Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 28104 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 141(@200wpm)___ 112(@250wpm)___ 94(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 28104 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 141(@200wpm)___ 112(@250wpm)___ 94(@300wpm)
"The suit survives."
"Are you sure? Because that looks like the kind of fabric with feelings." She surrendered the search, and instead held out one of the two oranges she was still holding. "Here. Down payment. It's bruised, but so was I almost, so it's thematic."
He looked at the orange.
He could not remember the last time a stranger had offered him something and wanted nothing back except to be even. In his world, no one paid debts with fruit, and no one, no one, thanked the traffic.
And then it happened. The girl's eyes traveled over him again, the black suit, the black tie, the general effect that made hard men remember appointments elsewhere, and she put it together with the sandwich board and the sidewalk full of tuxedos, and understanding swept across her face like a curtain going up on a show she'd personally arranged.
"Oh!" she said. "Oh, you're here for it, aren't you? The auditions. The Bond thing, the stunt doubles. Because that back there, that whole..." She waved the orange at the intersection, at the taxi, at the space in the air where he'd apparently rewritten physics. "...that was extremely stunt double of you. That was the most stunt double thing I've ever seen a person do."
She beamed up at him, delighted with the entire universe, one shoelace undone, holding out a bruised orange to a man whose name, spoken plainly, had unmade richer men than anyone she would ever meet.
"Are you one of them?"
The truth was one word long. The truth was what he was, and what he was walked into rooms three seconds before he did and left with everything warm in them. She'd hear it eventually, the way everyone did, and then she'd look at him the way everyone did, and the girl who thanked traffic would be gone from behind her own eyes.
And Valerio Le Sabre, who'd never in his life wanted to be anyone else, because it had never once been safe to be, heard himself lie.
"Yes," he said, and took the orange. "I'm one of them."
Chapter Four
EIGHT YEARS AGO
Valerio had come to say goodbye.
He'd rehearsed it, which should have been his first warning, because he'd never rehearsed anything in his life. Deals, threats, funerals, he did all of them cold. But he'd sat in the car outside her campus library for eleven minutes putting words in order, and the words were simple ones. This was the last time. He wouldn't be coming back. She'd be hurt for a week, maybe two, and then she'd be safe for the rest of her life, and those two things weren't even close to the same weight.
Men like him didn't get to keep girls like her. Men like him got girls like her killed.
He found her at their table, the one by the tall windows, buried to the elbows in books, hair escaping its knot one strand at a time, and when she looked up and saw him, her whole face did the thing it always did. Opened. Like a door in a city where nobody locked anything.
"You're early!" she whispered, delighted, because the library made her whisper and delight made her loud, and the combination was a small ongoing war. "Sit, sit. I saved your chair. Well, I defended your chair. A philosophy major tried to take it and I told him it was reserved for a working stuntman and he got so depressed about his life choices he just left."
"Aislinn."
"I have your orange." She was already digging through her bag. "It's Tuesday. Don't think I forgot, I never forget, it's a whole system now—"
"Aislinn." He didn't sit. "I came to tell you something."
She stopped digging.
He watched her read his face, watched her find something in it she didn't have a name for yet, and watched her decide, with that terrifying kindness of hers, not to make it harder for him. She just folded her hands on top of her constitutional law notes and waited, and somewhere behind her eyes a door started, very carefully, to close itself in advance, so that he wouldn't have to see it happen.
That. That was what did it.
He had a speech. It was a good speech. It was eleven minutes old and structurally sound and it would've kept her alive until she was ninety, and he opened his mouth to give it, and instead he leaned down across the table, across the books and the notes and the orange rolling loose between them, and kissed her.
Her breath caught. Her hand came up, not to push him away, but to hold on to his sleeve like the floor had tilted, and somewhere a chair scraped and a librarian made a small disapproving sound, and none of it mattered even a little, because he was kissing her, actually kissing her, in the actual library, and some small shrieking part of her brain was already composing the text she would never send anyone, not in a hundred years, not even Steph.