Page 49 of The Towering Sky

“Hey, Aves,” he ventured.

“Hey.” All she was willing to give him was that single word.

She was acutely aware that this was the first time she and Atlas had been alone together since he came home. She had seen him, of course, but always with her parents or Max there as a buffer.

“I was just about to make pasta. Want some?” Atlas offered into the silence.

“It’s almost midnight,” Avery croaked, which she realized wasn’t an answer. She felt like a newborn, discovering her vocal cords for the first time.

“I was at work late.”

Avery wondered, suddenly, if he’d stayed at work late on purpose—if he was avoiding home for the same reason she was. Because he didn’t want to run into her.

She followed him warily into the kitchen, lingering near the doorway as if she might make a quick escape at any moment. “Since when do you cook?”

Atlas smiled, the old half smile that Avery used to love, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Since I live alone in Dubai and got sick of takeout. Though pasta isn’t exactly complicated.”

She watched as Atlas flash-cooked the noodles, chopped tomatoes, shaved down a hunk of cheese. There was a strong, lean grace to his movements that seemed new to her. She felt the same way she’d felt the last time he returned home—like he’d traveled across some unknown distance, had seen and done things that would forever set him apart from her.

And just like last time, she felt an instinctive urge to draw near him. As though, if she got close enough, she might understand some of what he had done.

“What was it like?” Avery leaned forward onto the counter, pulling the sleeves of her sweater toward her wrists.

“Loud. Busy. Not that different from New York, except way hotter outside the towers.”

“Not Dubai.” She shook her head. “I meant—being away.”

“You went away too, if I recall,” Atlas pointed out.

“It’s not the same.” When Avery traveled, she took her identity with her; she never stopped being Avery Fuller. She was jealous, she realized, of Atlas’s anonymity.

“That reminds me. I have a present that I’ve been meaning to give you,” Atlas said abruptly, wiping his hands beneath the UV sanitizer beam. Before Avery could react, he’d disappeared down the hall toward his room.

Moments later he returned, holding something bulky behind his back. “Sorry I didn’t wrap it,” he apologized, and handed Avery a multicolored bundle.

She unfurled it before her, and her breath caught in her chest.

It was a square of handmade rug, about the size of the coffee table in their living room. A vibrant swirl of colors, blue and yellow and orange threads all woven into an intricate pattern that kept revealing more details the longer you looked at it. Avery saw peacocks, miniature trees, fiery sunbursts, and in the center, a radiant white lotus floating against a turquoise pool. The border was edged in gold stitching.

“Atlas,” she said softly, “this is breathtaking. Thank you.”

“I know it’s not a real magic carpet, but this was the closest I could find.”

She looked up sharply. “You remember that?” Avery used to ask Santa for a magic carpet every Christmas. She’d wantedone so desperately that her parents ended up commissioning an engineer to build a child-sized one, with metallic-woven fabric that lifted her a whole four centimeters above the ground, like a hover. They never understood why Avery hated that thing.

This was much more what a magic carpet should feel like.

Atlas was watching her closely. “Where would you go, if it were really magic?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, and smiled. Her fantasies of magic carpet rides had never gone past the part where she left the thousandth floor. “I guess I was always more excited for the flying than for the destination.”

“I know what you mean.”

Avery glanced again at the carpet, the beautiful woven richness of its fibers. “Thank you,” she repeated, taking an unconscious step forward, and realizing a beat too late how close Atlas’s face was to hers.

That was when he leaned in to kiss her.

Some part of her saw it coming, and yet Avery couldn’t pull away. Her body seemed to have momentarily shut down. She couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything except stand here and let Atlas kiss her. His mouth on hers struck something deep within her, like a bell.