I took off my jacket and helped him remove his. “You weren’t always Sebastian, were you?”
“I used to be Remy,” he said.
I tried to imagine calling that name in the dark. “It’s embarrassing, but I thought you just happened to have an available Morton name.”
He laughed. “My mothers let me choose. We went to the Little Graveyard. Sebastian seemed the least doomed. Erasmus, Chester, and Wendell are clearly never going to make it out.”
“You were always going to make it out. I thought you appeared from nowhere. Just for us.”
“Not nowhere,” he said. “Southern California.”
A memory came over me, us kids spilling out of the Great House on a crisp winter day. “The first time you saw snow—you went wild. But little me decided it was the first time you’d seen snowas a Morton.”
Sebastian laughed properly at that. I hoped no janitors were still cleaning down here.
His befuddlement about snow, his clumsiness on skis. He’d been bad at archery and Muay Thai too, at first. But ordinaries were bad ateverything, and after he’d lived with us awhile, he became good at everything. Like me.
Proof that he belonged.
“Remy…and your twin was Desiree. Are you French?”
“Respectable Haitian grandparents,” he said.
“Remy,” I repeated, looking at him closely in the dim light. “Sebastian. They both suit you. But you could make any name your own.”
“Flattery,” he said, and I wondered who he would’ve been if the Mortons hadn’t found him.
“Why did you want me? Back when I was a true Morton?”
“Because you were so certain,” he said, kissing me. “Unafraid.” He kissed me again. “You didn’t flinch. You didn’t cry.” And again. “You didn’t speak unless you had something to say.” Another, deeper, kiss.
The same sentiments as Xavier. “My certainty’s gone. Why do you still love me?”
We pulled away a little, surprised.
Neither of us had said the wordlovebefore. I wasn’t sure I loved him. This wasn’t what I’d felt for Hiromi. Sebastian felt more necessary—like air.
I no longer made my own oxygen.
“You’re still you, Jess. Different, but you.”
“What if it’s just your memory of the old Jessica?”
He kissed me. “She’s gone. Have you noticed I’m taller than you now? You were taller than me the whole time we were little. And now, finally, I win.”
“Delusional. I’m still taller.” I pressed my nose against the top of his cheekbone. “See? My nose is higher than yours.”
“Cheating—your chin is raised. I’ve got a solid inch on you.”
“You do not.”
“Gertie will adjudicate, in her coat of quilts.”
I laughed at that image and started to unbutton my shirt. “I’m taller and faster and smarter and—”
“More boastful.” He reached into my shirt, touched the silver chain that held the key he’d given me. Our safe house. Our revolution of two.
“A Morton never boasts,” I said, my skin on fire where his fingers brushed. “Which is, in itself, a boast.”
