Page 30 of Autumn on My Mind

His hands freeze, and somehow I can feel his body tense even though we’re not touching.

“I don’t live here. You’re aware of that, right?” His hands begin working on my hair again.

I am aware of that, actually. He told me himself. But I press forward anyway. “I forgot,” I lie.

His responding hum is about as skeptical as I’d expect. “So you came to see me…in the middle of the night? There’s only one kind of meeting that happens at this time,” he goes on, the words casual. “And I hate to burst your bubble, but did you ever consider that you might not be my type anymore?”

I have no answer for this, but it turns out I don’t need one, because he speaks again.

“You want to know what I think?” he says.

“No.”

“I think you’re here making sure our parents aren’t getting cozy, now that you explicitly claimed they wouldn’t be.”

All I can do is clear my throat and change the subject to buy myself more time. “How’s my hair doing?”

“It’s still attached to your head,” Dominic says flatly, and with one last yank, he leans back. “That’s going to have to be good enough.”

He stands up as I rub the tender spot on my scalp. I brush my fingers over the painful scrape on my face, too, and when I hold them up in the lantern light, there are a few streaks of red.

And instinct is a strange beast, I realize as my mouth opens automatically to speak. Past Reese would have told Past Dominic that in ancient cultures, a cut like this could ruin a woman’s chances for marriage—that her sisters would have to hope for an advantageous match instead.

Past Dominic would have listened to this irrelevant snippet of knowledge with a little smile on his face, and then he would have helped me up, and then we would have gone to the back of his truck, hand in hand, and watched the stars until the early hours of the morning.

But although the stars have stayed their course, we have not, and I find myself wondering how much people ever really change—if we’re different at our cores, or if we’ve simply become different versions of the same people.

I guess it doesn’t matter either way.

“Oh, that’s not bad,” I say to myself instead as I glance at the faint streaks of blood on my fingers, and I swallow all the words I can’t speak. Then I rise on unsteady legs as I get to my feet, grabbing the lantern and passing it up to Dom, who turns the light off and pitches us into darkness once more.

“I assume you’re here spying,” he says as I shake the buzzing discomfort from my legs. “Did you see anything?”

I hesitate for only a second before sighing. “Not yet,” I admit. “Alvina snuck out of our room earlier, so I followed her because I was worried she was coming over. She’s been in there maybe…” I bite my lip, thinking. “Twenty minutes?” I turn back to face the window, stepping slowly through the bushes that held me captive before. “I wasn’t sure⁠—”

But the words die on my tongue as two figures appear, almost like I’ve conjured them.

It’s Alvina and Daryl, of course. Who else would it be? Somehow the sight is still shocking enough that I startle, my eyes widening.

Alvina is much better dressed than I am—not in a negligee, thankfully, but about as casual as she gets all the same. I suppose I’d rather her wear her fitted blue pants and gray top than anything more revealing, but it’s still an odd choice for the middle of the night.

Not that I can judge.

She and Daryl drift into the room, talking and laughing as they settle on the couch. They scoot closer together, a little red flag popping up in my mind as they do. The red flag turns into a blaring siren when they look at each other—a tornado siren, in fact, accompanied by a rotating red light.

I can’t see both of them clearly, because Daryl’s back is to me, but when Alvina’s expression goes soft in a completely foreign way, I begin to panic. When Daryl lifts one hand to touch her face, my panic grows.

“No,” I breathe, and a small noise of disgust sounds from next to me as our parents lean closer, closer, closer⁠—

“Gross,” Dom breathes as our parents begin to kiss.

“No,” I groan as my stomach churns. I lean forward until my nose is almost pressed against the chilled glass. “No, you two—stop it. Stop it!” But my eyes widen in horror as the kiss from hell grows more passionate still, and I’m frozen until self-preservation kicks in and I lurch backward, shaking my head desperately.

I turn to look at Dominic, whose expression resembles that of a faintly ill rollercoaster rider. His eyes are glued to the scene unfolding before us, and against my will, my gaze is pulled back too.

“Okay. It’s two consenting adults kissing,” I say, but my voice is high-pitched, and my stomach is rolling worse than ever. “Let’s be mature about—about...oh, no.”

We have roaming hands.