“Nothing. It’s just, your hands.” He lifted one and smoothed my fingers open. “They feel like a mechanic’s.”
I pulled my admittedly rough hand into my lap. “I like my hands. They say who I am and what I do.”
Daniel’s eyes flickered between mine. “I like that about you too.” He reached for my hand again, gliding his fingers over skin that wasn’t soft, but still sensitive. He found a scar that flowed from the base of my thumb to the middle of my palm and traced it. “What happened here?”
It was hard to talk with his fingers sliding over my hand.
I made a pretense of pulling away to examine the line myself, as if I’d somehow forgotten the two-inch scar.
“I tried to pry up the hood of a rusted old Nova that my dad was working on. I slipped.”
“How old were you?”
“Seven.” I found myself telling him about that day and the way the vein in Dad’s head nearly burst when he found me messing with the Nova before nearly passing out when he saw all the blood. Twelve stitches and a new pair of coveralls later, he was showing me the correct way to open the hood.
“Not that I never got hurt in the shop again, but I was never on the wrong end of a Nova again.” I smiled, then flicked my eyes to Daniel. “What about you, any scars worth showing off?”
“Not really, no.”
He had at least two visible scars, the one I could barely glimpse on his collarbone depending on the way he moved, and the one on his eyebrow. But before I could ask about either of those, Daniel leaned forward and ran the back of his hand along the underside of my jaw.
“And this one?”
I dropped my chin, breaking the skin-to-skin contact.
“Sorry, too personal,” Daniel said, misinterpreting my reaction.
“No, it’s not. Indirectly, I guess. I crashed racing my dad around the garage on a creeper.”
Daniel raised a surprised eyebrow but said nothing. In the silence that settled between us, I realized he was giving me the choice to tell him more if I wanted to or leave it at that. I was so used to Claire pouncing on me with questions that I almost didn’t know what to say when it wasn’t being pulled out of me.
So I just started. I told him about moving and Mom, and about Dad turning that whole awful day into something amazing.
Talking about Mom with Daniel didn’t feel like I was exposing a festering wound to someone who’d never gotten so much as a scratch. He had his own wounds—and I was sure they were a lot more than he was sharing at that point, but it didn’t feel like we had to compare them that way. We both bled. How much wasn’t as important.
And just like that, I started seeing stars again, brighter and more numerous than they’d ever been before.
Daniel saw them too.
CHAPTER 18
Spending my mornings with Sean and, increasingly, my nights with Daniel, was confusing in ways it shouldn’t have been. Because I found myself looking forward to sunset in a way I hadn’t been able to look forward to sunrise.
For the first time in years, there was someone I wanted to see more than Sean. And that shift in my heart, free as I was to make it—free as I’d always been to make it—felt like a betrayal.
It made no sense to feel that way, to have any guilt over one fire dying and a new one kindling, but I did. And it was harder because, when we ran in the mornings, I’d sometimes find a spark, an ember that wasn’t supposed to be there. Wasn’t allowed. Sean would be telling a story about teaching his grandma and her bridge club how to use Twitter, or about the latest awesomely bad movie he’d discovered, when his eyes would catch mine. We’d share this smile that was all about our past and had nothing to do with our present. His mouth would kick up on one side, revealing much more than his dimple, and I’d let myself forget that it hurt to smile back.
It was becoming…not easier, but less of a battle to ignore Sean when I was with Daniel.
Other thingswereeasier though.
Coming home at night didn’t feel like slipping underwater without a full breath. The nights ahead of me weren’t something I had to endure. At least not alone. When Daniel and I were together, it was as if the world beyond my roof didn’t exist. We didn’t have to think about anyone fighting or walking out. While the world around us slept peacefully, we could escape it.
And that changed everything.
It had been a blisteringly hot day and even though the sun had long since set, the heat had soaked into the earth, my roof, even seemingly the air, and it hadn’t dissipated yet.
Daniel and I were both sweating. If it weren’t for him, I’d probably have succumbed to the lure of my air-conditioned house. But I’d wanted to see him more than I’d wanted the comfort of cool air.
