Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
"You're always working. It's very boring. Rule sixteen: no working during my movie." I flop onto the couch that I'm technically not allowed to flop onto and pat the cushion beside me. "Come sit with your little sister."
That gets me a look. I have discovered that the little-sister bit gets under his skin like a splinter every time, and I've decided, being an emotionally healthy person, to press on it constantly.
To my genuine shock, he comes and sits. On the far cushion. With the entire Pacific Ocean of couch between us.
The movie is terrible. Gloriously, can't-look-away terrible, a romance so bad it becomes a documentary about my own life, two people being idiots for the entire run time because neither of them will just say it. You know the exact movie, right? The one where you'd happily climb into the screen and knock their two stubborn heads together. I narrate it. I heckle it. I gasp at the parts that don't deserve gasping.
"He's obviously in love with her," I tell the screen. "Look at him. Look at his stupid handsome face. He'd rather set himself on fire than say it."
"Watch the movie," Maximo says.
"I'm watching. I'm just also correct."
Somewhere in the second act I stop heckling. Somewhere after that my eyes get heavy, and the popcorn goes untended. The couch, it turns out, has been closing the distance between us the whole time, inch by inch, or maybe that's me, migrating toward anything warm the way I always do. My borrowed heart is wide awake even when the rest of me is folding, giddy at how close he is, and not now, I tell it, we agreed we weren't going to get worked up over him. Naturally, it does the exact opposite.
The last thing I remember is my head finding his shoulder, and the shoulder going rigid, and then, slowly, like a man defusing himself, not moving away.
Then I'm gone, out cold, dreaming about nothing at all.
MAXIMO DIDN'T MOVE for a long time.
He could have. That was the part he'd turn over later. There was nothing holding him there but the weight of her head on his shoulder and the small warm fact of her breathing, in and out, even and easy, trusting the way only a person who's never been truly betrayed can trust.
The film played to nobody. He let it. On the screen the fool finally said it, too late, in the rain, the way fools in these movies always did, and beside him the girl slept through the ending she had called an hour ago.
She was forbidden, and he had a whole ledger of reasons why. Her youth was the gentlest of them. What beat beneath her ribs was the one truth he could not say aloud, and every rule he had handed her these past weeks existed so a night exactly like this one could never happen.
He should carry her to bed. He should reinstate the ocean of couch. Instead he sat with her hair against his jaw and her hand curled loosely on his forearm, and he felt something in his chest come unlatched that he had welded shut two years ago, and before he could stop it, before he even knew the words were in his mouth, he lowered his head and breathed a name into the dark.
"Mary."
The girl stirred. Made a small sound. Turned her face further into his shoulder.
And Maximo went cold to the bone.
Because the head on his shoulder didn't belong to his sister. His sister was two years gone. The warmth against his side, the pulse he could feel through her wrist, the heart doing its work an inch from his own arm—
That heart belonged to Mary.
The girl wasn't.
And the truly damning thing, the thing he would not be able to unknow after tonight, was that he had not wanted to move. Not once. Not for a second.
He sat there in the dark with a dead girl's name on his lips and a living girl in his arms and understood, finally, exactly how much trouble he was in.
Chapter Nine
COLD GEL, A WAND PRESSING around under my ribs, and a screen full of gray weather that happens to be my own heart as it thumps away.
"There she is," the tech says.
Today's my annual eval, same as every year since the transplant. They photograph her (as in my heart), take enough of my blood to concern a vampire, and ask me the questions I always answer, and underneath all of it runs the same low hum that's run under every appointment for two years.
Please still be happy in there. Please still want to stay. And please, oh pretty please, please be okay.
"You quit your last job," the cardiologist notes, scrolling. "New one less stressful?"
"Wildly more stressful. I'm an actress now."
"And you're eating."
"Someone force-feeds me nightly. It's a whole situation."