Page 40 of The Casualty of Us (Philosophies of the Heart Duet #1)

“Oh.” My brows fall. “I didn’t know you were still reading it.”

“In all my spare reading time, yeah.” He scoffs a half-amused sound. “But I still wanted to finish it before the summer.”

“Why?” I frown, not really getting it. “I told you it’s a sad story.”

“You really don’t like it?” He eyes me curiously. “Any part of it?”

“Maybe the flowers, I guess.” I shrug unhelpfully. “The symbolism of that moment for her at the end. Honestly, I’m not a big Shakespeare fan.”

“Hmm.” He lets go of my hand before lifting his own to run a finger down my nose. “What’s wrong with Shakespeare?”

“A lot.” A giggle bubbles past my lips and his lift with it. “But I don’t know…I guess I’ve always found his characters to be a little off-putting.”

“How so?”

“In reason.” I frown. “Repeatedly.”

“Ah.” The sound comes with a flash of victory in his eyes. “I see.”

“See what?”

“The conundrum there.” He lifts his finger from where it’s running over my cheek to tap it against my forehead gently. “You can’t comprehend Romeo not wanting to live without Juliet or Hamlet playing such a pivotal role in driving Ophelia mad.”

I just stare at him for a second, a bit taken aback by the depth of his perception, but I guess after a semester’s worth of penance reading, he’s learned something.

Even if that something’s more about me than the books.

“No.” I clear my throat quickly. “No, that I can understand perfectly actually…” I blow out a breath to ease some of my nerves before admitting, “What I can’t get past is why Juliet was stupid enough to fall for a boy that loved a different girl two seconds before her and Ophelia giving Hamlet the time of day to begin with.

” His eyes flare with surprise, and I finish quietly, “I understand being willing to die for someone, but they need to be worthy of that kind of devotion too.”

He pauses. “That’s fair.” His gaze drops to follow the path his fingers are tracing on the lines of my face as he presses further. “But what if it was real? What if Romeo really did fall in love with her just like that?”

“Then…” I frown at him with another sigh. “They should have been smart enough to plan an escape that didn’t involve fake deaths and poor communication skills.”

A real laugh escapes on his next breath. “Very romantic, O.”

“At least they would have been alive instead of gone to eternal oblivion.” I shrug, watching him closely and seeing the moment something sparks that has his fingers pausing their path.

“Can I ask you something?”

“When has me saying no ever stopped you?”

“Also fair.” He lifts the hand from my face before propping it under his head to hold himself up. “Do you believe in God? Or a god?”

I blink, quickly parrying instead of answering, “Do you?”

His eyes hold mine for a beat before drifting. “I think…” he starts slowly. “I think I have to.”

Something about the tentative surety behind the words makes a warmth flare in my chest that has me teasing him softly. “Not even Ollie’s that optimistic.”

“It all has to mean something more.” His gaze comes back to mine, intensity filling it expectantly. “You don’t?”

I let a second more pass before giving into the inevitable. “No,” I sigh softly around the truth because I don’t want to take away from his belief. “No, I don’t.” Quickly correcting myself with a frown. “Or I guess I’m a ninety-ten kind of person.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t discount the possibility, just like I don’t discount the probability of the multiverse.” Another sigh leaves me a little more wearily this time, and I shrug while concluding. “I just think, out of the two, the latter is more likely.”

“So…” He trails off, unwinding our hands enough to tap each of my fingers against his own. “What do you believe in then?”

“Myself.” I run the tips of my fingers back against his with the quiet answer before grinning. “Most of the time.” I tick off the rest quickly. “My family. Science. Facts.”

“That two plus two will always be four.” His dimples flash, face clearing for a second before it falls again with something about this obviously bothering him.

“Doesn’t anything ever happen that seems a little too coincidental to you, though?

Like there’s some hand reaching down and orchestrating things? ”

“I think if you search deep enough, you can find a connection between almost anything that you want to.” I give him another helpless shrug, a frown tugging at my lips because— “I think people want there to be some bigger purpose so they sleep better at night,” Immediately hopping on the next train my mind supplies.

“Because without it they’d have to face the pangolins, Hayes,” I half joke, despite the levity of the topic.

“They’d have to accept that in sixty million years worth of evolution, we’re the only thing that’s come close to wiping them out through nothing but our own carelessness.

That we’ve become the asteroid to the earth. ”

“But what about…” His eyes narrow on me. “Miracles. Love.” He pauses, clearly searching, before countering softly. “The things you truly can’t explain in life.”

I frown harder at him. “Like what?”

“Like the trust you have in your brother.” He runs a finger down my palm. “That’s pretty unshakable, yeah?”

“That’s different,” I argue back. “That’s—”

“Ollie told me once that he knew you were alive for those entire three days.” His words have mine dying in my throat as he lifts a brow at me. “That he could feel you.” I scowl openly at him, knowing where he’s going with this. “How do you explain that?”

I purse my lips for a second before giving him another piece of me. “Did you know that we’re semi-identical?”

His brows shoot down sharply. “What do you mean?”

“One egg.” I tap back against his hand with a sigh. “Two sperm at the same time.” The instant surprise on his face has me giving him a little grin. “A rare phenomenon, apparently, that we split the way we did. I just got the girl swimmer, and he got the boy one.”

His mouth pops open with a quiet, “What the fuck?”

“I know,” I snort. “It’s weird, but what I’m saying is…

we were quite literally torn from the same cell.

” His eyes flick between mine a couple of times, and I clear my throat.

“I think faith is beautiful. I have faith in Ollie. In myself and my parents.” Pausing for a beat before just putting it out there because there’s no way to tiptoe with this one.

“It’s religion that throws me. Awful things have been done in the name of it, and I struggle to understand any type of god that would leave his creations to that. ”

His eyes spark, face clearing. “It’s the accountability for you.”

“Exactly.” I give him a small nod and look down to where his fingers are still tapping against mine again. “You can’t give a child instructions only to abandon them and then judge them for what they did when you weren’t there.”

The words slip out before I can think them through, and his fingers go still, making me lift my eyes back in time to catch him swallow before he starts tapping away again. “And there’s no part of you that second-guesses yourself when it comes to that?”

“These days all I do is second-guess some things.” I scoff with the confession, my stomach flipping at the fact that he’s the main one.

“But no…I decided a long time ago that if I was going to be a good person it was going to be because I chose to, not because someone told me to.” I shrug with the truth, holding his gaze and not looking away from the intensity swirling there.

“So I guess if you put a gun to my head…I’d say that knowledge is my god, and anything unexplainable is just because we haven’t advanced enough to have earned the answer to it yet. ”

“Faith over religion.” His mouth quirks up on one side with a hint of a dimple. “That there’s some secret of the universe that ensures the pangolin survives.”

I try to fight the grin tugging at my lips, telling him seriously, “Written into its code right there in between the specks of dark matter.”

“That’s a little dark, Ophelia Sage.” He unwinds our hands fully, bringing his own up to trace the line of my jaw while finishing softly. “But I made a deal, so I’ll believe enough for the both of us.”

I know immediately that he’s talking about something else too.

About whatever is left of what could have been us at this point.

And the broken eggshells we’ve been so carefully tiptoeing around for the past couple of months and all those almost moments have my brows falling fast. Completely unsettled by the idea of letting him go for a whole summer while still being in this place.

“What deal?” I whisper.

“That’s my secret for now.” His fingers lift to run across my brow, smoothing the scowl just as thunder rumbles through the room. “What I would give for a peek into that head of yours.”

The storm finally closing in— “I don’t think you’d like it.”

“Why?”

“Because you think I’m better than I actually am.”

His fingers freeze and my stomach flips, reminding me of exactly why I’ve avoided him.

Because this close with a couple of strands of black falling across his brow…

I can almost pretend. “I can justify anything, Hayes, that’s my problem.

I had to ask to be reminded of the pangolin to not turn into the same kind of monsters I’d just left. ”

His fingers lift. “Freckles—”

“Kiss me.”

Everything stops as the demand slips past my lips, his hand pausing halfway through the air with his eyes locked on mine.

“Ophel—”

“Kiss me,” I whisper, heart picking up pace in my chest again. “No last year. No next year. Just right here.”

For it to feel right for just a second again.

His fingers flex midair. “Freckles…I didn’t come h—”

“I won’t ask again,” I warn him softly, my voice coming out hushed and stomach caught up in a riot as I stand on the edge. “Last chance.”