Free Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves

thinking. “You had to accept a lot today. I don’t wanna blow your mind.”
    “It’s already blown.”
    “You
think
it is. I could vaporize it if I wanted to. But I don’t. Especially now that you know about me. And it doesn’t bother you.”
    He crossed his legs in front of my feet, leaned forward, and rested his chin on my bare knee. The underside of his chin was sweaty, but I didn’t push him away; he was so cute, like a little boy, looking up at me. The late afternoon sun burned in his eyes, letting me see all the way inside him, but not in a spooky lure way. This was something else.
    I folded my hands in my lap; his breath tickled my fingers. “Does it bother other people? What you can do?”
    “It might if they knew about it.” His expression turned grim. “Only the Mortmaine know.”
    “Don’t you like them?” I asked, noting how straight he kept his back even while he leaned against me. “The Mortmaine? I mean, you are one of them.”
    Long silence. Someone was playing “Stoptime Rag” haltingly on the piano next door.
    “They’re okay,” Wyatt said. “But they’re so
rigid
. There’s all these nitpicky rules and stupid channels to go through. Like they’ll help people, but not individuals. If you and a bunch of people are at the park and y’all are about to get eaten by a monster, they’ll come to the rescue; if you’re at home about to get eaten by the same monster, they won’t do shit.
    “Or like at school. They knew about the lure, but since the lure only attacked people who touched the windows, they were just like, well, then don’t touch the windows, dumb-asses.
    “And the Mortmaine have this thing about how they only want people to use standard weapons on hunts. Like, the card I used on the lure? I’d have got my ass handed back to me for using that. They
hate
when I use my cards.”
    “Why? It worked. I don’t know how, but—”
    “They don’t care if stuff works. ‘We can’t take the risk of your experiments blowing up in our face,’” he said, mimicking some hardass he knew. “If the goal is to fight evil, what does it matter what weapon you use? I wish they’d leave me the hell alone and let me do my own thing.”
    I brushed my palm over his head, to see if his buzz cut wasas prickly as it looked. It was. “If you were left alone, you’d hate it. Loneliness gets old in a hurry.”
    He leaned his head into my hand. “Hanna? Do you believe in redemption?”
    “Of course.”
    “Then will you sit in my lap again?”
    I laughed in his face.
    “Seriously,” he said, pretending to be hurt. “If you really believe in redemption, you’ll let me try to replace a bad memory with a good one.”
    Almost before he finished speaking, I slid out of the garden chair and sat sideways in his lap, settling my hips into the cradle of his crossed legs and slipping my arm around his strong shoulders.
    Much better than our time in the cafeteria—no trays, no cell phones, no friends in the way.
    A ghostly breeze filtered through the porch screen and cooled the wet spot Wyatt’s chin had left on my knee. The skirt of my dress had bunched around my hips, exposing a good portion of my legs. Wyatt got an eyeful, but he didn’t try to feel me up. He really was a good boy. It made me glad to know I’d been right about him.
    “Nice?” he said, squeezing my waist.
    “Um-hm.”
    “It’d be nicer if you let me take you out.”
    I laughed again. “What happened to all that no-more-transies-ever crap?”
    “That was before I knew you were cool.”
    I rested my forehead against his and watched his lips pull up into a smile. “Your girlfriend will come after me with a rock if I go out with you.”
    “
Ex
-girlfriend. And Pet ain’t the violent type. She’s … kind of a wuss.” He said it as though he were disclosing a shameful secret, like that she had a tail or a third nipple. “There’s a movie theater just down your street—the Standard. They’re showing French movies