I folded my napkin, the cloth forming a droopy star. Simon watched it without speaking. “Ready to go?”
Outside, the moon glowed orange and heavy. “Where to next?” I asked as he helped me into the Jeep.
“Anywhere I get to be with you,” he said, his hand lingering on my arm.
“Book Park,” I said. It wasn’t really a park but a bunch of sports fields behind the library. At this time of night it would be deserted.
Perfect.
We sat on the football field’s bleachers, near the end zone. A single halogen light gave everything the look of a vintage photograph.
The field was crammed with pivots, but they were old and faint, easily ignored. I focused on Simon, who was watching me with dark eyes and a shadowed face. “You’re cold,” he said, noticing my shiver.
“I’m okay.”
“Liar.” He shook out the blanket he’d pulled from the back of the Jeep and draped it over my shoulders. “Better?”
“Almost.” The shape of his mouth was soft and inviting even in the half-light. It shouldn’t have felt new, but it did, my nerves tingling, my palms damp. I was as nervous now as I’d been outside Grundy’s, a world away and a lifetime ago.
Something rose up within me—a yearning so fierce it resonated through every cell I had, burning away fear and doubt, stealing my breath and blotting out everything but Simon in the moonlight.
I leaned forward, close enough that we were breathing each other’s air, and he went perfectly still, eyes locked on mine, familiar and foreign. His hand skimmed over my shoulder, along my pulse, around the back of my neck.
“Del,” he said, the word more shape than sound, more question than anything else.
I waited. It seemed vitally important, this time, that it was Simon’s choice. I’d made mine, over and over again. In the Key World, though . . . it needed to be his decision. Here, it mattered. Here, it was real.
His lips brushed over mine—once, twice, three times, more certain with each kiss, hungrier with each touch—and the pale cold moonlight disappeared as I shut my eyes and gave myself over to the heat of him.
He wasn’t the same Simon. His skin felt softer under my fingertips, and he tasted like autumn sunlight, like almonds and honey. The relief I felt—not the same, different, better—was dizzying. The uncertainty dropped away, and in its place was the knowledge that, for once in my life, I was exactly where I belonged. His lips traveled across my cheek, and I nipped at his earlobe, laughing when his arm tightened around me, opening my mouth to his when he came back for another kiss.
The blanket fell away, and I never even noticed, too intent on the feel of Simon’s hands, pulling me closer, the sound of his breathing, unsteady as it skated over my skin. “I dream about you,” he murmured. “About this. Us.”
I smiled against his neck, feeling hazy and languorous. “How’s it stack up?”
“Better,” he said. “It’s always raining when I kiss you.”
END OF SECOND MOVEMENT
BEGIN THIRD MOVEMENT
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I DREW BACK. “Raining? In your dream. In your kissing dream.”
“Too creepy?”
Not creepy. Potentially disastrous, but not creepy. I forced myself to breathe, kissed him again like his words hadn’t upended everything between us. “Tell me about these dreams.”
“We’re going there already? You seemed like such a nice girl.”
“Appearances can be deceiving.”
“They’re not X-rated, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m not a perv.”
“Dreams. Raining. Talk.”
“It’s jumpy. Like bad reception on TV,” he said. He leaned against the bleachers, gathering me in the circle of his arms, running his fingers through my hair and coaxing out the knots. “But it’s you, and it’s raining, and you’re just . . . there. Like I’ve been waiting for you, even if I didn’t know it. And suddenly you’re there, and we’re kissing, and when I wake up, I swear I can still taste you. But they were only dreams. This is better.”
“Because of the rain?”
“Because it’s real.”
He tipped my face up to his and kissed me again, gentle and persuasive, and for a moment longer, I savored him. But when we came up for air, I pulled back, needing to see the truth.
“And it’s always raining?”
“Not always,” he admitted. “The other day, in the library? I was daydreaming. And you were there, but Powell interrupted us. That’s when I decided I was done with dreaming.”
The rain, at least, was a coincidence. Nothing else was. His dreams—and his weird fugue state—weren’t dreams. He was tuning in to his Echoes. His SRT was stronger and more severe than anything I’d heard of.
I drew out an old English assignment from my coat pocket, trying to calm myself.
“What’s the deal with those things?” he asked as I began folding.
“It’s origami.”
“I know that,” he said. “Why do you do it?”
I looked at the paper, seeing the beginnings of a star through his eyes. “Habit. Some people crack their knuckles or twirl their hair. You like to tap your pencil when you’re thinking,” I pointed out.
“And you fold origami?”
“My grandfather taught me. He used to say that each fold was a choice. That I could make whatever I wanted, if I chose carefully.” Make a choice and make a world.
“Can I see it?”
I finished quickly, my fingers unsteady, and dropped it into his outstretched hand. It sat there, white with pale blue lines and smudged pencil marks, an entire reality’s worth of choices in his palm.
“Why do you leave them behind?”
“I didn’t think anyone noticed.” I only did that when I Walked.
“I don’t know when I started noticing them.” He held the star between his thumb and forefinger, spinning it slowly. The gesture was so familiar I wanted to cry.
“Probably the same time you started noticing me,” I choked out as the pieces came together.
All the times his Echoes spotted me. The way he’d zoned out in the library. He started paying attention to me in the Key World after we’d hooked up in an Echo. The threads of his worlds weren’t merely similar. They were interwoven. Like a duet, where the melody and harmony trade places, or the two lines merge.
Like counterpoint.
He touched his lips to my forehead, my eyelids, the tip of my nose. “It took me too long,” he said. “But I’m glad I did.”
He kissed me, sweetly, the sort of kiss that gave more than it took. Something prickled behind my eyelids, and I suddenly understood the biggest difference between this Simon and the others. He knew me. I knew him. Now I was falling for him—not his looks or his hands or the way he felt, but him.
I’d wanted to believe this moment was inevitable. That his feelings for me were so right, so undeniable, he’d fallen for me in two worlds, because the universe wanted us together.
I’d been wrong. Whatever feelings he had for me weren’t because of me, of us, the conversations we’d had and the time we’d spent together. They were residual. A memory of us hooking up in the Echo world. The fabric of the universe mimicking itself and mocking me.
This Simon had never wanted me at all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CRYING IS USELESS. Crying gets you nowhere, and nothing, and in the end, all you’ve done is waste time and energy when you should have been fixing whatever situation made you want to blubber in the first place.
So I didn’t cry when Simon dropped me off at my house, kissing me without realizing his feelings belonged to someone else. I didn’t cry when my dad came out of his bedroom to check on me. I didn’t cry up in my room, alone with the knowledge that my Walking—my reckless, selfish, stubborn Walking—had turned out far worse than even Addie had predicted.