“THANKS AGAIN FOR tonight,” Avery told Max, lingering on the landing to her family’s private elevator. She wasn’t quite ready to go inside.
She didn’t want to risk seeing Atlas.
Avery still couldn’t believe that he had moved back into their apartment. He had unpacked in his old room and was heading off to work every day with their dad, slipping nonchalantly back into his old life as if no time at all had passed since he left for Dubai. As if nothing had changed.
Except that everything had changed, Avery thought furiously. She had changed. And it wasn’t fair that he was suddenly here, when she’d gone to such painful lengths to move on from him.
“Are you okay, Avery?” Max asked, sensing her hesitation.
“I just wish that I could stay with you tonight,” she said, and meant it. Avery had slept over in Max’s dorm room the past few evenings. She wished she could keep staying there indefinitely—but her mom had made a pointed comment about it this morning, and Avery didn’t want to push her luck.
“Me too.” Max pulled her into a hug, tucking his chin above her head. “I’m sorry this election stuff has been so intense. I never realized how much it would affect you. We aren’t so obsessed with the candidates’ families in Germany.”
“That sounds nice.” Avery smiled. “Maybe next time my dad can run for mayor of Würzburg.”
In the week since her dad’s election, her parents had become more committed than ever to maintaining their image as New York’s first family. “New York royalty,” the feeds kept calling them. Even worse, they had dubbed Avery the so-called princess of New York.
Her inbox was now flooded with interview requests—which she found ludicrous, given that she wasn’t an authority in anything except, perhaps, being a teenager. Or hiding an illicit romance from her parents.
Yet bloggers suddenly wanted her to weigh in on everything from her favorite face cream to her most-anticipated fashion trends. When Avery tried to decline the interviews, her parents were horrified. “You’re the youthful face of my administration! Tell them whatever they want to know!” her dad cried out, and signed her up to talk to anyone who would listen.
Meanwhile, Avery’s follower count on the feeds had skyrocketed from a few thousand to a half million. She’d tried to make her page private, but her parents adamantly refused. “We can hire an intern for you, to post and reply to things,” her mom offered. Avery had thought she was joking.
“I’ll see you later,” she murmured and gave Max one last kiss. Then she stepped into the elevator that rose toward their foyer, holding her breath.
As the door slid open, Avery saw with a sinking feeling that she hadn’t waited long enough. Atlas was home.
He stepped out of the kitchen, the shadows falling softly over the planes of his face, so familiar and yet so changed. The silence fluttered between them like a curtain.
“Hey, Aves,” he ventured.
“Hey.” All she was willing to give him was that single word.
She was acutely aware that this was the first time she and Atlas had been alone together since he came home. She had seen him, of course, but always with her parents or Max there as a buffer.
“I was just about to make pasta. Want some?” Atlas offered into the silence.
“It’s almost midnight,” Avery croaked, which she realized wasn’t an answer. She felt like a newborn, discovering her vocal cords for the first time.
“I was at work late.”
Avery wondered, suddenly, if he’d stayed at work late on purpose—if he was avoiding home for the same reason she was. Because he didn’t want to run into her.
She followed him warily into the kitchen, lingering near the doorway as if she might make a quick escape at any moment. “Since when do you cook?”
Atlas smiled, the old half smile that Avery used to love, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Since I live alone in Dubai and got sick of takeout. Though pasta isn’t exactly complicated.”
She watched as Atlas flash-cooked the noodles, chopped tomatoes, shaved down a hunk of cheese. There was a strong, lean grace to his movements that seemed new to her. She felt the same way she’d felt the last time he returned home—like he’d traveled across some unknown distance, had seen and done things that would forever set him apart from her.
And just like last time, she felt an instinctive urge to draw near him. As though, if she got close enough, she might understand some of what he had done.
“What was it like?” Avery leaned forward onto the counter, pulling the sleeves of her sweater toward her wrists.
“Loud. Busy. Not that different from New York, except way hotter outside the towers.”
“Not Dubai.” She shook her head. “I meant—being away.”
“You went away too, if I recall,” Atlas pointed out.
“It’s not the same.” When Avery traveled, she took her identity with her; she never stopped being Avery Fuller. She was jealous, she realized, of Atlas’s anonymity.
“That reminds me. I have a present that I’ve been meaning to give you,” Atlas said abruptly, wiping his hands beneath the UV sanitizer beam. Before Avery could react, he’d disappeared down the hall toward his room.
Moments later he returned, holding something bulky behind his back. “Sorry I didn’t wrap it,” he apologized, and handed Avery a multicolored bundle.
She unfurled it before her, and her breath caught in her chest.
It was a square of handmade rug, about the size of the coffee table in their living room. A vibrant swirl of colors, blue and yellow and orange threads all woven into an intricate pattern that kept revealing more details the longer you looked at it. Avery saw peacocks, miniature trees, fiery sunbursts, and in the center, a radiant white lotus floating against a turquoise pool. The border was edged in gold stitching.
“Atlas,” she said softly, “this is breathtaking. Thank you.”
“I know it’s not a real magic carpet, but this was the closest I could find.”
She looked up sharply. “You remember that?” Avery used to ask Santa for a magic carpet every Christmas. She’d wanted one so desperately that her parents ended up commissioning an engineer to build a child-sized one, with metallic-woven fabric that lifted her a whole four centimeters above the ground, like a hover. They never understood why Avery hated that thing.
This was much more what a magic carpet should feel like.
Atlas was watching her closely. “Where would you go, if it were really magic?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted, and smiled. Her fantasies of magic carpet rides had never gone past the part where she left the thousandth floor. “I guess I was always more excited for the flying than for the destination.”
“I know what you mean.”
Avery glanced again at the carpet, the beautiful woven richness of its fibers. “Thank you,” she repeated, taking an unconscious step forward, and realizing a beat too late how close Atlas’s face was to hers.
That was when he leaned in to kiss her.
Some part of her saw it coming, and yet Avery couldn’t pull away. Her body seemed to have momentarily shut down. She couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything except stand here and let Atlas kiss her. His mouth on hers struck something deep within her, like a bell.
And for a single forbidden moment, Avery felt herself kiss him back.
Then her nerves came violently to life again, and she stumbled away, her breathing ragged. “Atlas! What the hell?” She wanted to scream, but their parents were home, so somehow—using every last shred of her willpower—she kept her voice at a low hiss. “You can’t do that, okay? I’m with Max now!”
It felt to Avery like the very air was charged, like the old Tower air before they adjusted the oxygen levels; as if a single spark might burst into flames, and destroy everything.
“I’m sorry. I guess I was . . . Never mind. Just pretend it didn’t happen.”
“Pretend it didn’t happen? How do you expect me to do that?”
“I don’t know,” Atlas said bitingly, “but you’ve been doing a fantastic job of it so far.”
“That’s not fair.” Avery noted with a wild sort of hysteria that she was still holding the rug in one hand. She brandished it before her like a weapon. “You’re the one who ended things with me, remember?”
“I’m just saying, you’ve done a great job pretending that you and I never happened. You have everyone convinced, even me.” He kept his gaze on her, steady and unblinking. “When I saw you with Max, I almost thought that I’d made the whole thing up. That it was something I’d dreamed.”
“That isn’t fair,” Avery said again. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. “You can’t do this, Atlas. You literally destroyed me. I was so broken, I thought it would be a lifetime before I could put myself back together. And then I met Max . . .” She trailed off, taking a shaky breath. “You can’t resent me for being happy with him.”
He winced. “Aves, I’m sorry. Of course I want you to be happy. I didn’t come here to break up you and Max.”
“Then why the hell did you just kiss me?”
Atlas’s grip tightened over the edge of the counter. “Like I said, forget it. Chalk it up to a stupid mistake, okay? I promise it won’t happen again. What more do you want from me?”
“I want you to forget that anything ever happened between us, okay? Because I have!”
He took a step back, retreating across the distance her words had created. “Consider it done.”
Back in her bedroom, Avery couldn’t resist unfurling the carpet near her windows. She had to admit, her room needed this—it was all neutrals, ivory and gray and the occasional soft blue. The carpet was a glorious oasis of color in a sea of boringness.
Trust Atlas to bring her the most thoughtful present in the world, then ruin it by turning her emotions upside down.
She sat down on the magic carpet and closed her eyes, wishing it would take her anywhere but here.