Page 58 of All the way home

Everything OK?

Quite

If you need me no you don’t

Having fun, are we?

Not jinxing it ok bye

She sighs. “I think he’s having a Cinderella moment.”

Lifting his arm so that his elbow presses against hers, Lucas considers this. “Is Kieran Cinderella, or is this Zach guy Cinderella?”

“Hmm. Unclear.”

“Do you think this is going to be a serious thing?”

“How would I know that?” Rena fights the urge to let her scowl out. “I haven’t even seen them interact.”

“Hey, you’re the one who can read Kieran like a book.”

And that’s not strictly true. Rena had thought she could read Kieran better than anyone.

But then, she hadn’t really known him at all, had she?

Their whole life it had been simple: Rena was black and white incarnate, and Kieran walked the line between slate and shadow. Until last year, that had been fine, because they got each other, and it didn’t matter that they were different. Left and right brain. A mismatched whole.

“You okay?” Lucas nudges her arm.

Blinking, Rena snaps out of it. “Yeah. Fine.”

When Lucas examines her face, what does he find? He knows how her expressions work even better than she does.

Rena glances at her watch.

If all had gone to plan, they would have been landing soon.

“Rena?”

“Yes.”

Cautiously, he says, “I love you.”

Her shoulders relax. “I love you too.”

Every time he says it, she wants to ask what he means by it. In the beginning, she did ask, but then had the sense she was being—as Kieran often put it—“unnecessarily aggressive” and stopped.

But there’s still a part of her that wonders. If she could reach inside Lucas’s head to pull him apart, she would. She’s known him for years and still has no idea what he’s thinking about half the time. Especially when they’d first gotten together, he’d been mystifying. Often, Rena could tell what Kieran was thinking about just from his face. Lucas wasn’t like Oscar or Siobhan, either, because both of them liked to say everything they were thinking out loud, and Lucas had to be pressed for information if she really wanted to know.

And usually, she really did. In the beginning, her terror of making missteps had been so high, she’d carefully monitored everything she was thinking and feeling, constantly and desperately horrified that it was considered a faux pas to be as upfront as she’d have liked to be—what if she was thinking and feeling things he wasn’t?

“You’ve been together for, like, five months,” Siobhan had pointed out, running her fingers through her blond hair and seeming a good deal more stressed about it than Rena thought was necessary. “He hasn’t said it yet?”

In those early days, Rena had been keenly interested in the subject of love, especially as it pertained to her and this entirely as-yet-unexplored territory. But Siobhan was far more concerned than she was.

“Is that unusual?” Rena closed her locker door to give Siobhan her full attention.

Even though Siobhan herself had not been in a long-term relationship before, her older sister had been in three, so she was the only one of their trio who knew what to expect. She leaned in close, voice lowered to a murmur as a handful of students passed by them in the hall. “Kind of! You need to figure out if he loves you or not.”