Page 6
My fingers twitch once at my side, still half-aware of the knife, half-aware of the fact that this should have gone very differently. Usually, if someone invades my space, my first instinct is violence and my second is more violence, in case the first one isn’t clear enough.
Time does something weird after that. It stretches. His pen keeps moving while I keep standing there, and the park keeps existing around us in a haze I can barely register. Then finally, after what could be five minutes or fifty, he leans back a little and studies the page.
“Hm.” The pen stills, and my body snaps back to life. “I think I’m done.”
The words barely leave him before I’m pushing off the tree, all that trapped energy hitting at once. “Let me see.”
He pulls the sketchbook against his chest in one movement, quick as a thief, and shakes his head. “Not yet.”
I stop dead and stare at him. “Not yet?” I repeat, outraged.
His expression doesn’t change much, but amusement slips into it. “No.”
“You drew my face.”
“Mhm. I did.”
“So it’s mine.”
“No.”
Before I can come up with an insult worthy of the occasion, he reaches out and taps the end of my nose with one finger.
I go completely still.
Again.
This is becoming a problem.
“You did well,” he says.
I widen my eyes at him, genuinely scandalized now, because what the hell is that supposed to mean? He praises me like I’m some feral thing he’s coaxed into staying put, and the worst part is that my body reacts to it instantly. A shiver crawls down my spine and heat climbs higher into my face.
Something cold touches my skin.
At first I barely register it, too busy staring at the space he occupies like I can glare him into spontaneous combustion. Then another drop lands.
Rain.
I tilt my face up, and sure enough, the sky has split open. All over the park, students start reacting at once. Sketchbooks get snapped shut.
The tall man with the black eyes just slides the sketchbook into his bag, then lifts his head and looks at me through the rain.
He starts walking toward me.
Rain catches in his hair, beads along the shoulders of his leather jacket, and slides down the line of his throat. He keeps coming until there’s hardly any space left between us, and that electric awareness starts sparking under my skin again. He’s close enough now that I can see droplets clinging to his lashes.
“I’m Kento.”
I blink at him.
What kind of man corners you under a tree, draws you without permission, dismantles your nervous system, and then introduces himself like this is a perfectly respectable first impression?
Apparently this one.
“Kento,” I repeat, because my brain, traitorous thing that it is, decides to latch onto the name instead of more important tasks like escape or murder.
It suits him.
