Once her feet hit the ground, she pushes her hands into his sandy hair and drags his face down to hers.

“Hi, Miles. How was your flight?” I ask.

“Good,” he mumbles with a thumbs-up beside Sage’s head.

She detaches, and he swipes over his mouth in case her black lipstick transferred while she spins on me. “You bitch. Is this why you whined about girls only tonight when I wanted to call him?”

I shrug, not admitting to anything. Now that I know it works, I might need to use it again in the future.

“This is hot.” Miles thumbs her bottom lip and then glances over to me. “Pretty swirls, Remi. Very slutty fairy.”

“The face paint mask was necessary.” Sage slides her arms into the front of his jacket, not cold. “Nothing else was going to cover the black eye she’s rocking.”

His brows pull in, gaze jerking to me. “Who the fuck gave you a black eye?”

Before I can even open my mouth to lie, Sage answers, “She got it having wild car sex.”

I force a laugh, his eyes still on me, and I shake my head. “I got elbowed by a girl in gym, but that’s boring, so…”

One side of his mouth lifts, but the undercurrent’s sad. Like Miles knows I don’t take gym class.

The look vanishes a second later, and he shrugs off his coat and drapes it over Sage. “Let’s take a lap, and then we’ll get out of here.”

She latches onto my hand and cuddles against his side, and we wander the midway with her as if the exchange never happened.

But I want it that way.

When Sage and I were nine, my mom went to rehab. I lived with my dad full-time until she came back. I have no idea how long she stayed clean, but I got a real mom for a few weeks. Sage didn’t understand why I was so sad after she relapsed. If rehab fixed everything, I just needed to tell my mom to go again. It was simple. After she smiled and hugged me, so excited we solved the problem, I stopped telling her the bad if I could help it.

Sometimes I wish she’d see it, though. Like tonight when I told her I got elbowed in my nonexistent gym class. We were on the floor in my room by the mirror, pillows against the door. She gave a psshh and accused me of not sharing the juicy shit. I stared at her while she painted a picture about hot car sex, simultaneously painting swirls of black and silver and teal on my face, burying the truth I desperately wished she would notice.

Except Sage doesn’t even know what to look for.