Page 86 of Turn

“Fuck.” I balled my hand into a fist and thought of my little brother down there in that ugly world. A shadow fell and I looked up to see Cassie peek into the room with a worried look on her face. I shook my head to let her know it wasn’t a good time and hopefully she got the message to keep Brecken away.

She nodded and left, closing the door to my bedroom.

“You know where I can find him tonight?” I asked Deck.

“I do. But you’re not going down there alone. I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.”

Deck couldn’t be talked out of accompanying me. There was no way in hell I could bring Brecken though. If he knew what was going on he’d insist on tagging along. That couldn’t happen, not when I had no fucking idea what we were walking into down there. And I hated the thought that he’d be here alone tonight, waiting for me to return when I couldn’t even tell him where I was going.

Cassie was in the kitchen with Brecken. She was letting him show her some comic book thing he’d talked me into buying him. Brecken was eating from the casserole dish while flipping the pages but Cassie looked up when I entered the room. I held her gaze for a moment and silently asked her to go along with whatever I said next.

“Hey, Breck,” I said with some forced cheer. “Before you got home I’d been telling Cassie that it’s pretty boring around here this weekend since I keep sticking my face in those books to study for the GED. She offered to take you back to her house until tomorrow.”

Brecken looked at me and then at Cassie, searching for confirmation.

“That’s right,” she said without missing a beat. “My mom and I were thinking you’d like to come help us pig out on junk food and have a Star Wars movie marathon.”

Brecken was still watching me, no doubt puzzled about why I was looking to push him out the door in the middle of our first full weekend at the new apartment. I smiled to let him know that there was nothing wrong, nothing at all.

“Okay,” he said with a shrug.

“Hurry up and pack,” Cassie urged. “We’ll stop and get frozen yogurt along the way.”

Brecken tossed his comic on the table and disappeared into his bedroom.

“Thanks for that,” I murmured to Cassie, keeping an eye on the door to Brecken’s bedroom.

She touched my arm. “What’s wrong?”

“Tristan,” I explained. “There’s been an update on his whereabouts so I have to go to down there, to Emblem.”

“Alone?”

“Deck’s coming. He insisted.”

“Curtis-” she started to say but I didn’t give her time to finish. I pulled her to me and kissed her hard. Earlier I’d promised myself that if it came to this I would go slowly, that I’d show her I knew how to treat her right. Now I just needed to feel her close, to get a brief taste of her before I faced the storm that awaited down in Emblem. Cassie’s mouth was hot and sweet and she kissed me with equal hunger. I pushed my body against hers, grinding so that she’d feel what I really wanted even though in this moment all I could have was a fleeting taste of her lips.

“Be careful,” she whispered when the kiss broke and then she pressed her soft cheek against my chest for an instant before I let her go.

When Brecken emerged he had no idea what had just happened. He joked that he didn’t think the day would come that he’d have to warn me not to study too hard and then he walked out the door ahead of Cassie. She looked back at me one last time with her fingers touching her lips, like she was still feeling the echoes of that incredible kiss. It suddenly occurred to me that it had been our first one. I hadn’t kissed her the night we messed around in the backyard. If I’d kissed her then I wouldn’t have been able to stop. I’d only stopped now because I had to, even though it was the last thing I wanted.

Cassie closed the apartment door without another word while I sat down on the sofa to wait for Deck.

---