Chapter 568 | The Resonance Load is Almost Full

We took the corner stools by the window, where sunlight fell across the counter in a warm square. Naomi crossed her legs, and the yellow hem of her dress rode up enough that I had to make a choice between my drink and my dignity. I chose the drink, but only barely, and I made sure she saw me struggle.

The boba tasted the way Naomi had described it in her texts, thick and sweet with burnt brown sugar that coated the back of my throat. The pearls were warm and chewy, and Uncle had absolutely given me extra, because the bottom third of my cup was a tapioca landslide.

“Okay, this is the best thing I’ve ever had in my mouth,” I admitted.

Naomi choked on her straw and slapped my arm with her free hand, and the slap left a sticky brown sugar print on my sleeve.

“You can’t say that out loud in Auntie’s,” she hissed.

“It’s a compliment to Uncle.”

“Uncle doesn’t need that kind of compliment from you.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, her cheeks blazing, and then she laughed so hard she had to put her forehead down on the counter. Her hair spilled across the Formica in pink and black waves. Auntie watched us from the register with an expression of deep and personal suffering.

I sat there sticky and happy, watching Naomi laugh, and I did not check the corner of my eye even once.

The chicken bites were gone and my cup was mostly ice before Naomi went quiet.

She had been tracing a line through the condensation on her cup with one fingertip, around and around. The sun had shifted while we talked, and now the light lay across her collarbone and the shell necklace and the strap of the yellow dress where it dug into her shoulder. She kept her eyes on her cup and spoke very low.

“On Tuesday, if she asks you to choose, what happens to me?”

Her finger stopped moving on the cup. Outside the window, a seagull fought another seagull over a french fry and lost.

She had wanted to ask that on Friday. She had sat in my lap with her chest bare and her hand over my graft and told Blair Davenport that I was hers, and she had been brave and terrifying and wonderful. But she couldn’t ask this question there, half naked, with Blair’s fingerprints melting into my doorframe. She had carried it across fourteen miles of water to ask it here, in a boba shop with a cartoon pearl wearing sunglasses, where nothing could burn.

Past Jace would have deflected. He had a whole drawer of answers for this exact question, and every one of them was smooth enough to slide right off. He would have made a joke, then kissed her and changed the subject.

I set my cup down and turned my stool to face her, and our knees bumped.

“Nothing happens to you,” I told her. “You’re not a slot I’m filling, Naomi. You’re the floor everything else stands on.”

She looked up so fast her hair swung.

“You chose me when I was two hundred and forty pounds of lost,” I kept going, because she needed all of it. “You sat next to me in Theory and apologized for taking the seat, and you were the first person on that island who acted like I was worth the space I took up. If Blair walks into Summit House and asks me to pick, I’ll tell her the truth. The truth is that you don’t get picked, because you were already here before there was anything to pick from.”

Naomi stared at me for a long time without blinking.

Her pink eyes were very wet, and she pressed her lips together hard enough to turn them pale. Then she picked up her cup and took a long, loud slurp of melted ice through her straw, maintaining full eye contact the whole time.

“I hate that,” she announced.

“You hate it?”

“I hate how good that answer was.” She set the cup down with a thunk and jabbed a sticky finger into the center of my chest. “You weren’t supposed to have a good answer. I came here prepared for you to be stupid, so I could be mad at you on the ferry and feel better.”

“I can be stupid on the ferry if it helps.”

“You’re always stupid on the ferry.” She grabbed the front of my shirt with that same sticky hand and pulled me down until our foreheads touched. Her breath tasted like brown sugar when she whispered against my mouth. “Say it again.”

“You’re the floor, Love.”

She kissed me hard enough to rock my stool back on two legs. Her fingers stayed fisted in my shirt, and she made a small, furious sound into my mouth that shot straight down my spine. Somewhere behind the register, Auntie yelled at Uncle in Mandarin. Uncle yelled back one word, and a pot clanged.

When Naomi let go, her lips were swollen and her eyes had gone dark and soft at the centers.

“Auntie says no kissing at the counter,” she reported breathlessly.

“Did she say that, or did you make it up?”

“She said it in Mandarin, so you can’t prove anything.” Naomi slid off her stool, and the yellow dress clung to the backs of her thighs for a second before it let go. She grabbed my hand and yanked me upright. “Walk me to the ferry, and don’t look at my butt the whole way there.”

I looked at her butt the whole way there. She knew, and she swung her hips harder every block to punish me for it.

The ferry home ran slow and lazy across the channel while the sun dropped toward the water and turned everything orange.

Naomi claimed a bench on the stern deck and pulled her knees up under the yellow skirt, tucking herself against my side with her head on my shoulder. Her hair smelled like salt and brown sugar and the jasmine hand cream she thought I hadn’t noticed. Her fingers found mine on the bench and threaded through them, and she held on as if the ferry might try to take me.

“Thank you for today,” she mumbled against my arm.

“You set the rules, so you get the credit.”

“I broke the first rule in four minutes, Jace.”

“You broke it in three minutes and forty seconds, but I rounded up to be nice.”

She pinched my thigh with her free hand, hard, and then she left her palm resting there on my leg, heavy and warm. Her breathing slowed against my shoulder. The engines rumbled through the bench and up into my spine, and the island grew on the horizon one minute at a time.

That was when the line slid in.

It came in at the very bottom edge of my vision, gray instead of gold or purple, the color of a pencil note in a library book. It was so faint that I almost mistook it for a smudge on my eye.

[Resonance load: 8.4 / 9. Graft upkeep recalculation pending.]