The Thousandth Floor

The door swung open.

Rylin jumped, holding the Spokes guiltily behind her back. Cord stood in the doorway.

“Hey,” he said, sounding puzzled. Rylin opened her mouth, but no words came out. She knew she was only making herself look more suspicious, standing in the middle of his room without cleaning supplies, but she wasn’t sure what to say. She stared stupidly at Cord, trying to read the emotions dancing like lightning across his face. If he caught her stealing from him, she wouldn’t just be fired—she could be arrested.

Rylin did the only thing she could think of. She leaned in, her hand still closed tight around the drugs, and kissed him.

She felt desperate and panicked, as utterly terrified as she’d felt when she followed Hiral to an elevator shaft and looked down the impossible distance to the bottom. After an endless moment, Cord returned the kiss. But it was guarded, cautious, nothing at all like the way he’d kissed her last weekend.

By the time they pulled away Rylin had managed to stuff the Spokes into her pocket. Cord was watching her, curious. His broad-shouldered presence seemed to draw the air from the room. Had he noticed? She steeled herself, ready to deny everything, to run away—

“You’re kind of confusing, you know, slapping me one weekend and then kissing me the next.”

“What can I say?” Rylin’s tone was flippant, but her heart was still racing in panic. “I’m complicated.”

“Apparently.” Cord stared at her a moment longer, then reached into his pocket for something. “I was going to give you this, by the way.”

Rylin inhaled sharply. It was an instaphoto of her mom, taken in what looked like the Andertons’ greenhouse. She watched, transfixed, as the moving image of her mom leaned in to smell a blooming pink amaryllis, her smile glowing. “How did you …?” she whispered, fighting to hold back sudden tears.

“My mom took it. She was constantly taking snaps,” Cord replied. “I remembered you saying you didn’t have many of your mom, from before. I stumbled across this and … anyway, you should have it.”

“I love it.”

“She had a ton of old files. You’re welcome to look through them. Who knows—there might be more of your mom.” His voice was rough with some emotion she couldn’t place.

“Thank you.” Rylin fell silent, touched.

They both stood there, neither of them quite sure what to say next. Rylin realized she was staring at the quick rise and fall of Cord’s breath, the neat row of stitches along his collar and the tanned smoothness of his chest underneath. She caught herself with a start. “I should get going, I guess,” she mumbled, and sidestepped past him.

Cord nodded, saying nothing. He just watched as she clattered down the stairs and out the door, clutching the photo with both hands.

* * *

“You’re never going to believe what I got today,” Rylin announced as she walked into the apartment.

“Arrested. A promotion. A new boyfriend!” Chrissa stood at the all-purpose cooktop in their kitchen nook, fiddling with the knob to change the setting from grill to steamer. She reached into the produce drawer and pulled out several oversized broccoli, then tossed them onto the cook surface and sprayed them with honey-sriracha glaze from a can. The steam curled her hair in little ringlets around her face.

“What? No,” Rylin said, too excited to respond to the dig at Hiral. Chrissa had liked him fine before, but ever since he started dealing last year, she’d made her disapproval abundantly clear. “Look at this!” Rylin exclaimed, holding out the instaphoto. She hadn’t been able to tear her eyes from it the whole commute home.

Chrissa turned, impatient, and nearly dropped the box of feta pops she was holding. “Oh, Ry.” She rushed over for a closer look.

“I know.” The two of them stared at the photo for a moment, transfixed.

“She’s so … happy. I’d almost forgotten how beautiful she was, before—” Chrissa sniffed. “Where did you get this?”

“Cord gave it to me.” Rylin wondered, suddenly, how Cord had stumbled across it. She and Chrissa had been looking for photos of their mom for a year, but most of the ones they had were pics that Rose had taken of the two of them. In the few they did have, she always looked tired or worn down. This was how Rylin remembered her: laughing and healthy, her green eyes sparkling, her face illuminated from within.

Chrissa had started crying. Not the quiet tears that they’d wept in the last days of their mom’s illness, when she was suffering in the next room and they didn’t want her to hear, but huge sobs that shook her skinny shoulders. “Shhh,” Rylin murmured, pulling her sister into a hug. She felt Chrissa’s pain as if it were her own, which of course it was, it always had been, ever since their dad left when Chrissa was a toddler, and Rylin’s mom had started working all the time. Even then, it had been the two of them against the world.

“I just miss her so much,” Chrissa whispered.

“I know. Me too.”

The front door pushed open. Startled, both girls turned to look, but it was only Hiral. “Hey hey, what’s cooking?” he asked, and paused when he saw that they were crying. “Sorry. What happened? Did someone die?”

Rylin tried to forgive his bluntness. “It’s okay,” she said, feeling Chrissa bristle next to her. “I just got this today. Cord gave it to me.” She gestured to the instaphoto on the table, the moving image of her mom laughing and smelling the flower in joyful eternity.