The corner of her mouth did something. It was not a smile, but it was in the same family, second cousin at best, and she took my hand.
Her grip was better than I expected. Not aggressive, not the thing Camille does where a handshake is a scouting report, just firm and dry and exactly as long as it needed to be, and then it wasn’t, because neither of us let go on the beat where letting go was normal.
One second past normal.
Two.
Her palm was warm. The cashmere sleeve had slipped down over her wrist and the edge of it brushed the back of my hand, and her pulse was going somewhere in the low nineties, and she was looking up at me because the heeled boots still weren’t enough and she’d stopped pretending it wasn’t a problem.
I want to be honest about something. There’s a version of me that would call this a tactical hold. That version has a whole vocabulary for it, gauge percentages and approach vectors and the useful gap between what a person says and what their body files as a correction, and that version has been driving for two months now and has receipts to prove it works.
But I was standing on a concrete path at eight in the evening holding hands with a girl who had called me the delivery boy, and the thing running through my chest was not a calculation, and I’ve gotten too old in one lifetime and too young in this one to lie about which of those it was.
"Belmont," she said.
Her voice had lost something. Not volume. Structure.
"Yeah."
"You are still holding my hand."
"You’re still holding mine."
Her fingers twitched, and she did not pull them back, and the flush had gotten all the way up past her cheekbones now, blotchy and unlovely and the first genuinely unmanaged thing I’d seen on her face since the training room in Building C. Her lips parted a little. Whatever was behind them didn’t make it out.
Click.
The beam hit us from about thirty feet down the path, dead center, the specific unforgiving white of a phone flashlight held by someone who had turned it on with intent.
"Oh."
The voice arrived a half second behind the light.
"Oh my god."
Petra tore her hand out of mine with enough force that her own momentum spun her a quarter turn, and I did not move, and I would like it on the record that not moving took effort.
Maribelle Kennedy stood in the middle of the walk with the light angled up at us and her free hand already going to her mouth, and the beam bounced enough off the concrete to catch all of her at once, which was a lot to catch.
Crimson skin, and the path lights loved it, warmed it, turned the whole line of her arms and collarbones into something out of a magazine that would never be allowed on a Halloran newsstand. Two smooth black horns curving back off the sides of her head and glossing where the light hit. A white ribbed tank top that had been made for someone with slightly less to accommodate and had clearly decided to just do its best, the hem riding up over her navel, the shape of her not so much implied as itemized. Athletic shorts that ended about four inches into the argument, and beneath them a truly indefensible amount of thigh, thick and toned and shining faintly with whatever she used after the bathhouse, the kind of legs that came from squatting things and enjoying it.
Her tail was already going. Spade tip flicking side to side, fast, the tell she had no idea she had.
"Okay," Maribelle said. "Okay. Okay okay okay. So this is a whole entire thing."
"Kennedy." Petra’s voice snapped back into place with genuinely impressive speed. "Lower the light."
"Class rep." The beam did not lower. "And vice rep."
"Lower the light."
"Getting into it. On the west walk. In public. On a Wednesday." The hand came off her mouth and she was grinning now, all of it, gold eyes bright and molten and absolutely delighted, and her tail curled up and around like it was underlining her. "Nyx owes me eleven dollars."
"There is nothing to owe anyone eleven dollars about."
"You were holding hands."
"We concluded a professional agreement."
"You were holding hands for like nine seconds, babe, I counted, that’s not an agreement, that’s a whole first act." Maribelle finally dropped the beam to the concrete, which somehow made it worse, because now the light came up off the path and put her in silhouette with her hips cocked and one hand resting on the swell of them, and my brain, ever helpful, took a photograph.
Petra’s spine had gone rigid enough to register on a seismograph. "You are misreading a routine interaction."
"Sure. Yeah. Routine." Maribelle tilted her head, horns catching the light, and the grin got sharper and slower. "Your ears are red."
"They are not."
"Both of them. All the way to the top." She pointed with two fingers, back and forth, like an official making a call. "That’s not a routine ears situation. I know a routine ears situation."
I decided, at approximately that moment, that I was going to be a problem.
I’d like to pretend there was strategy in it. There wasn’t. There was a girl who had spent three weeks looking straight through me and calling my registration a rumor, who had gone home and set her family’s machinery on me over a hallway kiss she was never supposed to see, and who was now standing on a concrete path with her composure in pieces because someone had shone a light on her. The pragmatic play was to shut it down clean. Say something boring, let Maribelle get bored, walk Petra to the door.
The pragmatic play has never once been the one I take when the other option is funnier.
"Nine seconds is generous," I said.
Petra’s head came around so fast I heard her hair move.
"Right?" Maribelle’s voice went up half an octave. "Right! Thank you! I was being polite about it!"