Free As I Wake by Elizabeth Scott Page B

a puzzle we needed to lock us together.
    “Ava,” he says, and then he kisses me.
    I don’t know how to kiss him back, but I want to, I have seen his mouth in my mind every time I close my eyes, so familiar, so—so gorgeous.
    He cups my face in his hands and there are freckles on his face, his nose, a few dotted on his cheeks, and there are gold flecks in his eyes.
    “This is crazy,” he says, but there is wonder in his voice, gladness and nothing more. He is not afraid of me, he is ready for me, for this.
    “Yes,” I say, because it is, but I don’t pull away. I let a lifetime of planning, of training, go in a moment, a heartbeat, and there is nothing in me that wants to stop.
    It is my first kiss and yet it feels like I’m coming home.
    “Come downstairs with me,” he says afterward.
    “Downstairs?”
    “Put the—” He points at the recording equipment. “Put it on a loop, play back all the silence it’s just heard and come back to my apartment. I want—I think about you there, about you sitting with me. Everywhere I go, I think about you. Want to see you outside this attic.” He grins at me. “Have to make sure you’re real, don’t I?”
    I stare at him, shocked. I thought—I could believe he wanted me. That is a simple thing. But this, what he’s saying—this I don’t understand. You don’t invite those who can destroy you into your life. You do not ask them to be part of it. Whatever I feel when I see him, I’m still SAT.
    I could destroy him.
    Myself.
    “Okay, the hall, then,” he says, still smiling. “Just come downstairs and stand in the hall with me. Then I won’t have to imagine what it would be like to see you there. No one is listening there, right?”
    I nod because this is the one room in the entire building where you can speak without your voice being heard by machines that note every syllable and save it forever. I have heard him in the hall, opening his door. I have waited to hear him breathe. I have waited to hear him.
    “Then out,” he says. “The bar two streets over, at the end of the block. Come late tonight. The lighting always goes bad then.”
    Of course it does. All lights do, all the power in the city being turned toward the computer that analyzes every word that was recorded starting then, filing everything away while the rest of the city wheezes darkly, supposedly asleep.
    “Tonight?” I say, and my heart is pounding more than it was before, when our skin was pressed together, and I see—I see us sitting together in the sun, our feet in the sand, together, looking out over a wall. It should feel like pretend, but it doesn’t, it feels right, and then Morgan leans over and kisses my hands.
    I shake my head, trying to clear the images in it out.
    But I already know they won’t leave.
    “You have to go now,” I say, frantic, and when he smiles at me, I ignore the way my heart twists, painful joyful scared all at once, and say, “Morgan, you have to go.”
    Wake up.

26.
     
    “WAKE UP,” I hear and come back to myself, to now, gasping, and see I am standing in a shadowed corner of the school, tucked out of sight.
    And with me is Morgan. Not in the attic, but here, at the high school.
    “What happened? You—you were staring but you didn’t seem to see me. Are you all right?” he says, wrapping his hands around mine and I know this, I know his touch.
    I know him.
    And then I hear Jane saying “Ava? Ava?” her voice rising each time in panic, as if she’s afraid I’ve disappeared.
    “We should leave now,” Morgan says. “I know a way to get back home. Trust me?”
    “No,” I say without thinking, but it’s true, it’s right, the word comes out strong, and his face drains of expression, color, as if I’ve hit him. As if I’ve made something inside him bleed away.
    “Ava,” he says, his face going so pale the freckles on it stand out sharply, dark brown against chalk white, and Jane’s voice comes closer, still saying “Ava?”
    They both