“Okay, Dottie. Spill the tea.” She put her hands on her hips in that way that said I had no choice but to talk.
I tried to get out of it anyway. “There’s nothing to spill.”
It didn’t work.
“Really?” She raised her brow. “So should I go let Ror’k know you’re in here?”
“No!” The word came out as a whisper-scream, and I glanced over at the door, hoping it hadn’t been loud enough for the hunter’s insanely good hearing to catch.
“So talk.”
Damn it! I had to let her know what happened.
“Ugh! Fine. You know that extra-strong batch of booze that went out?”
The strength of that hooch was, by now, known settlement-wide. Many bad decisions had been made because of it, including a few people who got blackout drunk. It had since been diluted. A lot.
“You mean the blackout batch?”
I nodded. I’d say I was rather lucky that I remembered most of what had happened… I think. “I might’ve drunk too much of it at the knitting bee last week, and I might’ve totally stumbled into Ror’k on the way home.”
“And?” She motioned me to continue.
I blew out a breath. “I might’ve kissed him?”
“You what?”
“Shhhh!” I put a hand up, placatingly, hoping her exclamation hadn’t alerted the hunter outside. “Might have. Because I actually don’t remember what happened. But Ror’k’s been showing up since.”
I knew for a fact that I’d kissed him, but I wasn’t sure what else I’d done. I had some pretty intense dreams that night, and I wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t. But the kiss was real, because a part of my brain told me I knew exactly what he tasted like.
“Well, have you talked to him?” It was just like her to ask the most logical question.
“No. He just stands there and watches me.” I thought of that morning after and the way he’d looked at me. That was the moment I’d realized that something really did happen between us. My body had reacted immediately, the same way it had today in the cafeteria; his look had me thinking of all the dirty things I shouldn’t be thinking of, like climbing him like a tree and seeing where else we could take that kiss.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
There was a knock at the door, and I ducked back behind the podium.
“Coward,” Kiera mouthed before going to check the door.
It was her hunter here to pick her up. I poked my head back out and was glad Bael’k didn’t ask why I was hiding.
“We’ll talk online,” Kiera said, letting me know I wasn’t off the hook yet.
Then she locked up, and I was left alone in the library. I was suddenly glad we’d turned the window next to the door into a display case. All Ror’k would see if he tried to sneak a peek would be this month’s children’s books and survival manual picks.
I wasn’t trapped in here either. One of the rules put in place early on in New Franklin was that all public places must have at least two exits. One only had to be trapped in a room with deadly space bugs once with no way out because they were blocking the door to realize why that was such an important thing.
The library had several more exits. There were two back doors, each with a sign reading “Emergency exit alarm will sound when opened.” Both of them led out to a hallway shared with the computer labs and the weight room. There was also the heavy-duty metal door that led outside. All the options were locked from the outside but easily accessible from inside the library. And plus, I knew how to disable the alarm so it didn’t ring at all.
I glanced out the nearest barred window. All first-floor windows in the settlement were either barred or reinforced with polyacrylic panels. Just because the nest in the middle of the old town of Franklin was gone didn’t mean we didn’t get the occasional centicreep or flyer group showing up from neighboring nests.
The sun was already setting, and the warm orange glow greeted me. If I hurried, I might still catch Kevin at the garage. I hadn’t forgotten my original mission to retrieve our only copy ofNuts, Bolts, and Caffeine: A Mechanic’s Guide to Keeping It Together.
Since I knew my purple stalker was recently outside the main library door, I decided now was as good a time as I needed to make my big escape. I went to the back door, the one leadingoutside. I would have to go out of the building and loop around to get to the garage, but it was my best option.
