Page 48 of Never Thought I'd End Up Here
“Just that,” he says.
“I don’t really know what I like these days,” I admit, except that’s not entirely true. There’s want bundling in my nerves, thrumming through my blood when I lock eyes with him, and I can imagine a number of things I would like to do right now.
He looks away first, twisting in the direction of the front door. “Did you hear that?” he asks.
“Hear what?”
“I think that was Wang Laoshi,” he says, standing up and striding toward the entrance to peer through the peephole. “He’s already patrolling the area.”
We both check the time. It’s already five minutes past curfew.
“Maybe you should sneak out now,” Cyrus suggests. “Before it gets too late.”
“What if he catches me?” I counter, which feels like a totally valid reason for me to stay in his room. To buy myself more time with him. “He’s probably going to have a heart attack if he sees me leaving your room like this.” I gesture down to my little silk dress, and Cyrus very deliberately shifts his gaze up to some point over my head. “And we’llbothbe in trouble.”
Cyrus clears his throat. “Then—”
“Let’s just wait it out until he leaves,” I tell Cyrus, squinting into the peephole again. Then I stifle a yawn with the back of my hand. Now that all my adrenaline has leaked out of me, exhaustion has started pressing in on my eyelids and my brain, pulling my body to the nearest, softest thing: which happens to be the bed in the middle of the room. “Do you mind if I take a nap while we wait?” I ask Cyrus.
He blinks. “Yes. I mean—no, I don’t mind. That bed’s mine. Feel free to …” He waves toward the bed, having seemingly forgotten the English language for a few seconds.
The blankets are luxuriously soft when I slip inside them, my head sinking back against the pillows. Cyrus switches off the main lights, leaving on only the floor lamp. Then he grabs a thick, battered book from his suitcase, flipping it open to the bookmarked page, and settles down on the carpet beside me, his shoulders level with the bed.
Xindong.
Another new word I’ve picked up on the trip. It means, literally, that the heart is moved by something—or more often, someone. A sensation firmer than butterflies in your stomach but more fleeting than love. Throughout the trip, I’ve felt my heart move multiple times, and they were all because of Cyrus.
I felt it when he bent down to help me slide my heels off and apply the Band-Aid, the warmth of his fingers so gentle on my skin. I felt it when he stretched his palm out to let me draw over it. I felt it on the race up the Yellow Mountain, in those moments when he’d shielded me like it was instinct. I felt it when he offered me his sunglasses, and when he set the flower crown on my head. And again, only earlier tonight, when I saw him in the trees. But those were all light movements, small fluctuations, easy enough to dismiss.
Yet now, watching him in the soft orange light, his head bowed as he turns the page, the shift inside my chest feels permanent. It’s a movement so deep it sends shock waves through my system, making my very bones ache. I’m gripped by the overpowering urge to do something reckless, to reach across the space and run my fingers through his hair.
For revenge.The old thought pushes itself forward out of habit, but it sounds weaker by the second, more like an excuse than a true plan. It’s too hard to summon anger, too hard to remember why I came here and why I should want to ruin this boy’s life when really, really I just want to touch him.
I shift forward, letting the blankets drop to my stomach. When my fingertips brush the space between his shoulder blades, he freezes. For a few moments, neither of us speaks. I can hear my heart thrumming faster and faster, the blood rushing through my ears, pulsing at my fingertips in the places they skim the thin cotton of his shirt, just once, lightly, before I retract my hand again.
“What are you doing?” I ask him, even though he’s so obviously reading.
Very slowly, he flips another page. “Practicing gymnastics,” he says, his voice sarcastic as usual, but hoarser.
I lie back on the bed, my head angled toward him. “Can you read the book out loud to me?”
“What, like a bedtime story?”
“It might help me fall asleep,” I say, kicking my feet out to get comfortable. “I’d always doze off in class the second the teacher started reading something.”
His laugh is quiet enough to go unnoticed, if not for the shake of his shoulders. “All right …” He clears his throat.“As the train disappeared into the mist, he vowed he would never allow himself to feel any happiness again. Look what had happened to Caiyun, to Zhuji, before the fall, to him. Joy had made him mindless, complacent, disgustingly weak; it had shaken loose his heart from his bones and sold him the illusion that there could be something else for him in this life. There was nothing else. Not anymore. He shoved the blood-splattered letter deep into his coat pocket. The stars looked terribly brittle that night …”
My eyelids fall shut. I don’t pay attention to the story, only to the cadence of his voice filling the room. He could be reading poetry, a classic, a eulogy. If he’s the one saying it, anything could sound lovely. Nestled in the warmth of the blankets, with my eyes still shut, I tell him, “You have a nice voice.”
He pauses. “You must be tired.”
“What?”
“When you’re tired,” he says, “you forget to hate me.”
“I forget to hate you a lot of the time,” I whisper. It slips too easily from my tongue, without warning, turned by the darkness into a confession.
He says something else then, but before my mind can latch on to it, sleep drags me down into its depths. The last thing I remember is the sound of his breathing, as soft and calming as the rustle of orange blossoms outside my childhood home.
