“We all have history.”
“Sure. But mine is filled with stories about trying to fit a whole cupcake in my mouth when I was seven, and that one time I fell out of a tree and broke my arm.”
Miles tilts his head, studying me.
“Which arm?”
The question stumps me for a second even though it’s a relatively easy question. No one has asked me that before. “Uh, the left.”
Miles nods, like I’ve told him a really important fact. “When I was twelve, I crashed my bike into a fence at the bottom of a hill and broke my right arm.”
It’s such a regular, normal thing that I don’t know how to respond to it.
Miles’ lips twitch. An almost smile on that very serious face. “I was a kid once too.”
“Are you sure?”
More lip twitching. He doesn’t reply this time.
He’s picked up all of the mugs and placed them in the sink before my brain comes back online.
“It feels like I’m intruding,” I blurt.
He turns to me, brows drawn in. “Hunter brought you here.”
“Okay, but, I don’t really need to be here, do I? They weren’t after me.” Though being a bystander to the event doesn’t feel particularly safe. “Aren’t I putting myself in more danger by staying around all of you?”
“Do you want to leave?”
“No.” A pause. “I don’t think so. You didn’t answer my question.”
“We have no way of knowing. They might have been tracking Hunter, or they might have been tracking you.”
Being caught unawares by those kinds of men without Hunter around isn’t the most appealing option. It still feels like I’m a third wheel, though. Fourth? In a game of “pick the odd one out” it’s clear that’s me. The circle among the squares. The apricot in the peaches. The… book among the magazines? The point is that I don’t fit here. So what am I doing here?
Miles pushes in a chair and glances to the back door, where Hunter and Xavier went. Ever vigilant. Does he get tired?
“Did they really mean—did Xavier really—um—” Is there a casual way to ask about the validity of death-threat implications? If there is, I’ve never heard of it. Though I’ve never had reason to hear of it either. It’s not really something that gets thrown around a lot in my social circles.
“Yes.”
The answer hits me right in the gut. “Oh.” When people say they have history, they usually mean, like, “We used to date, but we broke up,” or like, “He didn’t like mustard, so we were completely incompatible,” or, “I moved for a job, and long distance didn’t work out.” Normal, everyday, boring kinds of reasons why two people drift apart and go their separate ways.
Miles softens. I think? A little. “It’s complicated.”
That could mean so many things that I wouldn’t even know where to start with guessing. It’s not as if I haven’t picked up on the fact that they’re complicated. Individually they’re complicated, together they’re an unsolvable Rubik’s Cube. One that is actually difficult to solve, not something that has a pattern that’s easy to follow once you know what you’re looking for. “Not going to elaborate?”
Miles moves behind my chair, bracing his hands on the table, crowding me in. It brings him close enough to me that I can feelhis breath against my neck. “What information are you looking for?”
“All—all of it? Everything.” I want to know everything about them. There’s so much there. A veritable minefield of history, and I want to learn it.
“And where do you want me to start? Xavier was born on May 17, to Josephine and Everard Alicent. He looked like all babies do—a wrinkled potato.”
I twist around in my seat to stare incredulously up at him. “Did you just make a joke?”
“I don’t make jokes.”
“It sounded like a joke.” It was definitely a joke. Or an attempt at humour, which is really the same thing. It counts.
