Page 35 of Ly to Me

“As much as I wish I could keep you here, my parents are going to start to worry about me bringing my meals up to my room. Do you need to go home for anything, or do you finally want to come out of hiding and go meet them?”

Lyra shook her head, her brown hair fanning around my chest as she drew lazy circles on my skin. I really wanted to keep her in my room forever, to lock out the rest of the world, and only go outside to watch her watch the butterflies. She seemed to do that through my windows just fine, though.

“You sure?” I shifted beneath her, using my hand to guide down the hard-on that was going nowhere these past two days.

“I’m sure, Car. I like being here. Unless, you want me to—” She started lifting from my chest and I locked my arm around her back, keeping her close to me. “Or not.” She giggled as I kissed her forehead.

“I’d stay here forever if I could. But school starts up again tomorrow, and you can’t wear my clothes to school. Don’t you need to tell your mom or dad about you being here?”

“I can throw on one of your hoodies, no one would know the difference. No one looks my way at school, anyhow. Well, ’cept you.” I waited for her to answer my question, but when she didn’t, I figured maybe she didn’t feel like explaining her family dynamic.

I swallowed as I stared up at the ceiling. “That’s not true, Ly.”

“Yeah, it is. Don’t act like I don’t hear what everyone says about me—calling me the weird girl. I’m no stranger to it. I just don’t care what they think.”

I smiled as I shifted my hold on her. “You’re better than I am in that department.”

“Nah, you don’t care, either. Saw that when you tossed Noah against the wall in front of half the school.”

“Noah can go to Hell.”

She snickered. “Yeah, that’s what I think about everyone that isn’t you.”

“Why is that?”

She paused, her finger tapping rhythmically on my chest. “Well, for one, you didn’t bat an eye at my house or my bedroom.”

I internally winced, thinking back to that day a few weeks ago when I had, in fact, hesitated upon seeing where she lived. Where she calledhome. I was ready to call it off then but for an entirely different reason than I would now.

“That’s all?”

“You see my weird and make me feel normal. I’ve never felt normal before.”

I chuckled. “Just what every guy wants to hear, ‘You make me feel normal’—doesn’t really have a good ring to it, now, does it?”

She smiled, and I had to shift once again at the flood of heat going straight to my groin. “I meant it in a good way. You don’t look at my room and think I’m a freak for collecting butterflies, for having them pinned and framed on my walls that have more chunks of paint missing than not. You don’t judge me for my clothes or for sitting alone at lunch.”

“Well, you don’t sit alone anymore.”

She shuffled closer and kissed my cheek. “No, I don’t sit alone anymore.” I played with her fingers, sliding my thumb over the tips of each one while staring at her eyes. I’d never seen a prettierpair of brown eyes than hers before. They were warm like the shade of honeycombs submerged in a jar of honey, yet darker in the center like the earth turned when you dug too deep. And I didn’t want to stop digging. “Are you okay? You keep wiggling like—”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” I slid my hand to cup her cheek. “Just keep kissin’ me before I have to take you home.”

She pouted, then gave in, sealing her soft lips to mine. If I thought I’d dug too deep before, now I was falling through some hole in the ground, unable to stop.

14

Lyra

The Inferno

Night came quicker than I’d expected. Carver left after he made a comment that I’d been the one in the wrong for how our past panned out—that it had beenmeand nothimwho fractured what we were and caused me to become the person mymama raised me to be. After seeing him place his high-stakes bet to win the facility, I doubted he changed at all. Well, that, and the fact that he kept trying to remind me how his fingers and tongue felt on my skin.

As if I’d needed more reminders of him.

Instead of focusing on my hatred, I tried to focus on the positive aspects—in thirty days, I’d get twenty-thousand dollars, and use that to get the life I’d been trying to have ever since I’d left this town.

In the meantime, I’d have to keep avoiding Carver and his mood swings. It was almost like sometimes he was the same boy I knew all those years ago, and then a fire would burn in those pretty blue eyes and take that boy down with them, igniting a man I’d only seen occasionally when we were young and stupidly in love.