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“Have you always been a runner, or is it just my home you feel the need to flee?”

“I’ve always been a runner. All-state track and cross-country back in high school, and marathons starting while I was in college. I try to do at least one a year, if I can.”

Cas cuts me a look. “Impressive.”

“Well, when you grow up with a family who are all extraordinary, you kind of have to be.”

It’s a slip I didn’t mean to make, a comment that wades back into the deep, murky waters we were navigating earlier. I silentlycurse myself for not being able to keep the conversation light when we’ve still got at least ten minutes to go until we make it home.

Cas falls silent for a few long moments before he answers, and though I don’t dare look, I swear I can feel his eyes on me as we roll to a stop at the next intersection.

“Have you ever consideredyouare extraordinary, in all your wonderful humanity?”

I swallow hard, unable to answer, but Cas isn’t finished.

“I certainly thought so, even back when we first met. And that opinion hasn’t changed all these years later.”

Silence falls again, but it’s filled to the brim with a terrible, aching sort of tension that makes me want to throw open the door and hurl myself out of the car.

What the hell am I supposed to say to that?

My breath is too shallow in my chest, and I can’t make myself look at Cas, even when we start moving again and I sense his gaze slip away from me.

“Forgive me,” he says quietly. “That didn’t exactly match the tone of the conversation, did it?”

I laugh softly, but the sound is wrong, forced, and there doesn’t seem to be much air left inside the car as we continue on for a few more blocks.

My lungs get smaller and a good breath becomes harder and harder to come by with each streetlight we pass beneath. When I sneak a glance at Cas, his face is set in tight, tense lines, his eyes determinedly fixed on the road ahead.

Why would he say something like that?

The idea that it might be true, that he might actually see me as someone different than the ordinary, unremarkable person I’ve always felt like rings through me like a broken bell. Discordant, off-key, grating against my nerves, which already feel raw and shaky after the last few days.

I don’t know what to make of it, what to do with it, so I take my cue from Cas. I turn my gaze back to the road and keep it there, stubbornly looking onwards, always onwards, counting the blocks, the minutes, the seconds, until I can get out of this damn car.

16

Casimir

Any lingering good mood between Ophelia and I has soured to something stilted and uncomfortable by the time we make it back to my home.

It’s my fault, and hers, and neither of ours.

The conversation got away from us, that’s all.

Too much fraught history and too many permissive shadows in the car between us. Too much strange, unfamiliar friendliness and a certain type of circumstantial intimacy that’s sprung up in the few days since we’ve called this fragile truce. Somewhere between borrowed bathrooms and power outlets and homemade pasta in a kitchen that never gets used, we both forgot why exactly it was we were so at odds in the first place.

I don’t know Ophelia, not really, but like that night on the rooftop, I’m aching to know just one true thing about her.

Or a hundred. Or a thousand. Because even the bare, plainspoken truths she already gave me tonight don’t feel like enough.

As I pull into the drive and turn off the vehicle, a heavy, expectant silence fills the space between us.

Outside, an unseasonably chilly September night has fallen over the city. It’s a harbinger of the late autumn and winter tocome, and though it’s not unexpected, nor does it make me feel particularly comforted to know all that stands between Ophelia and the cold is the thin walls of her van.

“I still can’t tempt you inside?” The words leave me before I’ve fully thought them through, and they land with a slight stiffening of Ophelia’s posture before she relaxes and shoots me a small, wry smile.

“As tempting as you’ve already proven you can be, no, I don’t think so.”