Page 57 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
I’m halfway to sleep when something erupts from my desk, noise crackling through the room so loudly Esther nearly bites my hand in panic.
“Christ,” I mutter, sitting up. Esther bolts off the bed and straight out of my room. The noise breaks the sleeping stillness of the house again, and I hurry to the desk, searching for it. I shove papers aside, knock my mouse so my computer turns on, pull open one drawer and then the next.
The sound crackles again—but this time, there’s something discernible in it. My name. “Ro?”
I yank open the bottom drawer, and there it is: my walkie-talkie.Little orange light blinking.
“Ro?” The sound quality’s horrible, but I’d know Miller’s voice anywhere. “Do you copy?”
I grin like a fool, standing all alone in my bedroom. Man, do I copy. I copy so hard.
“Miller.” I lift the hunk of plastic to my face, one finger on the speak button. “What are you doing?”
“We said no more phones today.” His voice is garbled. My phone’s still at the bottom of my backpack—tossed aside in the corner of my room. “I’m outside.”
“You’re—” I walk over to the window, peer down at our yard. And sure enough, there he is: the white outline of his cast catching the moonlight, his chin tipped up to see me in the dark. He smiles. “You’re outside.”
“Can I come up?”
I practically throw the walkie across the room in my haste to get downstairs. He’s waiting on our landing when I get there, no car behind him in the driveway.
“Did you walk here?” I ask, glancing around him. We live close, but still—it’s nearly midnight, and freezing outside.
“I drove,” he says, glancing up the road. “Parked down the street just in case.”
I look at him. “Just in case.”
He tries to shrug, then winces. He’s in sweatpants and a loose sweatshirt, bulky over his cast. Even in the dark, I can tell his cheeks are pink from the cold. “In case what, Miller?”
He takes a step closer to me, reaching for my hand. I lookdown at our fingers, his thumb over my knuckles. “I just wanted to see you,” he says, so quiet, straight down at our hands. Like he’s nervous. “Without my mom there, or—” He breaks off, and we look at each other. “Now that we’re doing this for real, I just want to be near you. Finally.”
“Yes,” I say, the answer to a question he didn’t ask. It comes out on its own, a breathless rush of a word. “I mean, I—yes, I want—” I’m a useless, fumbling mess over him.
“Okay,” Miller says, laughing into the cold. “I’m glad we’re on the same page.”
When I kiss him, he’s still smiling. I tug him over the threshold and close the door softly behind us, lifting a finger to my lips and pointing toward Dad’s room at the back of the house. Miller nods and follows me up the stairs, my heartbeat gaining speed with each of his footfalls. I’m so exhausted I’m halfway delirious, and Miller here, like this—it feels huge enough to hollow me out entirely.
“Hey, Esther,” he whispers, stopping as she purrs against his ankle. I reach for his hand, pull him into my room, and shut the door. And then we’re alone.
“Wow,” Miller says, eyes raking across the room. “It’s different.”
I follow his gaze, tracking across the cramped space—my unmade bed, the photo strips pinned to the wall of Maren and me skiing on Valentine’s Day three years running, my desk strewn with headphones and external hard drives. My computer pings with a text message notification, the screen still awake from when I knocked it in my rush to find the walkie-talkie.
“Different how?”
Miller points to the wall above my headboard. “I seem to recall a certain One Direction poster.”
“Oh my god.” I yank him, laughing, toward the bed. “There was no One Direction poster.” (There was definitely a One Direction poster.)
“I like it,” he says, smiling at me as he sits down. “Feels like you in here.”
“I like you in here,” I say, like an idiot. Like an embarrassment to myself and every Devereux before me. But Miller only smiles bigger, and uses his good hand to hook a finger behind my knee and pull me toward him.
“Hi,” I whisper, when our bodies are close enough to keep us warm in a blizzard.
He curves his hand around the back of my leg. “Hey.”
I lower myself onto his lap, one leg on either side of him, careful with the cast. When I run my hands into his hair, his eyes close for the briefest moment. “Is this okay?”
