“I didn’t tell anyone.” He deftly navigated the dark, leading me to the far side of the room, where he bent to point at a spot on the wall.
I attempted to not direct every single neuron of energy into the fact that we were still holding hands.Wells. Guilt was dirty puddle water, I was white sneakers. My jaw contracted, released.
“Here’s me,” he said. I squinted, and when I looked closer, a row of numbers and symbols crystallized. 0*1.001!1*1.1.
“And here you are.” I was a thread running away from him. Our connection was light gold, not strong, but somehow, it felt like the most important one on earth. It was the same shade as the one leading from my ID to... “Natalie,” he said, tapping it.
“I’d need to join your network to make this bright?” I asked, running my finger along the cool surface.
“Yeah. If you enter your soulmate, then that relationship will have the brightest link to you. But for ours to deepen, you just need to confirm our connection.”
His was a small star in the constellation of them. Above us, most of the Soulmail connections were bright, strong, insistent, the unconfirmed entries dangling off them like cobwebs. “You still haven’t looked at yours, then,” I said. My voice came out small, unlike me.
“Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one left. I’m more solo than Han,” he punned, shrugging. “Get it? Ugh, that was awful. I was going for Han S— Wait. you’ve never seenStar Wars. I forgot.”
“I have seen it.” I fell asleep, but I didn’t have to tell him that. “Like, ten years ago. Natalie and I had terrible hangovers and couldn’t reach the remote.”
It was a blip. A beat of a reminder: I’d grown up without him. He had grown up without me. First together, then apart, and now this.
He swore.
“What is it?”
“I feel like I’m messing everything up with you.” The lights shimmered around us. “I know you had a life... between me? I know things aren’t the same.” He held his pinkie against our line. “It’s just—”
For a fraction of a second, we were blanketed in full darkness, before the mirage came back on. The soft glow cut across his sharp cheek. I had to pin my hands by my side to avoid running the pad of my thumb along it. Our line had moved, or he had. It was to the left of his finger now.
“Did the power go out?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It refreshes once an hour, but I’m the pinned person, so I always know where the start of this is.”
The start of this. Time warped, sped. We faced each other, and I clocked the fact that he was shaking.
I wanted nothing more in the entire universe than him—and it felt like a galaxy right now, like we were the last two people on earth. My hands gripped his arms without permission, and he took my wordless invitation, drew me ever so gently closer until we were hip to hip. I pressed against him. He returned a sound that started somewhere in his throat or gut or mind.
My forehead was against his chest. I blinked. We breathed, mine coming faster than his. If I lifted my head, we would be one step closer to something I couldn’t undo. But Ihadto choose this.
I could not choose this.
I lifted my head anyway.
The tip of my nose touched his. Years back, we smelled Mr.Sketch markers together until his mother yelled at us. We rode boogie boards in the sound. We slid down my swing set’s slide together, crash-landing in my father’s raked piles of leaves. We were each other’s first kisses, first everything. Years forward, we were here, in this place where he had blossomed, a place that supported his interests and recognized his worth. The heat of his mouth was on my chin, his breath minty. Imoved my head back to meet his eyes.
This was a betrayal. I had been betrayed, and if there was one thing Dad drilled in to both me and Sabrina, it was thattwo wrongs didn’t make a right. And yet her life had ended in a version of hell, and here was mine. I felt raw. I felt small. A small voice wheedled in my mind: There had been no kiss, so was it technically disloyal? Was it cheating if your brain was doing the thinking, but physically, you were loyal? Somehow, there was someone else and no one else all at once, and I couldn’t lower myself to do something behind Wells’s back. Even if it would be quid pro quo.
“I want more than anything to kiss you right now,” I whispered before I chickened out. “The time we did was the best night of my life. I can’t, but I want to. And that’s bad enough.”
The growl sound again. “I want you to, and I wouldn’t let you,” he said. His arms twitched beneath my palms, which was how I discovered I was still gripping him. “That’s not how I’d want us to be.” Pain filled his eyes. “You’re getting married.”
I groaned. He palmed my hips, my legs working backward until I was pressed against a tunneled wall of his exhibit. He hiked me up, my body weight landing against his thigh. A cry coiled from my throat. “This. This is how I’d want us to be,” he said. He thumbed my ear, cupped my jaw. “I would kiss you here.” My collarbone. “And here.” My lower lip. My body sank lower, the pressure of his leg striking my best parts. I tipped my forehead against his shoulder, my breath coming in gasps.
“I won’t do it.” His voice hitched. “But god, Livi, do I regret not doing it over and over again when I could.”
If we were Ross and Rachel at his museum, in their own version of a constellation exhibit—theirs, simple and scientific, measured and logical, not like the one before us now, then we would wake up in sleeping bags to a laugh track. An adult sleepover, like the cab driver said. But we weren’t. We were Olivia and Caleb, one half-famous, both destinies lost to the ether.
How powerful it would be to be the person in charge of this. Did it feel like playing god? Like you alone had this stupendous ability to set people on the courses of their lives? A marionette with strings, a human architect.
The decision to release the emails must have been the largest one in the history of mankind.
