CHAPTER EIGHT
ARYA
Past
He was here.
Finally.
I could tell by the footsteps. The way they brushed against the limestone. Steady, measured, precise. His knockoff sneakers kissed the floor. I closed my eyes, balancing against a bookshelf in the library, my breath fluttering in my chest like a butterfly.
Ten months. It’s been ten long months. Come find me.
A shot of thrill rolled through my belly. I’d never done this before. Made myself unavailable to Nicholai. No matter how much I wanted to wait for him by the door, like an eager puppy, ready with all the books and stories I wanted to share with him, I didn’t. I wanted to reinvent myself this summer break. To be mysterious and alluring and all the other things I read about in the books that made heroines worth fighting for.
I was in the library, clutching a black-and-white paperback of Atonement by Ian McEwan, wearing a mint-green satin nightgown. I’d read the book in February, after stealing it from the school’s library just to feel what it was like to take what wasn’t mine, and then every month since I’d waited to tell Nicky about it. Even though we lived in the same city, we might as well be living in parallel universes. Our worlds didn’t touch, our lives orbiting around different schools, people, and events. It was only during summer break that we collided. That the universe burst with colors.
Several times throughout the year I’d found myself itching to send him a letter or an email or even pick up the phone and call. Each time, I’d had to talk myself off the ledge. He never sought me out between summers—why should I? Maybe to him we were nothing but a lame version of summer camp. Maybe we weren’t even friends. Just two kids spending the summer in one confined space, carelessly forgotten by the adults who’d made us.
Maybe he had a girlfriend now.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
So I waited. Stewed on the book. Marinated in the feelings it evoked within me. They always brought me back to him. Nicholai. My Nicky.
The footsteps grew louder, closer.
I tucked a flyaway behind my ear, willing my heart to beat slower. I’d been crushing on Nicholai Ivanov since that first day at the cemetery; I’d just never put a name to that feeling I had for him before. Not until this year, when everyone at school had seemed to pair up into couples. Having a boyfriend had somehow switched from a shameful thing only bad girls did to the height of one’s existence overnight, and I’d fallen behind on the trend. None of these couples actually talked to each other during school hours or hung out, but they had the title, and whenever there was an outing or a birthday, the couples would whisper to each other and kiss.
Kissing, too, had become a rite of passage. Something to be checked off a list. There was not one boy at school I wanted to kiss.
The only lips I wanted to feel against mine were Nicholai’s.
I flipped through the pages of Atonement, but the words kept slipping, as if falling from the pages. I was surprised there wasn’t a pile of letters at my feet. It was hopeless. Trying to concentrate on anything that wasn’t him.
And then . . . bliss. Nicholai’s body filled the doorframe in my periphery. Holey shoes, jeans ripped in all the wrong places, and a faded shirt, frayed at the edges. Each year he sharpened into something more beautiful.
I pretended not to notice him.
“Sup.” An unlit cigarette butt was tucked in the corner of his mouth. I pondered what the great Beatrice Roth would think about the fact I wanted to kiss a boy who shoved used cigarettes from the street into his mouth. Probably not much, to be honest. As long as I didn’t bring a disease into the house, she wouldn’t have minded if I sawed my own limbs off as a fashion statement.
I looked up. “Oh. Hey, Nicky.”
His beauty struck me like lightning. He hadn’t been so handsome two years ago. Each summer, his features were honed into something more male. His jaw became sharper, the slash between his eyebrows deeper, his lips redder. His eyes were his best feature, though. The exact, astonishing color of blue topaz. He was tall, smooth, and lithe, and above all, he had that quality that couldn’t be named. The badassness of a kid who knew how to fend for himself. How to fight for his survival. It made me nauseous to think some kids had him two semesters a year. To ogle, to admire, to enjoy.
“You good?” He pushed off the doorframe, waltzing over to me. I noticed that his scrawny arms had filled out over the past year. Veins ran through the muscles. He didn’t stop until our toes touched, and he plucked the book from between my fingers and flipped through it nonchalantly.
He tucked the cigarette behind his ear, his eyebrows knitting together.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hello.” He looked up, flashing me a grin, then returned his attention to the book. I couldn’t wait to see him in swimming trunks this summer.
“Have you read it?” I wheezed out the question, my face blazing hot.
He shook his head. “Heard some of it is pretty raunchy, though.”
“Yeah. But, like, that’s not the point of the book.”
“Making out is always the point of everything.” His eyes lifted to meet mine, and he let loose a rakish smirk. He handed me back my book. “Maybe I’ll give it a try one day, if Mr. Van stops giving me Penthouse hand-me-downs.”
This was my in to tell him what I’d thought about the entire year. What I dreamed about at night.
“Congratulations, you officially became gross.”
He laughed. “I missed you.”
“Yeah. Me too.” I twisted a piece of hair over my index finger, feeling so strange in my body, like it didn’t belong to me. “I’m thinking of taking theater class, now that I’m going to high school.”
I absolutely wasn’t, but I needed a solid background story.
“Cool.” He was already roaming the room, opening drawers, looking for new, shiny things to explore. My house was like a theme park for Nicholai. He liked to use my dad’s lighters, to cross his ankles on the mahogany desks, to pretend to take important calls on the vintage Toscano office phone.
“I thought maybe we could reenact part of the book. You know, as practice, for my audition in September.”
“Reenact what?”
“One of the raunchy scenes. In the book. I need to do something risqué for my audition.”
“Risqué?” he murmured, pulling drawers open, sticking his hands in them.
“Yes. They’re not gonna let me in if I give them something mild.”
What the hell was I talking about? Even I had no clue.
“How raunchy are we talking?” He was too distracted, on his hunt for something to steal.
I grabbed the book and flipped through it before stopping at page 126 and handing it over to him. He stopped rummaging through drawers. His eyes dropped to the text. I held my breath as he read it. When he finished, he passed it back to me, and I tucked it in the library behind me.
“You’re kidding, right?”
I shook my head, my pulse nearly jumping out of my skin.
Nicholai froze. His gaze flew from one of the desk’s drawers to mine, disbelief touching his topaz eyes. There was knowledge in them. Irreverence and annoyance too. I wanted to recreate that scene at the library, where Robbie pins Cecilia against the shelves and kisses her like the world is ending. Because to him, it is.
Every hair on my arms stood on end. I didn’t want to throw up on my own shoes. At the same time, it seemed like I was about to do just that.
“We’ll just kiss,” I clarified, faking a yawn. “None of that other weird stuff, obvs.”
“Just kiss?”
“Hey, you were the one who just told me everything begins and ends with making out.” I raised my hands in surrender.
His lips curled into a slight smirk. My heart free-fell to the floor.
“Have you raided your old man’s liquor cabinet, Ari?” Nicky erased the little space we had between us. He trailed a finger along the shell of my ear. A shiver ran through me. “We can’t kiss. Unless, of course, you want our parents to kill me.”
“You mean us.”
“Nah.” He took the cigarette from behind his ear and chewed on its butt, keeping his hands and mouth busy. “You’ll get away with just about anything under Daddy Conrad’s watch. The blame always lies at the feet of the poor person with the funny-sounding name. Haven’t you noticed a theme in all of the classics we read last summer?”
“I’m not gonna tell anyone.” My throat felt tight. Full of pebbles. Suddenly, rejection had a taste, a scent, a body. It was a living, breathing thing, and the sting of its fist burned my cheeks. I couldn’t even be mad at Nicky. I was a reluctant observer all the times my father, my mother, and Ruslana tossed threats like arrows into the air, aimed at Nicky.
Don’t you dare touch her.
Take a step back, son.
Nicholai, don’t you have to help your mother with the dishes?
“I know; it’s not that I don’t trust you,” Nicky agreed. “It’s that I don’t trust my luck. If they find out somehow, if this place is wired or whatever . . . Ari, you know I can’t.”
It was gentle, but it was final. Subject closed. And while I understood him, I was also angry at him, because he was still levelheaded about us, whereas I was as logical as a truck tire where he was concerned. The bile in my throat rolled an inch forward toward my mouth. But I wasn’t that kind of girl. I prided myself in being exactly what Nicky wanted me to be. I watched action flicks and played wall ball and said dude at least fifteen times a day.
“Hey, we going down for a swim or what?” Nicky wrapped his fingers around a small crystal ball on the shelf behind me and pocketed it. He did that a lot, and I never minded. Maybe because I knew he’d never take something that was dear to me. “I practiced at the YMCA pool all year. Prepare to be crushed, silver-spooned girl.”