Bookish and the Beast
I turn to creep back up the stairs when he says, a little blearily, “Can’t sleep either?”
…Guess he’s not asleep after all.
I turn back around to him. He pushes himself up on the couch and motions for me to come sit. I do, mostly because I can’t sleep. This house is too big and too quiet.
As I get closer, he holds up a book. “I want to know what happens.”
The Starless Throne.
I bite the inside of my cheek to hide a smile. “Do you, now?”
“I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon.”
I climb over the couch to sink down beside him. “Probably not all afternoon.”
“Does Sond get out of prison? Does Amara save the planet? Who’s the murderer? Are they ever going to kiss?” He asks the last one a little impatiently. “I want to know.”
In the dim light of the living room, his golden hair shines in a platinum halo around his head, and his cornflower eyes are bright with curiosity. He really does want to know what happens. I’ve read it a thousand times, I can recite most of the chapters by heart. I know what the words sound like in my head, but I don’t know what they sound like in his.
I push the book back to him. “Read it to me.”
“You can’t be serious.”
I yawn. “I’m tired. I worked all day. You’ve lounged around playing video games.” Which he doesn’t dispute, because I know him well enough by now. I’m not sure what kind of video games he plays, though. I close my eyes, curling up in the corner of the couch, and rest my head on the cushions. “Please?”
For a long moment, he doesn’t say anything, but then I hear him flip open the book, the pages buzzing between his fingers, until he settles on the page where we last left off, and he begins to read in a soft, steady cadence. The adventure of Amara and General Sond spills softly from his mouth, and I’m not sure when I drift off to sleep, but when I do my head is filled with stars.
A GUST OF WIND SHAKES THE TREES, and I watch as yellowing leaves scatter across the yard. It’s early afternoon, and Rosie’s father’s already gone back to the apartment again. Rosie slept in this morning—her father told us not to wake her, since she hasn’t slept in for a long time. “Not since my wife…well, you know,” he had said with a shrug. “She always makes me coffee in the morning, like Holly used to. I think she thinks she has to take care of her old man now.” I remembered that her mother passed away, but I didn’t realize how recent it was. Only a year.
I tap out “I Like Big Butts” on the grand piano in the living room, because I can’t think of a more ridiculous song to play on a five-thousand-dollar instrument, putting my ten years of music lessons to excellent use.
I’m working out the notes to round thing in your face you get—when my phone, sitting on the bench beside me, pings with a text.
DARIEN (3:47 PM)
—Hey man, it’s been a while.
Yeah, no kidding. It feels like an eternity. I keep tapping away at the notes, adding a bass chord as I get more acquainted with the song.
…with an itty-bitty waist and a round thing in your—
My phone pings again.
DARIEN (3:48 PM)
—You okay?
Just two words. But they’re enough to thoroughly ruin my fun. I should text him back the truth, that I’m having about as much fun as anyone else in the lowest circle of hell, but when I pick up my phone I can’t do it. We made our choices, and this is how the dominoes fell. He made the right ones, I made the not-so-right ones.
Instead, I turn off my phone, and as I close the cover on the piano keys, the Star Wars theme echoes through house. Elias’s ringtone, but he’s out running errands. His phone is vibrating on the edge of kitchen.
He forgot it—again.
I stare at it, because the first thing I think is that it’s my mother. Or my manager. Or a reporter. Or my mother.
And none of them I want to talk to.
The call goes to voice mail, and my anxiety begins to ebb. I shove the bench underneath the piano and start for the stairs when—
His phone goes off again.
What if it’s important? a voice inside me whispers.
My stomach flips into a knot and I make for the counter and swipe up on Elias’s phone. It’s not my publicist, or my manager, or a journalist. It’s…
My mother.
I haven’t talked with her since our fight, and I have strategically avoided her every single time she’s tried to call me, and despite everything, I do miss talking to her, even as I try to remember why I’m so bitter about it all to begin with.
Because she sided with my stepfather. She sent me here, to nowhere. To hide me away because she, like my stepfather, is ashamed of me.
That’s the part of all of this I don’t like thinking about.
“Um, Vance?” I glance behind me. Rosie stands in the doorway to the living room with her suitcase and her bookbag. Her hair is pulled behind her head in two short pigtails, and she tugs on one of them nervously. “Dad just called. He said the apartment’s back in tip-top shape! I hate to ask, but Elias has gone to the farmer’s market, so…do you think you could take me home?”
I turn around and send my mother—again—to voice mail. “Your chariot awaits, Princess.”
HE LEADS ME OUT INTO THE GARAGE, where a simple economy car sits. I buckle myself into the passenger seat. It surprises me—I didn’t think he’d be caught dead in anything less than an Aston Martin, but I suppose that would stick out too much in this town.
Out on the main street, trees unfurl around us, curling up toward the sky in a tunnel. He flicks on the brights, the radio murmuring soft pop songs.
He shifts in his seat. “So, if I liked that book…which one would you suggest next?”
I give him the strangest look. “Seriously?” I chew on the inside of my cheek to keep myself from smiling.
“…What?”
“I’m sorry—this is just so weird. I never would’ve thought that I’d ever be in a car with you, asking me for book recs.”
“Well, I will admit this is a first for me as well. But…” As he coasts to a stop at the stoplight, he tilts his head, frowning, “it’s not a bad thing, yeah?”
“No, it’s really not. Well, what kind of books do you like?”
“Ones that aren’t boring.”
“Well, that’s all of them.”
He gives me a sideways glance, and I smile and pull out my notebook from my school bag. “Fine—how about court intrigue? Assassins? Starship battles? The Star Brigade is a good one to start with.” I scrawl the name out onto the top of a spare piece of paper, tear it off, and hand it to him.
“Thank you kindly,” he replies, and tucks it into the fold in his beanie.
I shove my notebook into my backpack. “You know,” I say, and hesitate for a moment, before I continue, “I like this.”
“This?”
“We aren’t sniping at each other for once.”
“I know, it’s ghastly,” he replies with a laugh. A moment later, the light turns green, and we drive on. “We should at least be arguing.”
“I know, you’re a terrible villain.”
“I like to think of myself as an anti-hero.”
“Byronic? Take a left here,” I add as we come to the next stoplight, and he turns onto my street. I tap on the window, indicating my apartment building on the right.
“I am not nearly that broody, thank you,” he says as he slows down in front of the entrance to the building. It’s nothing like his castle-house. It’s a three-story walkup apartment complex with a smaller-than-normal kitchen and a leaky toilet, but it’s home.
“Not broody? Now I know you’re lying.”
He mocks a gasp. “And I thought we were friends!”
Friends. I like the sound of that, strange enough, even after I turned him down for a date. But a friendship—one between him and me, Vance Reigns and Rosie Thorne—doesn’t sound too terrible. I lean across the middle console toward him and when he looks back at me my breath catches in my throat, because his eyes are so blue and he smells so warm, and for a brief moment—I can see him.
The boy I fell for on the balcony of ExcelsiCon.
“There you are,” I whisper. The words slip out of my mouth before I can reel myself in. His eyebrows furrow, and I quickly pull myself back and push open the car door. “Good night, Vance.”
“See you tomorrow?” he calls.
“Tomorrow,” I promise.
He waits until I’m inside my apartment before he drives away, out of the gates, and onto the main street again, but my heart never stops racing.
I CAN’T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME I woke up before noon, but I didn’t actually sleep very well. My stupid brain kept replaying last night over and over—like the theater previews before a film. I saw her every time I closed my eyes, illuminated by the soft light of the dashboard, fiddling with the radio even though she never picked a channel, just so I wouldn’t notice the blush across her cheeks.