Free Outcast: A Corporation Novel (The Corporation) by RaeLynn Fry

and a cool breeze that wraps around my ankles and shins. I turn around to see her slip through the back door. She unwinds the scarf from her neck and chin and tugs her mask down on top of that.
    “Sorry I'm late,” she says, short of breath. She must have hurried to get here. “I had to run a quick errand after work.”
    “Anything interesting?”
    She stiffens ever so slightly. “Oh, you know. Not really.”
    I can't shake the feeling she's not telling me the truth, but I don't know why she would feel she needs to keep something from me; which makes me want to find out what that something is.
    “That's nice,” I say, instead of pressing her for more information like my instincts tell me to. But then, she smiles up at me, and I'm less suspicious. “How was your day?” I ask.
    “It was a day.” She shrugs her slim shoulders and shrugs off her duster.
    “Hey,” I say, wrapping my arms around her, “about this morning.”
    She shakes her head. “It was nothing. Don’t worry about it. We all have so much on our minds lately.”
    I look her in the eyes, really look at her, and smile. “I love you.”
    She stares at me for a moment, like she's looking for something. “I know,” she finally says, wrapping her arms around my waist and sets her head on my chest.
    I rest my lips on her hair, breathing her in. We stand there and I think to myself, Forget the rebellion. Forget my father. All I want is this, and I’ll pay any price to keep it. “I missed you.”
    “I missed you, too,” she says as she pulls away, but not all the way. She goes up on her toes and kisses me gently.
    That one moment of contact grounds me and brings me back to Earth and puts everything in a new perspective. It's okay if she’s keeping something from me, because if it were important, she’d tell me. I have no doubt. And when I know more about what's going on with my dreams, I'll tell her about them. Then, we won't have anything between us anymore.
    I pull her tighter against me and lift her up a little, kissing her again. “I love you,” I say for the second time. I set her feet back on the ground, her cheeks flushed.
    “I love you, too. But we'd better finish getting this place set up. People will be here soon.”
    “Yeah, all five of them,” I say with a sigh. Karis smoothly removes herself from my hold and lays out the remaining few chairs.
    “I hope more people start showing up. If we want to change things—if we want to make a difference—we're going to need more than a handful of people,” I say.
    “We will. But it will take time. Just wait, more people will come.”
    “That's one of the several things we don't have.”
    “They're scared, Ethan,” she says with sudden irritation. “They're fearful that the Corporation will find out about the meetings, that they'll be punished somehow.”
    “That's a possibility, I'm not going to tell them otherwise, but it's worth the risk. We'll never see freedom if we play it safe.” My voice rises a little. Our tender embrace moments ago seems to never have happened.
    “Hey,” Karis says, “You don't have to convince me. I'm on your side. You just need to stop having such high expectations. This will all come, but in time. If you rush anything, it will only backfire on you.”
    “I know we're on the same side. I just feel all this pressure from every angle, and I feel like I'm doing this alone. When we came back to Neech, I thought it was with the understanding that we were going to do this together .”
    “What's that supposed to mean? I'm here with you; I'm getting people to come to the meetings. I'm trying to figure out what Déjà and the others are up to. I want to take down your father as much as, if not more than, you do. But I'm also being realistic and not ridiculous in my expectations.”
    “Oh, kind of like how you're being realistic with your slapped together quasi-plans of getting your brother back by yourself?” I take a breath and run my hand through my