In my fantasies, I got more than one date. I learned her likes and dislikes not through a screen, but after spending hours talking, the sun rising through the windows. I’d get to memorize all the facets of her personality. What she looked like sleeping or waking up, if her face scrunched when mad or irritated. We’d read books on Friday night, we’d watch bad television.
We’d be boring.
Maybe in this fantasy I owned a small bakery on the ground floor of our apartment. I baked her treats before she went in tosolve the universe’s mysteries. She’d read me her papers, and I’d buy a scientific thesaurus so I understood.
I flexed my fingers against the tile, watching the blood disappear in a pink spiral down the drain.
She was innocent.
And I was dangerous.
I got out of the shower, steam fogging the mirror. I could feel that instinct heating up, sliding inside me, taking over. Overriding any and all morals and reservations. One night wasn’t enough. She’d still been nervous, in her head. I wanted to be the one to make all her fantasies come to life.
This was bad.
The last time I’d let this feeling take over, my dad had ended up dead at my feet. This fire in my veins was a warning. I was being reckless.
But I fuckingneededto be the one she went through that list with. Not some random asshole who didn’t even know the face she made when she wanted to say no. Who would push her too far, into a flare-up.
Shay was like drinking sunlight in a world of darkness. Even if it was just one more day—shit, one more hour—I wanted to taste more of hernormal. A life I might have had if I wasn’t born a Throe.
Of the fantasy I would never get to live, where I got to be just Calder.
I swiped the fog away, meeting my own gaze in the mirror.
She’d already had one night withVoid.
She’d never metCalder.
chapter
sixteen
SHAY
“No,” Eames said, “you don’t need a forty-year-old man who’s still ‘figuring it out.’”
True to my promise, a few days later we met across the hall in Eames and Olly’s apartment. They’d connected my phone to the television, so now all four of us saw my potential matches in HD.
Eames swiped, and then swiped immediately on someone with no bio whose only photo was a low-angle selfie in the car.
A new face filled the screen instantly.
Olly tilted her head. “Maybe?”
Eames and Lithie turned to her in unison, eyes wide.
“He’s wearing aPunishertee,” Eames said.
Her eyes grew. “Oh, shit, didn’t see.”
Swipe. Swipe. Swipe.They filtered through a seemingly endless amount of men who were all rejected for some reason or other.
Olly and Eames’s apartment was a mix of Barbie Dream House and seventies hippie. Olly, Eames, and I squeezed into a burnt-orange couch. Lithie sat in front of us on a pink-and-white mushroom-shaped footstool.
“Oh, wait,” I said. “What about him?”
He was twenty-seven—a little young for me, but not too young—and at least had a fully formed frontal lobe. He played a board game in his photo.
