“Bro,” she said, sitting up, voice serious. “You know that no matter what happens we’re in this together, right? If this Riven thing works out”—she searched for wood to knock, apparently deciding that the particleboard resting on stacks of cinder blocks that made our coffee table counted—“and I actually make any money, it’s still both of ours.”
I nodded, stomach clenching.
“Okay. Sure.”
Sofia flopped back on my bed and when she spoke again, her voice was reverent.
“They were gorgeous, weren’t they?”
I knew she meant Theo and Coco. And they were undeniably gorgeous. But it wasn’t either of them I was thinking about.
Huey wasn’t what you’d call handsome, but he was incredibly hot. Piercing blue eyes that snapped beneath straight, dark eyebrows, strong cheekbones, and a jaw like a superhero out of a fifties comic. His head was neatly shaved—not in a creepy skinhead way, but as if even the unruliness of hair would interrupt his clean control.
He was as immovable as stone, tall and hugely muscled. But he held himself carefully, like he was exquisitely aware of his own strength and what it could do. Even his expression had been carefully controlled. He paid intense attention when I was talking, but he didn’t give any of the typical conversational cues like laughing or smiling or nodding.
And when he’d laid his hand over mine on the bar, electricity had crackled through me.
“Yeah,” I sighed. “Gorgeous.”
* * *
—
I was desperate to go with Sofia to her Riven audition, but I couldn’t get the day off work, so I rushed home as soon as my shift was over.
“How’d it go, how’d it go?!” I called as soon as I slammed the door, but there was no answer. “Sof?”
I walked through our apartment, but she wasn’t home.
I texted, How’d it go?????
When she didn’t reply, I figured things must’ve run late and she was on the subway. I pulled things from the fridge to start dinner so it would be ready when she got home.
I put my phone in a bowl and pressed play on my audiobook to listen while I cooked. It had all my favorite things—magic and adventure and high school friendships and first kisses—but for some reason I just couldn’t lose myself in it the way I usually did.
I’d started listening to audiobooks in high school. I’d always loved to read, but since I was constantly running from one place to the next or working manual jobs, I never had time to sit down with a book. When I realized I could download books from the library and listen to them as I did other things, it was a revelation. Listening to stories where teenagers like me learned magic or fought epic battles of good and evil or explored underground cities absorbed me completely while I went about my own much less exciting life.
I listened as I walked, on the bus, between classes at school, when I helped clean hotel rooms with my mom, and as I cooked and cleaned around the house. I listened while I did my homework and as I fell asleep.
The narrators’ voices blocked out Adrian’s snores from across the room and the sound of Sofia and Ramona fighting across the hall. They blocked out the sound of my mom and her boyfriends, and of the neighbors’ dogs. They blocked out the condescending and dismissive way people talked to my mom at the hotel and the shit people said to me at school.
They blocked out the world and created new ones.
Worlds where anything was possible, and I could jump from sorrow to joy or from anger to hope with the click of a button. Where the pace of a story changed the rhythm of whatever I was doing and the intensity of the characters’ feelings turned the simple act of cleaning or walking into something heroic. While I was immersed in those worlds, I didn’t have to wish that I was somewhere else, that I was someone else, because…I was.
Even though I wasn’t a teenager anymore, those were still my favorite books to listen to, and having a story to sink into while I was walking through the city or on the subway still made everything better.
Tonight, though, I was too nervous to hear how Sof’s audition had gone to pay attention to the story. At every footstep outside the door I waited for her to come in, but she still wasn’t home when I finished cooking.
She wasn’t home when I finished eating, either.
Finally, around ten, I heard her key and scrambled over the back of the couch, yanking the door open before she finished unlocking it.
“Dude,” she said. She was grinning and wide-eyed.
“It went well, then?”
“Yeah.”
She unlaced her boots at a maddening pace.
“Well…are you gonna tell me or are you gonna just say one word at a time until I scream?”