Then she shifted her legs, moving them to either side of my hips, which shot the intensity level up from about ten to a thousand, and I swallowed a groan, wrapping my arms around her and pulling her closer.
God, it was so hot. In every sense of the word.
We were wearing too many clothes. But I could fix that.
I slid my hands beneath the hem of her shirt and started inching it up.
“Zane?” she whispered against my throat.
I was having a little trouble focusing on words. The bra that I’d seen earlier was now beneath my fingertips. “Yeah?” I managed.
“I want to find Ford and the other hybrids,” she said breathlessly.
“Wait. What?” I stopped, with one hand caught in the fabric of her shirt, the other searching for a fastener of some kind at the back of that undergarment that would probably play a starring role in my future fantasies.
I’d heard that wrong. Had to have. I’d caught the “I want” part, but nothing after that had made any sense.
“I figured out another option when you were sleeping,” she said. “Ford and the other hybrids. I want to find them.” She pulled away from me slightly, her cheeks flushed pink and her eyes hazy but slowly regaining focus.
Reluctantly, I let go of her shirt and scrubbed my hands over my face, not entirely sure I was awake. If I wasn’t, I was kind of disappointed at the left turn this sex dream had taken. “Right now?”
She blushed, color spreading up from her neck. “Not this second, no.”
I struggled to focus, when my whole body was screaming at me to close the distance and kiss her again, to get us both down on the floor of the van. “Why do you want to find them?” Avoiding Laughlin’s hybrids entirely seemed like a much better goal to me. Healthier.
Ariane frowned, sharp intellect replacing all the softness in her expression. “So far, we’ve just been reacting to what everyone else does. GTX, my father, your mother. An alliance with Ford and the others could give us leverage, an advantage.” She shrugged and, I noted with regret, pulled her shirt into place. “If we all refuse to cooperate, they can’t have their competition.” Her voice held a note of grim satisfaction.
I sighed, shifting her weight in my lap slightly to make it more comfortable and less distracting. Clearly the make-out portion of this conversation was over. “We’ve seen how ‘persuasive’ GTX can be. I doubt Laughlin’s any different. These hybrids probably spend half the day throwing knives at your picture on the wall,” I pointed out.
She rolled her eyes. “You watch too many movies.”
“Really? You’re saying that to me?” Based on what she’d told me, most of her early education about the outside world—in other words, anything beyond the ten-by-ten-foot space of GTX cell—had come exclusively from movies and TV they’d shown her. And it seemed, given the number of pop culture references she used, those films and shows had had a lasting effect on how she viewed things, a filter over her real-life experiences.
“Fine,” she said with an impatient exhale before pushing herself from my lap and resettling on the van floor across from me, adding distance between us. “You watch too many bad movies. That’s a cliché.”
“And this isn’t?” I asked in disbelief. “You want to approach the bad guys, hoping they’ll want to talk when it’s far more likely they’ll just try to kill you.”
Her gaze skittered away from me. “They’re not the bad guys,” she said, staring at a point somewhere to my left, her shoulders tight suddenly.
Smooth, Zane. Way to insult her. “I’m sorry,” I said with a wince. “I didn’t mean they were bad because they were hybrids. I just meant—”
“They were raised by Laughlin, just as I was raised by Dr. Jacobs,” she said. “That gives us more in common than it divides us.”
Hearing her talk about “us” and mean herself and the hybrids instead of the two of us sent a twinge of worry through me.
“How do you know that they haven’t spent the last fifteen or twenty years just waiting for the chance to prove themselves?” I argued. “What if he’s promised them freedom if they win the trials? What if they don’t even want to be free?”
“Then why would they hate the humans so much?”
Her use of the word “humans” and the cool distance in her tone—as if we were some simple inanimate object, like grapefruits or something—made me shiver despite the heat. It was easy to forget sometimes that she was more than just Ariane Tucker, the quiet girl who’d been in my math class. She blended in, just as they’d intended. But other times, like now, she seemed foreign, unknowable. Like all those Earth-like planets you hear about in the news; we can see them but we’ll never be able to get there.
Perhaps sensing what I was thinking, she reached out and touched my knee. “There’s a chance that you’re right—”
“Just a chance,” I muttered.
She ignored me. “But we have to try. It’s our best option for getting out of this”—she gestured to the van but, no doubt, meant the entire running-for-our-lives situation—“with a chance for any kind of a real future.” She wasn’t pleading, but I could feel her intensity pulling at me. She truly believed this was the best choice.
And technically, she could be correct; we didn’t have enough information about the hybrids to know one way or another. They might, in fact, welcome her with open arms. Just not me.
I swallowed a sigh and rubbed at the headache beginning to throb behind my forehead, whether from the heat or this conversation. “You’re the strategy expert,” I said with a shrug that hurt. “How do you plan on finding our new best friends?”
“She said they’re in public at times,” Ariane said. “In school, even.”
I noticed her avoidance of “your mom” or “Mara.” My mom had managed to wound her with what she’d said, I realized. Not that that was surprising, because my mom had been awful. But Ariane, most of the time, gave the appearance of being pretty impervious to the stupid shit people said about her. Rachel had only managed to goad her into reacting by attacking others. Jenna. Me.
It made me wonder if Ariane was more vulnerable than she let on and better at hiding it. And that made me want to pull her close again, as if that could shelter her from whatever people had said to or about her.
I cleared my throat. “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of public here to go around,” I said, gesturing to the mall and the now-busy parking lot, visible through the windshield.
She glanced away from me. “We do have a source.”
I gaped at her. “You’re kidding. You want to go back to my mom?” There were so many things wrong with that idea, it almost distracted me from the complete insanity of chasing after Laughlin’s hybrids. “She’s a little off her rocker at the moment. You get that, right?”
“She’s not crazy,” Ariane said with a certainty I didn’t feel. “She’s reacting to stress.”
“No,” I said. “Mainlining Swiss cake rolls while watching junk TV is reacting to stress. Putting six extra locks on your door and imagining that you’re being followed is something else entirely. Besides, I don’t think she’d be too excited to help us.” Us being anyone and anything related to Ariane.
Ariane met my gaze directly, reading through my weak subterfuge. “You’re right. She wouldn’t…what’s the phrase? Spit on me if I was on fire.”
I winced. True enough, it seemed. My mom’s guilt over working for Jacobs at GTX was enough to push her into apologizing, but that was likely the extent of it.
“But she’s not going to do it to help me. She’s going to do it to help you,” Ariane said.