"Complicated." Ricco beams. "I love complicated. Complicated means available."
And he flirts. All the way through the read he flirts, generous and funny about it, sharing his water, stealing my margin notes, making me laugh in the exact loud way that gets us shushed twice. It's nice. It's uncomplicated. It's the kind of attention a smart girl would water and grow.
But this smart girl spends the entire afternoon thinking about a man who folds his smiles away in a vault.
When they break, there's a car at the curb that I didn't order and would know anywhere, and a man leaning against it with his arms crossed, watching Ricco walk me out with the focused calm of a storm deciding where to be.
"Enriquez," Maximo says.
"We've met?"
"No." A beat. "She's expected home."
Ricco looks at me, looks at him, and does the math faster than most. "Right. Complicated." He squeezes my shoulder, unfazed, and saunters off whistling. The car door shuts. The city slides by, and the back seat is suddenly the size of a shoebox.
"Were you jealous?" I ask the hard line of his profile.
"No." He doesn't turn his head. He watches the road like it might bolt.
"You looked jealous."
"Irritated." His hand rests on the seat between us, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off it, and he doesn't move it, and I don't move mine.
My borrowed heart is going loud enough that I'm half afraid he can hear it, which is exactly the sort of excitement my last checkup asked me, very politely, to avoid. My heart, as usual, has other ideas.
"They're extremely similar looks, on you."
"They're not." But his voice has dropped, gone low and a little rough, and his jaw is a straight line, and the whole car has gone warm in a way the heater has nothing to do with.
"Agree to disagree." I settle back, thoroughly warmed. "By the way, he thought you were my brother."
His jaw works.
"I told him it was complicated," I add, and watch that hit home, and decide it's the most honest sentence either of us has managed all week.
Chapter Seventeen
HERE'S WHAT I KNOWabout being sick. I'm terrible at it, I narrate it without mercy, and somewhere around the third hour the ceiling starts giving notes on my performance.
"You're being dramatic," the ceiling says.
"I'm dying," I explain to the ceiling.
"You have a temperature."
"A fatal one. Tell Maximo I forgive him. Tell him he was my favorite—"
"Jassy."
That last one isn't the ceiling. That one has a hand, cool against my forehead, and a voice with something underneath it I'm too cooked to name.
"How high?" he demands, of someone. A phone. "And with her medication?" A silence I don't like the shape of. "No. I'm bringing her in if it climbs another degree."
"'m fine," I inform the room. "It's a small fever. A starter fever."
"You're on immunosuppressants and you're burning up. There's nothing small about it." The cloth on my forehead goes away and comes back colder. "Drink this."
"Bossy," I can't help remarking even as I do as asked.
