This is why he didn’t show me right away—because I can see so much of him here. The heart that he tries to hide because it isn’t safe to show it, because his home can at any point be taken away, but nevertheless filling his world with trinkets that remind him to hope.
Remind him of what is worth holding onto, even if it’s small.
And I wonder what hope he is desperately holding onto by a thread with me.
“If you leave after talking to me,” I finally say, “then you’d better be planning on coming back. Or Iwillfind you.”
Zan is silent a moment. “You may not want to.”
I turn to glare at him. “I will find you,” I growl. “Maybe it will be to punch you or dunk you in the lake, but until you believe this is actually your home and you don’t have to evict yourself, my wrath will not settle. And if it doesn’t, neither do you get to.”
Zan blinks, then smiles, just a little.
But his eyes still look sad, and I realize that whatever he’s hiding, he doesn’t believe I’m still going to want to be around him.
Well, he doesn’t get to decide that for me.
I’m about to lay into him again when knocks pound at the front door.
“Yora, Zan, it’s me!” Nomi calls. “Can I come in?”
Zan quickly sits up. “I’ll go out and distract her so you can get changed out of what you were wearing yesterday.”
I do probably need to change, but I can do that after opening the door too. “Why?” I ask with narrowed eyes.
“So she won’t know that we’re sleeping together and jump to the wrong conclusion.”
Wrath rises, fast and furious. “Isit the wrong conclusion?” I snap.
There are many things I don’t understand about his feelings, but that the connection between us is one-sided Idon’tbelieve.
Zan pauses halfway to standing up. “That’s not what I meant,” he says tightly.
Well at least he’s not going to pussyfoot aboutthat.
In private, anyway.
“ThenIdon’t care if she knows,” I tell him. “Why doyou?”
Zan snaps his jaw shut.
I don’t wait for him and storm out.
Nomi has already let herself into the house—you know, maybe we do need locks for reasons other than strictly security—
“Oh, there you are,” she says, turning. “I thought—”
Her eyebrows shoot up as she realizes I’m coming from Zan’s room.
She blinks a couple times.
“I thought you might be out, and I’d just leave these here,” Nomi finally finishes, her gaze turning speculative as after a moment, Zan follows me out of his room and closes the door behind us.
I ignore her expression and join her in the kitchen to see what she brought.
It’s a stack of identical lightweight metal containers, and in a flash I understand.
“Are these for ice cream?”
