Page 19 of Star-Crossed
The embarrassing part wasn’t that he’d said it. The embarrassing part was that he’d memorized at least twenty more.
You’re so hot, you denature my proteins.
Can I be the phasor to your electron and take you to an excited state?
You make my anoxic sediments want to increase their redox potential.
Like technology later would, biology had appealed to Cy for one simple reason: a peek behind the binary curtain. A glimpse of the mysterious information system that ran through absolutely everything from duckweed to digital signatures.
Fucking. Nerd.
A side of his personality Cy had been too busy playing jock to let anyone see.
“Biology was the only subject I was decent at.” He shrugged. “You work with what you’ve got.”
Lyra picked at the soggy label on her beer bottle. “It made me laugh.”
That,he remembered.
In the strange half-light of the bus with a giant orange supermoon playing hide-and-seek with the tree line, he’d seen her face as clear as day. He’d sat there for what seemed an eternity as she pinned him with that expressionless, sharp-eyed gaze that some of their classmates had diagnosed as “resting bitch face.”
And then, suddenly, she’d burst out in a single, unselfconscious bray of laughter before quickly clapping her hand over her mouth.
Because everyone else on the bus had been asleep. It had taken him that long to work up the nerve.
“I was just surprised you didn’t kick my ass into the aisle.”
“I was in shock.” Setting her beer back on the table, Lyra shifted positions, curling her knees up onto the cushion…and closer to Cy. “How would you react if the scary, angry jock who had never even acknowledged your existence plops down by you all of a sudden and hits you with a terrible botany-based pick-up line?”
“Terrible?” Cy clapped a hand to his heart, feigning hurt. “Come on. I slaved over that one.”
One corner of Lyra’s lips lifted in a wry twist. “You found it on Reddit, and we both know it,” she said, poking his shoulder.
The voluntary physical contact only half offset his shock. Lyra had hit him with several pieces of life-altering information in the last ten seconds.
That she’d seen him as angry and scary. That she’d correctly guessed the origin of his source material.
When he wasn’t getting his head cracked on the football field or begrudgingly scaling giant oaks and elms to help his dad, Cy had been stalking Dungeons & Dragons strategy forums to prepare for the online game he’d been part of for ten years now.
A hobby not one other soul—besides Kiki—knew he had.
Everyone else had assumed the long hours spent with the blue glow of the computer monitor leaking beneath the threshold of his locked door were spent jerking it to online porn.
And Cy had been happy to let them.
Explaining how the eclectic group of gamers was his lone escape from the reality of the person he’d loved most in the entire world slowly—then quickly—dying on the other side of his bedroom wall would haveruinedhis image.
So he’d just hit people a lot instead.
An option that wasn’t available to him when he’d returned to town to recover after his accident. Now, he just kept a smile plastered on his face to cover the molten core of self-pity and loneliness that haunted his every waking moment.
Like a goddamn adult.
“Busted,” Cy admitted. “I knew I was going to make an idiot of myself, but I figured if I could at least do it in a way you didn’t expect, it might buy me a few extra seconds before—”
“I insulted you so you’d get up and leave me alone?” She shot him a knowing side-eye.
“Pretty much.”
