“In my head.”
“So you couldn’t work up the nerve to ask me in person, but you went with breaking into a locked room? Very brave.”
A laugh escaped him, warm and bright.
He looked down the dark curve of the stair instead of at me.
“You’re right. I shouldn’t have gone into your room.”
He said it simply, with the apple-boy performance stripped away.
We stared at each other for a moment, then:
“You know,” he said, “most girls would be flattered by a midnight apple.”
“It isn’t midnight.”
“I was trying to make it sound romantic.”
“You broke into my room.”
“And failed.”
“At being romantic?”
“At several things. Including being romantic.”
I should have stayed angry.
Unfortunately, he was two steps above me, contrite and ridiculous, with his green eyes bright in the stairwell gloom, one dark lock fallen across his forehead, and his mouth doing a very poor job of not smiling.
The tower stair smelled suddenly of autumn apples.
Him.
My mouth watered.
That was deeply unfair.
I took a deep breath.
“If you go into my room again without asking, I’m throwing the next apple at your head.”
“Fair.”
“I’m serious.”
“I can tell.”
I took the shorter step, then the next, and climbed past him.
He climbed behind me.
When I stepped out, the sky around me was open.
I hadn’t seen the sky from outside the building since the quad on my first day. That sky had been dusk-going-dark. This one was full night: no clouds, a moon my wall-facing window had hidden from me, and more stars than the city had ever let me see.
They were the same stars I had grown up under.
