“Did you want to hook up with her?”

Her tone was sharp. I realized, suddenly, that she was jealous. Her face was barely lit in the shadowed room, but I didn’t need to see every detail to recognize what she was feeling. It seemed palpable in the air between us. Inevitable.

“No,” I said. “I only want you.”

I felt as if I’d lit myself on fire.

Steph said nothing, and her silence made me bold. I took three steps across the floor of the small room, and I was standing right in front of her. I smelled the spice-and-citrus scent on her skin, now cut with cigarette smoke.

She could have stopped me, but she didn’t.

I put my arms around her neck as if we were slow dancing in a high school gym. I felt the swaying of her body into mine as if we were moving to music. In my new boots we were the same height. It was as though gravity were conspiring with us because I didn’t feel like I was standing on firm ground until her mouth met mine.

Chapter 28

I have replayed this moment in my memory over and over. It has, over time, been honed down to a few bright fragments.

The cold, bright taste of her. Ice and lime.

The fine soft hairs on the back of her neck, my fingertips raising them from her skin in an electric charge.

Her hands sliding around my back to press me into her, and she feels so good I forget everything else. There is only her.

Chapter 29

Her phone rang. It was loud and insistent, and at first, we ignored it. Her hands were slipping beneath my shirt, raising goose bumps on my skin, and then suddenly she backed off and I was standing in the middle of the tiny room, blinking, while she stared down at her phone.

“Shit,” she said. “Fuck.”

I was dazed. “What’s wrong?”

“Lisa left.”

“What?”

Steph’s phone shed a ghostly light over her face. Behind her, the painted pink eyes of the blue-skinned woman seemed to glare at me. I moved toward Steph and reached for the phone, but she pulled it away before I could see the message.

“What happened?” I asked.

“If she took the car, I—I don’t know.”

She was at the door before I understood what she was doing, and now the door was open and she was leaving.

“I’m sorry,” she called back to me. “I have to go find her.”

She was gone.

I was stunned. I could still feel her mouth on me. I ran out into the candlelit hallway and into the quiet living room. Everything looked the same as before. I didn’t see Steph, but one of the people on the sofa noticed me and pointed at the stairway, and I realized it was Talia. She looked knowing, and I went downstairs before she could say anything.