It wasn’t much of an answer, but it was all he could bring himself to give her. In the cupholder, his phone lit the interior of the car with another incoming call. He rushed to kill it. The car cabin pitched back into starry dark. Next to him, Lane wasn’t satisfied.
“They’re never at the house,” she noted as he pulled into the campus parking lot. “Where do they spend all their time?”
In the windows, the formless streak of evergreens turned to the string-lit twinkle of topiaries. “Don’t dig into my life, Wednesday,” he said. “You might not like me afterward.”
“No risk of that,” she assured him. “I already don’t like you.”
“Is that right?” Colton drew into a loading zone and put the car in park. “Is that why you spent your entire night painting me a butterfly?”
“Yes,” she said, and the lie sank deep into his solar plexus.
Engine idling, he sat still and waited for her to climb out of the car. Every part of him felt like a bruise. In the cupholder, his phone blew up with one notification after another. He peered over at Lane and found her watching him, her face lit blue in the light of his screen.
For a few minutes, the only sound was the quiet tangle of their breathing. Along the base of the windshield, a streak of lamplit condensation began to bloom. She looked starlit in the dark, her eyes glazed gold, and he wondered how badly it would hurt if he leaned in and kissed her.
He was about to cave and find out when his phone rang anew. Cursing, he fumbled for it, silencing the ringer. Remnants of the chime clung to the air. When he peered back at Lane, a thoughtful frown had crept in at the corners of her mouth.
“What does it feel like,” she asked, “when you go through a door?”
The wordless intimacy of the previous moment had severed. He couldn’t call it back, and it was for the best. His infractions notched into his bones like a belt. He could taste his spine in his mouth.
“It feels different for everyone,” he said, opting for a nonanswer in place of the truth. His voice came out garroted, and he hoped she hadn’t noticed.
“I didn’t ask about everyone,” she countered. “I asked about you.”
He hadn’t misunderstood. He just didn’t want to tell her. He didn’t want her to know how he clutched at his throat each time, convinced there was water spilling into his lungs. How he cried like a child. How the cold bled into his bones.
Instead, he said, “You ask too many questions.”
“You don’t give me a lot to work with.” She adjusted the right passenger vent, fingers splayed over the paltry heat. Visibly striving for nonchalance. “I’m worried I won’t make it through the doors next week.”
“You will,” he said, and he meant it. “You’re supposed to be here. You think you aren’t, but you are.”
She huffed out a disingenuous laugh. “Try telling that to my professors. I’m pretty sure they’ll disagree with you.”
“Who cares about them?” He traced the glossy logo of his steering wheel. “They see you for eighty minutes a day in a room full of faces. They don’t know what you’re capable of.”
“Nothing,” she snapped, and he heard the strain in her voice. “I’m capable of nothing. Adya can step right outside of her own body. Mackenzie can tell you what’s going to happen days before it actually does. Every other student I’ve met is in touch with some special, arcane ability. And then there’s me.”
He held her gaze. “And then there’s you.”
The words hung in the air between them. He wished she knew the things he knew. He wished he wasn’t bound to a lie.
On the windshield, the spot of condensation flowered outward in a widening oval of gray, shrouding them in a fog. It felt like they were doing something illicit. Parked around the corner from her dorm. The new moon climbing into the empty pinnacle of the sky. Her bright eyes shining up at him.
She must have felt it, too, because she unbuckled suddenly, reaching for her bag.
“I should go inside.”
“Delaney—”
She paused with her hand on the half-open door, looking back at him. Cold buffeted in around her. Shadows seeped into every crack. Crawled into his skin and stayed. He wondered what she saw when she looked at him this way. If he even looked real.
He wanted to thank her for coming back. For painting him a butterfly.
He wanted to tell her he had no interest in being friends.
Instead, all he managed was “I’ll see you in class.”
