In The Afterlight

“I don’t want to ask this, but...you were going to tell us about the agents and what you did eventually, right? You wouldn’t have just let us figure it out when only cars of kids showed up?”

“I should have told you guys as soon as we were out of the city,” I said. “It just...slipped my mind with everything that happened.”

“You could have told us before we left,” he said gently.

“It had to happen fast,” I said, “and if anyone showed a hint that they knew what was going on, it could have clued the agents in to what I was doing. We had to scramble.”

“You and Cole.”

“He knows the other agents better than any of us. I needed his input on how to make the suggestion feel real.” And if I had told you, you’d have tried to force us to leave.

Sometimes—most of the time, actually—it was hard to think of us as having had any kind of separate lives before they converged. Our lives were so closely knit together that it was a compulsion to tell him everything, to hear his thoughts on it all, to see if they matched mine. I’d held back from him before, about what I was, what I had done to my parents, but somehow...it wasn’t that it felt worse, exactly, more like there was just this nagging, this unflinching sense that something wasn’t clicking the way it had before. I’d interrupted some natural pattern in our lives. I bit my lip, watching his brows draw together the same way Cole’s had as he concentrated.

“That’s why you panicked, isn’t it? You’d just found out about it...” Liam rubbed the back of his hand against his forehead. “Damn. So what’s the plan now?”

“We’ll all meet for dinner to talk through a plan for freeing some of the camps.”

“Maybe not dinner, if this is all we have...” he started. “But I’ll figure something out. Everything will be all right.”

Liam draped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me in. I pressed my face against his shoulder and let out a shuddering breath. My arms locked around his waist.

This was right. Being close to him like this was right. For the first time all day my mind wasn’t racing. Here in the dark, my pulse fluttering at his closeness, everything else seemed far away. He kissed my hair, my cheek, and I thought, Can’t lose this, can’t lose this, too—I couldn’t tell him everything, not if I wanted him to benefit from what we were trying to do, not if I wanted to protect him. But we could have this, couldn’t we?

“Do you trust me to keep you safe?” I asked. I knew it must have seemed like I pulled the question out of nowhere, but all of a sudden it felt vitally important. I could see that he’d been hurt by my not telling him about the agents.

“Darlin’, if it were a choice between you and a hundred of Gray’s finest, I’d pick you every time.”

I caught him by surprise, rolling up onto my toes and kissing him full on the mouth.

My fingers were still gripping his shirt when I pulled back. My voice sounded low, rough to my ears. I had to fight for the words, and I was so self-conscious I wasn’t sure I was ever going to pick the right ones. “I want to—”

The dazed look faded from his face as he watched me, waiting.

I want to...I felt my face flush, but I couldn’t tell if it was out of embarrassment or because of the images flashing through my mind. I’d never felt so awkward and tense. I’d kissed him before, really kissed him, but every time before had felt like it had been prompted by stress or urgency or anger, and each had been cut off by the demands of the world around us. This was really the first chance I’d had to think about him, all of him, slowly; to make a thorough study of him. The feel of his hands. The rasp of his stubble. The small, breathless sounds he made at the back of his throat.

We were in a pantry and there were kids working outside in the kitchen. The rational part of me knew the limits of this moment, but next time, if we were somewhere else, and if we had another moment to ourselves alone—what then? I felt a small tremor work through me, powered by equal parts panic and longing. I wouldn’t know what to do. How not to mess it up.

Liam’s hands covered mine as he leaned back against the shelves. Relief broke over me when I saw his smile. He understood. Of course he did. From the moment I’d met him, he’d known me better than I’d known myself.

When he spoke, his voice was sweet, but his expression was anything but. There was mischief in his eyes, a hungry look. There was a jolt low in my gut as I realized it was because of me. “Now, darlin’, I just had myself a little thought.”

“Did you?” I murmured, distracted by the way he reached up to run his thumb over my bottom lip.

“I did indeed. It being that you are seventeen and I’m eighteen, and we have every damn right to make out like teenagers. Like normal, happy, crazy kids.” He hooked two fingers over the waistband of my jeans and tugged me closer. I loved his voice when he lowered it like that. His accent broadened, warmed like summer air in the minutes before a thunderstorm. It was the full-on Stewart charm assault, and I was totally helpless against it. “You want to hear the rules?”

My heart jackhammered as I nodded. That same hand slid around my hip, up under my shirt, and felt warm and perfect against my lower back. I closed my eyes as his lips just barely brushed mine. His touch made me feel brave. It pushed the uncertainty back until it couldn’t reach me.

“The first one is you can’t think too hard about it. The second is you say when you want to stop. The third is you do whatever feels good to you. The fourth is—”