Page 39 of Redline Communion

“What?”

“You’re eating it like soup.”

“It’s good soup.”

“It’s pasta sauce.”

“Then it’s bad soup.”

She tries not to laugh and fails. Something in my shoulders loosens along with my jaw, and I realize I hadn’t noticed how hard I’d been holding either.

She points the spoon at me. “You’re doing it again.”

“Eating?”

“Looking at me like I’m the only interesting thing in a five-mile radius.”

“You are.”

“I have sauce on my neck.”

“Collarbone.”

“That correction somehow made it worse.”

I lean against the counter and watch her try to save dinner. I drove her back to campus and kept going after she got out, made it four blocks, then turned around. By the time I parked outside her apartment, I still hadn’t decided what I was going to say if she answered.

Nico landed this morning and put the whole house on edge without raising his voice once. Cassian and Ash had some kind of fight in the garage, and both of them have been walking around since like they’d rather chew glass than explain it.

I didn’t come here to confess any of that. At least, that’s what I tell myself while she drains the pasta.

She lets me carry the bowls while she brings two forks and a fistful of napkins. We eat on the couch because the small table by the window is buried under sheet music, unopened mail, and three mugs she claims are still in use.

“They’re forming a community,” she says when I look at them.

“They’re growing fur.”

“That’s the newest member.”

“Jesus.”

“Don’t judge him. He’s shy.”

She tells me about a professor who spent an entire semester pronouncing Debussy like de-bussy and got far enough into the year that correcting him would’ve required the whole class to admit they’d been discussing it behind his back.

“So nobody said anything?” I ask.

“We were trying to protect him.”

“You laughed every time.”

She does the impression. It’s terrible, and I nearly choke on my pasta.

For twenty minutes, nobody says Offering, claimant, or Nico. Lorelei complains about the choir director changing a key three days before a performance, and I tell her that doesn’t sound legal. She says she checked and apparently musicians have no rights. My stomach hurts from laughing by the time I finish everything in my bowl and scrape up the sauce she left behind.

We end up on her bed with the dishes in the sink and some show running on her laptop. I couldn’t tell you what it’s about. There’s a detective with excellent hair and a dead woman everybody keeps pretending to be sad about.

Lorelei’s legs are draped over mine, her head against my shoulder. I drag my fingers along her arm from wrist to elbow and back again, following the same path until I stop thinking about where the cameras are in every room.