Page 72 of Touch the Sky

“Fucking shitde crisse!”

Jacinthe turns without warning, yelping when she catches me staring at her. Sam startles at the noise, pinning his ears backand jerking his head up hard enough that Jacinthe almost loses her grip on the lead rope.

“Whoa, buddy.Ça va.”

Jacinthe talks him down with a low voice until he’s settled again. Then she looks back at me.

“What the hell are you doing there?”

She sounds more surprised than angry, so I risk taking a few steps down the aisle towards her.

“Shit. I’m so sorry I scared you.”

I pause when I’m still a few feet away, shoving my hands in my pockets and hovering in the middle of the aisle. She waves my apology off.

“Ça va,” she repeats.

I don’t feel as soothed by her words as Sam. In fact, the longer I stand here, the louder my pulse gets in my ears.

“I wasn’t sure if you were coming down here this morning,” she says.

She reaches up to stroke Sam’s cheek, a couple creases forming between her eyebrows while she stares down at the floor

“Of course I came down.”

There’s a hollowness to my words, the ‘of course’ landing flat and discordant.

There’s no ‘of course’ to any of this. We’ve blown up the course.

“I’m not going to ghost you all morning just because…because we…”

I clench my hands into fists in my pockets, urging myself to get a grip. If I can’t even say it, how the hell are we supposed to move past it?

“Because we kissed.”

Jacinthe goes stock-still for a second before she bobs her head.

“We sure did,” she says, her voice half an octave higher than usual. “That, uh, happened.”

I can see a trace of pink staining her cheeks, and somehow, despite the catastrophe we’re facing, I can’t help wondering what it would feel like to brush my thumbs over the rosy patches. I wonder what it would take to make her blush harder.

“Jacinthe…”

Her head jerks up at the sound of her name, and she meets my eyes with an expression that almost looks pained.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

I suck in a sharp breath, like she’s tossed a bucket of ice cold water in my face.

Her gaze drops back to the floor.

“I should not have kissed you like that.”

Like that.

The words seem to hang in the air, an echo of everything that passed between us last night.

Jacinthe shakes her head.