Authors: Amy Garvey
“YOU’VE BEEN WEIRD TODAY.”
I glance up at Gabriel, startled. “Me? Are you kidding? You’re the one dragging yourself around like you’re in a coma.”
He makes a face. “Thanks.”
The diner is noisy and a little too warm, the windows streaked with fog. It’s become our Friday night ritual, as long as I’m not working. For some reason, Gabriel always orders the meat loaf special with mashed potatoes and a huge house salad with Thousand Island dressing, like he secretly dreams about eating dinner in the fifties.
I balance on the edge of my seat to stretch forward and bump my knee against his. “I’m sorry. I know you feel shitty.”
“I’m
fine
. But you’re . . . I don’t know.” He pushes lettuce around his plate, until it’s drenched in creamy orange dressing. “Forget it.”
I can’t, because I know he’s right. Even when he’s not purposely poking around in my head, he picks up on a lot more than he mentions. My boyfriend, the human radio tower.
When it comes to Gabriel, I might as well be made of glass. He can see right through me all the time, good and bad, and when I’m feeling the most breakable, I hate it. But I don’t feel like talking about my power now, or that I actually considered using it on Darcia for a minute. My power is just for me. For stupid things like writing Gabriel’s name on my wall.
“It’s messed up about that kid Adam,” I say finally. It’s not a lie, not really. Kids don’t usually go missing here. Every once in a while someone gets pregnant, and a couple kids have wound up in rehab, and a few years ago Mikey O’Connor made a career out of getting arrested, but that’s about it.
“Yeah.” He pushes his plate away, half of his meal still uneaten. “Did you know him?”
“Not really.” I break off a piece of my grilled cheese and dip it in the cup of marinara on my plate. My mom knows Sheryl, our waitress, and Sheryl can always convince the guys in the kitchen to make me grilled Swiss on sourdough with sauce on the side. “I mean, I know who he is, but we weren’t ever friends.”
Gabriel dips one finger in my marinara and licks it off, shrugging.
“You want to get the check?” I ask him, brushing greasy crumbs off my hands and pushing my plate away. “Or is there room for pie?”
“There’s always room for pie.” He grins, and I smile when I feel his foot beneath the table, the toe of his sneaker gentle against my ankle. “You want to share?”
“Only if it’s apple.”
“God, you’re so predictable,” he says, but I catch the glimmer in his eye that means he knows exactly what I think about his usual dinner.
I’m about to kick him under the table when I see her across the diner, the girl from the tunnel. I shiver, frozen in my seat.
She’s with another boy this time, as dark as she is light. He’s slouched against the counter up front while they wait for a table, almost black hair hiding his eyes, a huge overcoat the color of charcoal falling in wrinkles of old wool below his knees.
He’s chewing on a thumbnail like it’s his mission in life, but she sees me, and even from all the way across the room, the weight of her gaze is a tangible thing. A touch, but not a heavy one—instead, it’s sort of fond, fingers against the cheek of someone you love.
Gabriel is too busy flagging down Sheryl to notice. I grab my bag and start digging through it for my wallet, anything to look away from those pale blue eyes and the cloud of white hair around her face that looks like cotton candy.
She knows. She knows what I did, what I can do. I don’t have to be psychic to recognize it for the truth. We’re going to have to walk right by them to leave, too, and for a blinding moment I want to startle her, blow the two of them through the door with a thunderclap or a cloud of blue-gray smoke.
I want to show them what I can really do.
It’s so tempting, all that energy sharp on my tongue. I drag my gaze up from my wallet, clutching sweaty, crumpled bills in one hand, and blink. Gabriel is squeezing the bridge of his nose like he’s trying to get the whole thing to come off, and behind his hand I can see he’s wincing.
Sheryl walks up to the table then, check in hand, and I don’t bother to ask Gabriel before I say, “Can we get a slice of apple pie to go?”
By the time she’s gone, the girl and the boy have been seated in the back room, on the other side of the wall. Gabriel hasn’t looked at me yet, and worry uncoils in my stomach like a greasy rope.
I reach across the table to hold his hand until the pie comes, and this time he holds on tight.
“You totally don’t have to come, you know. Seriously.”
Gabriel sighs, and noses at my cheek until I turn my head far enough for him to kiss me again. “We’re coming,” he says against my lips. “But right now I think we could be doing something a lot more fun than talking about Christmas.”
We’re tangled on the couch at his apartment, and we didn’t even pretend to put on a movie tonight, since we never end up watching them. Olivia tends bar downtown on Friday nights, so we always have the place to ourselves. My mother wasn’t thrilled about it until I promised her I would keep my cell phone on and always answer it if she called.
I also reminded her that we’d already had the hugely embarrassing sex talk, when Danny and I were together.
“That was then,” she’d said, words tart and heavy in the air. “This is now.” I was just grateful she didn’t insist on going over the particulars again.
I wonder what she would say if she knew it’s one of the only things Gabriel and I haven’t talked about.
Kissing is so much easier than talking. And usually a whole lot more fun.
The sofa isn’t really big enough for the two of us, despite how short I am and how lanky Gabriel is, but neither one of us has ever suggested going into his room instead. I don’t want to, not yet, and maybe Gabriel knows that. Maybe he just doesn’t want to push. Either way, I’m content right here, tangled together warm and close, my hand on his chest and his arm around my back, his fingers in my hair.
“Are you sure Olivia won’t mind? About Christmas?” I wince when he groans. I waited to ask him until we’d finished the last sticky crumbs of the pie, and I only brought it up because his headache seemed to back off as we walked home.
“I swear,” he promises, and tugs lightly on a lock of my hair. “It’s not like we had anything planned. And I wanted to see you on Christmas anyway.”
“I know, it’s just the whole family thing is so . . .” I don’t even know how to finish that sentence. Not without saying things I don’t want to admit out loud.
“Cool,” Gabriel says distinctly, and the vibration of his voice tickles my cheek. “It’s not a big deal, Wren. I bet Olivia will melt all over it. We haven’t had a family Christmas in a long time.”
I know his mom died when he was pretty young but not much else about her. And I still don’t know why Gabriel’s dad is gone or where he is. I want to ask if they had any traditions, even if they were just dinner out somewhere or an afternoon at the movies. Three’s not a big number, but it’s still a family. For a long time, it’s all I had with Mom and Robin.
But even without Gabriel’s psychic gift, I can feel shutters banging closed in his head, the locks to every door turning sharply. Even his body is tense now, and I rub my palm in circles over his chest until he relaxes.
“Well then, I’m glad,” I whisper, and stretch up to kiss him, licking the cinnamon of the apple pie on his lips.
“No singing, though,” he says. “I draw the line at singing.”
I laugh against his mouth, and he takes it in, smiling even as our mouths meet. I want to know so much more—the big stuff like where his dad is, how his mom died, and the stupid stuff, too. What his first-grade teacher was like, if he ever dreamed about being a fireman or a space cowboy when he was a little kid.
But he’s kissing me, which makes it hard to think about anything else, or anything at all. I’m dizzy with the scent of him, spicy boy and worn, soft denim, and the faint taste of sugar and coffee on his tongue. I close my eyes and let go, until there’s nothing left but all the places we’re pressed together and the sound of our breathing, rougher and ragged now. Just another minute, I tell myself. Maybe two. Enough to pick apart and remember later, when I’m alone and wishing I had more.
And then it starts to change. I feel it in my blood, liquid gold sliding slow and hot through me, shimmering. When Gabriel takes my hand, pressing our palms together and twining our fingers, our heartbeats are right there, suddenly one, a sure, steady pulse echoing through our skin. It’s hypnotic, perfect, seeping into every cell as if we’re fused, and all the ways I can think to describe it are too much and too little. It’s like a candy buzz, or the first dizzying swoop of beer in your stomach, the sensation of floating right before you fall asleep, the needling heat of a foot gone to sleep. All of it and none of it, but
good
. So good . . .
Gabriel wrenches his mouth away, creates space between us somehow, and blinks up at me, shuddering. “Wren. What . . . it was all . . . bright and hot and . . . like falling. Did you . . . feel that?”
It takes me a minute to remember how to breathe, to remember how to think and speak. I’m shivering, cold now that we’re not pressed so tightly together, and whatever was running wild inside me is seeping away, nothing left but a pale shimmer of light.
“Yeah,” I whisper, and sit up, pushing my hands through my hair and taking a deep breath. “I mean, something like that. It was my power, I think.”
He sits up, too, blue-gray eyes dark and hot, and runs a hand across his forehead like it hurts again. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, okay?” I need some water, some cold air, a minute to think. I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t stopped. I know I wasn’t even considering it. It was delicious, even if it didn’t exactly feel real. It was hard to care about how far off our usual map we were in the moment, and that scares me.
Gabriel follows me into the kitchen, and I fill glasses with water for both of us. He leaves his on the counter while I drain mine, gulping the last bit and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.
“You okay?” His voice is low, and he’s still flushed. I nod, and for a minute we just stand there, looking anywhere but at each other. The kitchen floor is ancient red-brick linoleum, and I trace the outline of one rectangle with my socked toes.
I slept with Danny, after we’d been together for months. I didn’t regret it then, and I don’t now. It still feels right that we gave each other that, because he’d never slept with anyone, either.
Going slow with Gabriel isn’t really about not wanting to sleep with him, though. It’s about what happened after, with Danny. How much closer I felt to him, how many more secrets we shared, this new private language we had together.
But now, with Gabriel, there’s so much I still don’t know. So much he still doesn’t say out loud. We have to speak one language together before we can learn another one.
Gabriel clears his throat, and for a second I want more than anything to reach and brush away the pale sheaf of hair falling over his forehead as he studies his feet. But he’s leaning against the fridge, all harsh angles, like he’s about to fold himself away. Just because he knows what I can do doesn’t mean it doesn’t freak him out sometimes. “So, nothing like that ever . . . ?”
“No,” I rush to say, because we don’t talk about Danny, not anymore. “I mean, not like that. Once in a while it felt sort of . . . floaty, but that was all.”
When he lifts his head, the brief flash of heat in his eyes looks a lot like victory. It’s one more reminder of the dozens of things I still don’t know about him, like whether or not he’s ever had a girlfriend, and who she was, what she was like. But now is not the time to ask. Not with Gabriel looking at me like that, and not with that warm, liquid-gold sensation still echoing faintly in my pulse.
“Do you . . . want to stop?” Gabriel says, and he sounds so unsure and so hopeful at the same time, I want to scream.
But I’m not four, so I take a deep breath. “I don’t know. I mean, I . . . no, not really. It’s just that I thought I had it under control, but it’s all tied into my emotions and I . . .”
Another sentence I don’t know how to end. Except that I actually do, I just can’t say it out loud, not yet.
I love you
.
He folds his arms over his chest, holding in things he doesn’t want me to see, or maybe things he wants to believe. But his voice is as low and gentle as ever, and I wish I could hold on to that, wrap the sound around me, and snuggle in. “Can’t your mom help?”
“It’s not Hogwarts, Gabriel.” And there, I’ve ruined the moment already. He scowls at me, and I reconsider the futility of wishing the floor would open up and swallow me.
“I’m sorry.” I take a step closer and pick at a stray thread on the cuff of his shirt. “It’s just that it doesn’t seem fair. Not right now. Robin needs Mom, too, and she’s already so busy. The salon is crazy this time of year.”
“I know,” Gabriel says, and moves away, taking his shirt with him. The stray thread flutters along with it, as helpless and unsteady as I feel, and I watch as he shudders out a breath. “I’m just talking about asking her a simple question.”
“But it’s not simple!” I sink back against the counter, and then slide to the floor, wrapping my arms around my knees. “It’s finally out in the open, yeah, but it’s not like our house suddenly turned into Magic Central. It was never like that, really. Mom and Aunt Mari and Gram didn’t hide it when they used their power, but it wasn’t an everyday thing, either. It was . . . something special.” I close my eyes, letting the memories swim up, pale and faded before they resolve into sharper pictures.