Page 80 of One Adult, Please

THE QUIET PART

GRACE

It's been fourteen hours since Joel's face was close enough to mine that I could count the colors in his eyes, which is two. They're brown with a ring of darker brown near the center. Fourteen hours since Gregory, whose sole purpose in the undead ecosystem is apparently romantic sabotage, shuffled up in his stupid fanny pack and his stupid Hawaiian shirt and ended whatever was about to happen.

Gregory is my nemesis. Gregory showed up at the exact moment when things were about to become more things and instead they became nothing because Gregory exists. Gregory is still out there. He survived the clearing because he's the cockroach of wrong people, the one who's always somewhere else when we sweep.

I'll deal with Gregory later. Right now I'm dealing with something worse, which is the fact that Joel and I have been doing a perimeter check for the last forty minutes and neither of us has mentioned the kiss and the not-mentioning is so loud it's echoing off the fish tube.

The sharks can hear it. They're judging us.

Joel is three feet ahead of me.

The WonderSphere polo is gone. He found a button-front maintenance shirt in the supply bedroom this morning, dark blue with the park logo over one pocket, and apparently I can be emotionally compromised by more than one kind of uniform.

I watch the way his head turns slightly when he checks, scanning for threats that aren't there because nothing can get through the acrylic and Joel knows this but checks anyway because Joel is Joel and Joel doesn't trust anything he can't verify personally.

He's been doing it all day. The not-quite-looking-at-me while also definitely looking at me.

"Panel seven is holding," he says.

"Great. Love panel seven. Big fan."

He glances back at me. "You're being weird."

"I'm always weird. You said you were used to it."

"I said I was adjusting."

"Did you finish adjusting?"

"No." He turns back to the panels. "I don't think I'm going to."

We walk. The sharks swim. Lenny the sea turtle glides past unhurried, like an animal that never once stressed about a kiss because sea turtles don't have lips, or maybe they do, I don't actually know the oral anatomy of sea turtles and this isn't the time for marine biology.

"Joel."

"What."

I don't know what I was going to say. I had words. Then he turned around and looked at me and they scattered like startled fish.

"I just..." I wave my hand. The gesture that means everything and nothing. "Last night. That happened."

"It did."

"And then Gregory happened."

"Also true."

"And I've been thinking about it. Not the Gregory part. The Gregory part can rot. But the first part, the part where you..." I gesture at his mouth. At my mouth. At the space between us that feels smaller than it should be.

"The part where I kissed you," Joel says.

"Yes. That part."

"What about it?"

"I don't know. I don't have a thesis statement. I'm not presenting a research paper. I keep thinking about it and I can't stop thinking about it and my brain has like forty-seven tabs open and they're all that moment and some of them are playing audio and I can't figure out how to close them."