“So, I’m not a ten?”
“Wh-what?”
“A ten. Isn’t that what you said?”
“You were spying on us out on the deck.” I tried to be offended but couldn’t really be with him smiling like that.
He grinned. “You weren’t trying to be quiet.”
I liked how his grin crinkled the corners of his eyes. I liked too much about him. The fact that we would soon be living in the same city was enough to give me heart palpitations, even if the likelihood of our lives overlapping was slim to none.
“Spying definitely lowers all of your scores by, like, half. So, now you’re barely a five,” I told him.
He laughed—a full laugh this time—no half-laughs or snorts. And it seemed to fill the night around us. It felt like it could echo in a cavern with the boom of dragons. It felt like it could echo into my hidden away places if I wasn’t careful.
Mac
A GOOD NIGHT
“Maybe it's the music or the red stain on your lips,
I'm wondering when the right time is to go in for a kiss.”
Performed by John Legend with Bloodpop
Written by Legend / Diamond / Keen / Yatchenko
When Georgie hadn’t been in the house or on the porch, I’d found my way down the shell path to the firepit that I’d helped Eli and Ava build the summer before. I’d found her sitting in one of the Adirondacks, a blanket she didn’t need wrapped around her knees and a book unopened on her lap. Her hair blended with the shadows. Dark. Mysterious. Dreamy.
“Spying can hardly drop me to a five. It’s what I do for a living.”
I shouldn’t have harassed her about saying I was a ten. Hel?heck, she was a ten, ten times over. A hundred. A gazillion. There wasn’t a rating system that went high enough. But it felt good to tease. To get under her skin just a little. She was crawling all over and under my skin.
“You aren’t a spy,” she guffawed.
True. I wasn’t exactly a spy. But I dealt with all the data that came back from them. I dealt with field reports, and black ops, and things that the average citizen would never want to know about. “Let’s just say I’m in the know.”
“Because you spy on conversations that have nothing to do with you.” She wasn’t mad. She wasn’t even embarrassed; she was just giving me sh?a hard time.
“I think that conversation was entirely about me and my best friend.”
She just ignored me, pushing off the chair, leaving her blanket behind, and heading out toward the sand and the water that pulsed against it.
“Where are you going?”
She glanced back. “Why do you care?”
I didn’t respond. I just pulled myself out of my chair and followed her.
She headed toward the water, dragging her feet in the sand and writing something in the dampness. I watched as she wrote with her toes. Long toes on dancer-like feet that made it hard to look away from as they moved through the dark silt.
When she reached the end of her sentence, she kept walking away from the house and down the beach. I eased up on what she’d written. It was a cliché. “Follow your dreams.”
I tagged after her, jogging the first couple steps to catch up. Georgie had never seemed like a cliché kind of person, and this made me even more curious about her than I already was.
“What dreams are you chasing?” I asked her.
She looked over at me as if she’d known all along that I’d follow.