Free The Book of Blood and Shadow by Robin Wasserman Page A

never been up here,” I said, leaning against the balcony and watching Chris and Adriane sway and spin beneath us. The wooden rail creaked with my weight, sign enough to step back and forget the rituals of seduction playing out below.
    “I come a lot,” Max said. “I like the way things look from up here. Small.”
    There was a sudden draft, and I shivered in the blast of frigid air.
    “Cold?” Max inched closer, hand on the lapel of his blazer, as if he wanted to offer it but couldn’t quite muster the nerve. He almost always wore a blazer, khaki in the early fall, corduroy now in the encroaching cold. It wasn’t an unusual uniform amid the New England tweediness of the Chapman quad, but I liked the way Max pulled it off, pairing his jackets with faded vintage T-shirts that looked—as opposed to the crisply colored ironic tees paraded by the occasional out-of-place hipster—genuinely bedraggled, as if they had been plucked from the pile of dirty laundry in his childhood bedroom.
    “I like this,” I said, pinching the thin cotton of his faded Simpsons T-shirt and tugging it toward me. Then, though I’d never thought of doing anything like it before and didn’t technically think of it at all, not in any way that constituted conscious thought as opposed to reflexive, unmotivated, utterly irrational action, I kissed him.
    He let me. For a few seconds—then he pulled back and adjusted his glasses, looking at me like I was a puppy who’d just performed a particularly complicated dance step, then peed on his leg.
    I wanted to die.
    “Sorry,” I said.
    “Why’d you do that?”
    Because I’d wanted to kiss someone. Because my two best friends were best friends with each other, a seamless unit who probably spent the majority of their time together waiting for me to go away. Because his eyes were brown in one light and green in another, magnetic in both. Because I’d worked a miracle—or maybe because I’d done so only by imagining I was someone else, someone intrepid and intense and long dead, and I wasn’t quite ready to go back to being me. “I don’t know.”
    He laughed. Now I wanted to kill him— then die.
    “That’s a terrible reason,” he said.
    “Yeah? You’ve got a better one?”
    He leaned forward. He cupped his hands around my face, one warm hand over each cheek. He kissed me.
    “Because I wanted to,” he said when he let go. “That would have sufficed.”

20
    We kissed only once more that night, on the steps of the church before he went in one direction and I went in the other. And yes, I lay awake half the night replaying the details in my mind, imagining I could still feel his hands on my face, my neck, the curve of my hip, his fingers entwined in mine, his lips, and the way that, for a few seconds, it felt like we were breathing together. I replayed the goodbye, the awkward moment beneath the streetlight, our breath white puffs disappearing into the night, him not asking me back to his dorm room, me babbling something inane about being able to use my father’s car when I asked nicely but sometimes preferring my bike and sometimes not, and then one final, feathery peck on the cheek, the soft touch of my gloved fingers against his. I woke up convinced that if it hadn’t been a dream, it had been an aberration, and not only had I guilted him into a pity kiss— Max , of all people, a college guy, and, more to the point, a college guy who’d never shown any romantic inclinations in my direction—but there was no way I’d be able to return to the Hoff’s office. It would be torture, pretending to translate while I wondered whether Max was staring at me, and what kind of pitying, mocking thoughts were running through his head as he did. Or worse, realize that he wasn’t staring, because he couldn’t care less.
    Suffice it to say, I wasn’t expecting a happy ending, any more than I was expecting my phone to buzz with an incoming text. From him:
Thinking about you .

21
    Max had a