Page 32 of Blood Secret

9

Janna

“This is what people do nowadays?”he asked for at least the third time.

And for the third time, I elbowed him. “Could you not sound so obviously out-of-touch? Stop talking about nowadays. Now is now.”

“Right. Of course. It isn’t easy to remember.” He took everything in through the lenses of his sunglasses. “This is what people do for fun?”

I looked around at the view off the observation deck at the top of the Empire State Building. “I thought it would be something you’d like. Seeing the city from this high up for the first time. Seeing how it’s changed.”

“Oh, I don’t need to see how it’s changed to know it has,” he muttered.

My heart sank. Why did it matter if he was happy?

He was obviously determined to feel miserable and negative.

I should let him be that way and leave it.

But he had saved me.

And he had mounted my bookshelves, which for some reason meant even more.

“Can you tell me about those times?” I asked in another attempt to reach out to him. “The last time you were here, I mean. I’ve always been fascinated by the Victorian Era, the Gilded Age. Those days must have been so much more graceful and beautiful.”

“There was a beauty to them,” he admitted. “If one cared about such things.”

“But you didn’t.”

No matter how he tried, he couldn’t make me forget the way he’d smiled when he saw the Van Gogh in that book.

He did have nice memories. I refused to believe his entire life had been nothing but darkness.

“Beauty fades. It never lasts.” He walked from one corner of the observation deck to the other, looking pensive.

“Art lasts,” I argued as I followed him. “The Starry Night lasted. And you remembered it, and it meant something to you.”

“If it makes you feel better to tell yourself that…”

“Stop making fun of me.”

“I’m not. I would never make fun of ignorance. It’s not your fault that you haven’t seen enough of the world to truly understand it.”

“I swear to God,” I muttered, and I poked him in the back to get him to turn around. “I’m tired of talking to the back of your head, and I’ve never in my entire life been called a Pollyanna.”

“What’s…”

“Somebody who’s always positive,” I snapped. “I’m probably the most negative person I’ve ever known, which is one of the many reasons I never fit in with the people around me. I’ve always seen the darkness instead of the light. But you’re, like, perverse about it.”

“You don’t like hearing how much like your Pollyanna you are,” he observed with a wry smile, which only made me want to throw him off the building.

“You’re right, because you make it sound like I don’t have a brain in my head. And that’s not so.”

“Oh, I believe that’s not so,” he murmured.

I couldn’t see his eyes behind those tinted lenses, so I didn’t know if he was being serious or just taunting me.

“Just because you’re all emo—depressed,” I corrected, rolling my eyes, “doesn’t make you unique. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

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