There’s a part of me that thinks he’ll change his mind, and I want to give him the chance to. But after a silent moment, he speaks decisively.
“We have one more shot at meeting Anna in about a week,” he says. “If the story hasn’t run its course by then and it’s really bad, we can try again. But maybe we won’t need to. Maybe it’ll be okay.”
I want to be happy about this, and I’m sure I will be. But first I have to be bewildered by the fact that Grant, the man who spent the first several days of our acquaintance making sure I knew that he was in the seventeenth circle of hell, now thinks this serial killer story might beokay. He must see the skepticism in my face.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “A lot of this story has been really disturbing to experience up close. But from a reader’s perspective? There’s some levity to it. The cartoonish villains, Lesley’s puns, Lissa’s … everything. I’m not so sure it’s a straightforward crime-thriller novel. It might be more like a crime-thriller-comedy.”
Relief washes over me once again.Levity.I love levity. I can do levity.
“You can just say I’m very funny,” I say, bumping his shoulder. “I know you think so. I read your emails.”
He rolls his eyes, turning away. “I was just trying to sweet-talk Anna into letting us go.”
The idea of Grant sweet-talking anyone, ever, in his life, is so preposterous that all I can do is raise my eyebrows at him. He meets my gaze, as if in challenge, and then gives up. “Fine. You are sometimes mildly entertaining.”
“And very cool,” I add. “Especially when I’mGrand Theft—”
“On second thought, a walk into traffic sounds nice.”
He gets up from the bench and I can’t help but giggle at this stupid game we play, yanking at his sleeve to pull him back down. I pretend to zip my mouth closed, lock it, and drop the key in my inside jacket pocket. With narrowed eyes, he pulls the front of my jacket away from my body and reaches in, then mimes chucking the key far away.
I shrug. “It’s fine. I have a spare.”
He cracks a reluctant grin. “Good.”
So this is what it’ll be, then. Another week of this. My heart does a little somersault at the thought of everything we don’t have to give up just yet. The running, the hiding, the throwing punches. Lesley and Lissa. All the danger. All the intrigue.
And us. Me and Grant against a lawless fictional world. Facing down peril as a team, getting backed into corners and finding our way out again. And maybe, if we’re lucky, more nights like this one: Stolen moments of quiet, sitting side by side. Closer thanI ever would have thought comfortable, yet inexplicably easy. Getting a little bit lost in another world,hisworld, and not particularly eager to find a way out.
It’s then and there in the moonlit garden, with nothing but the sleepy calling of birds and the rustling leaves and the perfectly ordinary stillness of nighttime around us, with Grant smiling to himself and sitting so close to me that I can just about hear his heartbeat, that I finally realize it:
I’m in trouble.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It is a beautiful day in Londontown, and I am outside jogging, and all is right and all is fine because I do not have a crush on Grant and that is why I am going for a normal jog, jogging normally. That night in the park, the one I have barely even thought about in the three days and eleven hours since? That was just a weird little twinge brought on by weird little moments of vulnerability that will not happen again. Now everything’s back to normal. And I do not have a crush on Grant. And I know that because of how normally I am jogging.
I pass a bus, parked in the middle of the street. Odd. Then I realize it’s not parked, it’s driving at a normal speed and I am, in fact, outrunning it.
I stumble to a stop, only now realizing how my lungs are trying to incinerate me from the inside out.Fuck.This isn’t working.
I lean against a brick building in the shade, the wall cool at my back. In the stillness of the moment, with nothing but my gasping breath and my thumping heartbeat to fill the quiet, the lie crumbles like a sandcastle.
I have a stupid fucking crush on Grant.
This can’t happen. As a rule, I do notletthis happen. A little vacation flirtation is all well and good, but feelings? Real feelings, and for someone who lives in the same city as me, assuming we ever make it back there? They might be rejected, or worse,reciprocated. And reciprocated feelings have a way of turning into relationships. And relationships have a way of crushing people’s hearts and ruining their lives.
Which is why normally, I’m very good at keeping my heart out of things. But Grant crept up on me. He caught me with my guard down, tricked me into getting to know him and like him before I could realize that there might be something brewing between us.
And the worst part is that I can’t just run away. We’re stuck together with life-and-death stakes, and the attraction is only going to get worse. We still have to train every day. We’ve worked through most of the basic defenses, so now each morning I’m left scrambling for things to teach him that don’t involve close bodily contact. I’ve spent two entire days teaching him how to kick a weapon out of someone’s hand, which is almost never the answer. We’ve devoted hours to vague no-touching concepts likeusing whatever you have availableandmaintaining the element of surpriseand definitely not things liketrying to escape being pinned to the ground until you realize it has become A Moment and all of a sudden you’re kissing.
And then there’s Lissa and her hawklike gaze and her waggly eyebrows whenever Grant and I so much as glance in each other’s direction.
I compose a text to Steph—HELP, I have a crush—and then delete it because I know what she’s going to say. Something along the lines ofShall I read from Corinthians orBreaking Dawnat your wedding?
I breathe forcefully, in the nose and out the mouth. It’s going to be fine, I decide. Itisfine, because I’m an adult with self-control. So what if I have a tiny, one-sided crush? I don’t have to tell anyone. I can even talk myself out of it. Grant is just the buddy in the accidental buddy-cop story. Or buddy-crime-vigilante, as it were. I like him in a camaraderie sort of way, as a survival instinct more than anything else. That’s all this is. I repeat it to myself like a mantra.That’s all this is.
I continue my leisurely jog—leisurely, leisurely, LEISURELY, I warn myself in my head—and focus on all the reasonsnotto have feelings for Grant. He’s a know-it-all. He’s judgy. He’s so anxious all the time. I can see it in the way he rubs his jaw, the way his hands shake just a little when he’s particularly nervous. But he tries anyway. He’s always trying. And he gets such a determined look in his eye, even when he’s freaking out, because he’s decided to work with me and be there by my side. I couldn’t ask for a better teammate in all of this, nor one who makes me feel so bathed in sunlight whenever he cracks a reluctant smile. Okay, cool. This isn’t working either.
