“I’m not an artist.” She reached for the drawing, and he leaned back, holding it just out of her grasp.
“That’s fine.” His hair had dried into waves, several errant curls creeping forward at his temple. “You asked what I want. This is it. I’ll let you use my notes if you paint this for me.”
She surrendered the drawing. “Where?”
“An excellent question.” He set the butterfly down and plucked her pen from her grasp, then jotted an address across the top of her open notebook. “My house,” he said. “Tonight, after your classes are done for the day.”
“Yourhouse?”
He spread his hands wide, affronted. “What’s wrong with my house?”
“Probably nothing,” she admitted, wishing she hadn’t reacted quite so fervently. On the far side of the café, Mackenzie and Adya were staring openly. “It’s just that you give me a real Jack the Ripper vibe sometimes, and I don’t think I should go home with you.”
One corner of Colton’s mouth twitched. “That’s incredibly rude.”
“But is it untrue?”
The subsequent arch of his brows gave him an unforgivably imperious air. “I’m not planning to kill you, Wednesday. I’m extending an invitation.”
“I don’t know.” She poked at the handle of Adya’s abandoned mug. “Sounds like something a murderer might say.”
Colton stared at her for a single, silent beat, a muscle working in his jaw. Then, rising from his chair, he folded the butterfly drawing in half and slid it neatly into the interior of his coat.
“I’ll see you tonight,” he said.
“Maybe,” she called after him, but he was already walking away, his scarf trailing, the college-ruled perforations of her paper peeking around his lapels.
“Be there,” he mouthed, and then he was gone, ducking beneath the jingle of the bell and the bite of the wind and plunging into the campus rush.
It wasn’t until he was well out of sight that she realized he’d absconded with her pen.
It was well into evening when Delaney finally arrived at the address Colton had jotted in her notebook. Huddled beneath her umbrella, she made her way down the little brick lane, staring up in wonder at the little brick houses. The neat baronial homes looked like something out of a postcard, all widow’s watches and finely wrought iron.
She hadn’t planned to come, but then her composition professor sent her a scathing email regarding her lack of classroom participation and her Latin exam came back covered in red slashes and Mackenzie wouldn’t let up about the importance of putting a name to the face in Adya’s head.
Now, and in spite of her better efforts, Delaney was standing on Colton Price’s road, in front of Colton Price’s house.
A car rushed past. The sun dropped out of sight, leaving the cast iron streetlamps to wink on one by one by one. The sleepy brownstones lit up like votives, bathing the whole of the maple-lined lane in a merry glow.
Only one house stayed dark.
The thought that Colton Price might not be home at all was what finally spurred her into moving. She’d knock, he wouldn’t answer, and then she’d leave the way she came—worrying on foot, panicking by train, stewing in the stinking heat of Government Center. She’d have more than enough ammunition to remain furious with him for days.
She climbed the stoop and knocked three times on the door.
Silence rose to meet her.
She leaned in to listen—a learned behavior, she couldn’t hear beyond the wood if she’d tried—and knocked again. Again, the door stayed shut. The house remained dark and silent as a tomb.
She’d just positioned her fist to knock a third time when the door wrenched open. It widened only a crack—just enough for Colton to wedge himself into the gap. He was dressed down in a white crewneck and jeans, his feet clad in socks. His eyes were guarded, the set of his jaw unreasonably stiff, as though she’d arrived unannounced on his doorstep, and not at all as if he’d singlehandedly provoked her into coming.
“I’m here,” she said, a little indignantly.
“I can see that.” He didn’t invite her in. In the street behind her, a car slipped past like a silvery fish, windows catching in the lamplight.
“Are you going to make me stand out here all night?”
“Of course not,” he said. Then, “Yes. Actually, yes—tonight’s no good for me.”
