Page 105 of Break Your Fall

“Ew,” I say through a laugh.

“No,” Camille tells her, lifting her grip on the plate again. “And you won’t be watching me eat.”

My sister’s lips purse around a small grin. “Well, I did tonight.”

Camille simply chuckles before she wanders back to the sink with my plate, and Jessa is still grinning as she nudges her shoulder against mine, her subtle solidarity giving me warmth.

“Hey, Pinkie,” Banks calls out as he starts toward me and my sister.

“And the no brain,” Camille smarts back with sharp annoyance at him blocking her path. His mouth falls to a flat line and she lets out a laugh as she moves past him. “You walk into these yourself.”

“Hey, Strawhead.” Jessa gives Banks a nickname of her own when he’s standing in front of us and I bounce against the cushions.

“That’s what I say! Well”—I look up at Banks with a wink attached to my smile—“we call him Scarecrow.”

“My hair is not straw,” he argues to my sister, then to me, “I don’t even look like a crow. And I’m not afraid of anything,” he finishes with a point of his finger, then throws his hands up. “Now I forgot what I was gonna say.”

Tommy, overhearing Banks’s argument on his way back in here from the hall, creeps up behind him, his eyes on me with his finger over his lips, puckered in aShh.

“AHH!”

Banks hollers at Tommy’s shout, flailing his arms on a jump, and laughter erupts throughout the room.

Along with aclangfrom the kitchen and a scolding from Julian. “Dammit, Tommy.”

Tommy holds his hand out toward Julian and Camille in apology as he laughs, then walks backward with a spring in his step, mocking to Banks’s glare, “Not afraid of anything.”

“Jump scares don’t count!”

“Wrong,” Tommy says to Banks’s disapproval. His smiling eyes meet mine and his face instantly shifts to the look I’ve come to recognize as only for me.

For this small moment, it’s just the two of us, his feelings for me reaching out in the way he holds my gaze, my feelings for him tugging, too. They touch me in the tingles, in the goosebumps that spread along my skin now without his even being near me, in the ache in my chest, in the stirring in my lower belly.

I flush down at my water glass, wondering how mine touched him.

“You don’t let a guy like him get away,” Jessa nudges close to my ear after spying our moment.

I twirl the glass, watch the last of my water slosh up against the sides, then sit it on the coffee table, the water I’ve already swallowed now sloshing too much in my stomach to drink the rest.

“I’m not.”

“And he knows you don’t let a girl like you get away, either.”

Her words are a compass, pointing my eyes back to Tommy who’s now at the sink, his eyes already waiting for mine like I knew they would be. He watches me over his shoulder, and his gaze is soft and warm and beckoning.

He’s waiting for you.

I’m waiting for me, too.

31

Twilight Zone

Reyna

Tommy.

I awake the next morning from a restless night’s sleep with his name on the tip of my sleepy tongue. I move from my side to my back, taking another moment to close my eyes.

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