship.”
Their gazes met for a long, dark, hot moment. Sound seemed to dissolve into silence. Rylin’s thoughts, her blood, seemed to move with a poignant slowness.
She rose on tiptoe to kiss him.
She was startled by the tender brush of longing she felt as Cord’s mouth touched hers. She tried to kiss him lightly, but it had been too long; they both fell forward into the kiss. Rylin pulled him instinctively closer. She felt dizzy with it, drunk with it, that Cord was here and real and hers.
But was that a good thing?
She had been here before, and it ended badly then, and why on earth did she expect it to be different this time?
Even though it cost every last ounce of her resolve, Rylin tore herself brutally away from the kiss.
“Cord,” she whispered, trying to ignore the way his hands felt, still clasped around her back. “What are we doing?”
“Making out, until for some inexplicable reason you forced us to stop,” he said and began to lower his mouth to hers. Rylin took a step back.
“You and me, together again? This is crazy.” No matter how much she wanted him, Rylin knew that she couldn’t go through it a second time: all the countless small wounds they’d inflicted on each other, all the misunderstandings and hurt and loss. Wasn’t that the definition of insanity, to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result?
“Of course it’s crazy. I’m crazy about you, Myers. I have been since that first day you stormed into my apartment last fall.” When she didn’t smile at that, he let out a breath. “What is it? What are you afraid of?”
She leaned her forehead against his chest to avoid having to look into his eyes. “That we’re being foolish. That nothing has changed, and we’ll just hurt each other all over again.”
“We both made mistakes last time, Rylin. I know now that I should have given you a chance to explain yourself that night. I should have realized how much I loved you before it was too late.” He bit back a sigh. “Eris told me to, you know.”
Rylin’s head shot up at that. “Eris?”
“The night she died. She told me that you were the real deal—that I should fight for you.”
“She didn’t even know me,” Rylin protested weakly.
“Eris made a lot of snap judgments,” Cord said, as if that explained everything. “She said that she could tell what you meant to me from the way I was looking at you.”
“Oh,” Rylin breathed. She probably should have felt weirded out by that, but for some reason it was nice—to know that Eris, a girl Rylin hadn’t even known, had believed in her and Cord.
And Leda believed in them. Rylin remembered what she’d said the other day, about needing something good to root for. As strange as it was, that thought warmed Rylin too.
“Rylin, I swear to you that if you give me another chance, I won’t make the same stupid mistakes. I can’t promise that I won’t make other, equally stupid mistakes,” Cord added ruefully, “but I’ll try my best.”
Rylin gave a cautious smile. “That seems fair. As long as we don’t repeat the old ones.”
“God, I’ve missed you.” Cord began to kiss her again, a rain of small warm kisses, each one punctuated with a sentence.
“I missed your laugh.” Kiss. “The way you call me out on my bullshit.” Kiss. “That turquoise bra you secretly wear under your dark clothes, just because you can get away with it.” Rylin opened her mouth to protest, but she couldn’t say anything, because Cord was already kissing her again and listing more things; and so she gave up and tilted her head back. Her pulse was going haywire, her entire body humming sharply to life.
“I missed that look you get on your face when you’re filming, your nose all crinkled.” Kiss. “The way your hair falls out of your ponytail and hangs around your face, just like this, when I kiss you.”
Rylin started to reach her hand up to fix it, but Cord shook his head. “No, leave it. You look beautiful.”
She smiled up at him in the shadows. “Getting me alone in a dark room and showering me with compliments? If I didn’t know better, Cord Anderton, I would say you’re attempting to seduce me.”
“Is it working?” he asked, and Rylin laughed, circling her arms blissfully around his shoulders.
They kissed more slowly this time as the tattered lights of the hologram flickered over them.