Page 78 of The Towering Sky
“Maybe you don’t take things seriously enough.” Rylin meant it as a joke, but her delivery wasn’t quite right. Cord looked hurt.
“I takeyouseriously,” he countered.
“Sorry.” Rylin glanced back down at the view, still pensive. “I wish my mom were here. She would have loved to see this.”
“Really?” Cord sounded skeptical, as if he couldn’t picture Rylin’s mom up here—which he probably couldn’t, she realized. He had never known her mom as anything except the maid.
She tried not to sound defensive. “She loved adventures. She was the one who always dreamed of getting to see Paris.”
Cord seemed to have nothing to say to that. He never did, Rylin thought in chagrin, not when the conversation got heavy like this. For someone who’d suffered plenty of losses of his own, he wasn’t very good at talking about them.
He settled down on the couch, letting her study the view insilence. Eventually Rylin came to sit next to him, leaning her head on his shoulder. “Tell me everything I missed this past year,” she demanded.
“Where should I begin?”
“At the beginning,” Rylin teased, and Cord smiled.
“Fair enough. I guess the first story is what happened to Brice on the way to Dubai....”
Rylin tipped her head back, listening to Cord’s smattering of anecdotes from the past year: the trip he and Brice took to New Zealand, the time his cousins came to visit from Rio and overstayed their welcome, the prank Cord pulled on his friend Joaquin. She listened, and yet she didn’t actually care that she had missed any of these things.
Cord had a tendency to focus on the big, epic moments, things like thisSkyspearcruise. But a relationship wasn’t made or broken on the dramatic stories. It was built the rest of the time, during the drowsy late-night conversations, the laughter over a bag of pretzels, the quiet study sessions after class.Thatwas what Rylin loved.
She realized that Cord had finished talking, and was looking at her in a way that brought color to her cheeks. “I’ve missed you, Myers,” he said. “This might sound weird, but I missed having you to talk to more than anything else. There were a lot of things that I only talked about with you.”
Rylin reached for his hand. She knew what he meant—that underneath the romance, they had also been friends. “I missed talking to you too.” She really had missed him, she thought, even when she was with Hiral.
She wondered how Hiral was doing right now. Maybe his floating city was big enough to be visible from this high up.
“Look.” Cord nudged her gaze toward the window, where golden flames licked above the horizon.
Rylin gasped. They were flying directly into the sunrise.
Banners of fire spun out into the darkness. It was dazzling, blinding; Rylin wanted to tear her eyes away but she couldn’t, because there it was, the sun, the closest star within reach. Her whole being felt flooded with a rush of glorious lightness. To see the face of the sun, she realized, was a lot like falling in love.
“You know,” Cord said with a mischievous smile, “the natural state of low orbit is actually zero-g. The gravity in this thing is optional.”
“Is it?” Rylin felt a delicious shiver trail down her spine. She could guess where this was going. “I’ve never kissed anyone in zero-g.”
“Neither have I, but there’s a first time for everything.” Cord reached for the touch panel on the wall and tapped the gravity controls to off.
Rylin didn’t realize how tightly she’d been clenching the armrest until the gravity had melted away, and she was drifting upward. She quickly let go. How ridiculous of her to be nervous; this wasn’t exactly her first time with Cord. But she couldn’t help the way she felt.
She floated upward, her hair waving and floating about her in a dark cloud, as if lifted by her heartbeats. Cord had maneuvered himself to her side; he stretched out his hand, reaching for her, and when her fingers laced with his he pulled her to his chest.
They were fumbling and awkward at first, getting used to the lack of gravity. When she lifted Cord’s shirt over his head and tried to toss it aside, it didn’t stay put the way it would have normally, but kept hovering alongside them like a troublesome gnat. Rylin swatted at it. Suddenly she was laughing, and Cord was laughing too; and she knew with an unshakable certainty that this was right.
And then they were no longer giggling, because their mouths were pressed together, all the awkwardness between them dissolved. Rylin wondered why she had ever doubted them. How could she when her skin was on fire, when Cord’s skin was her skin and they were tangled like this, hot and slow and elemental all at once?
Their ship kept on orbiting farther into the sunrise, the dawn bathing their bodies in a warm golden glow.
LEDA
LEDA COULDN’T STOPthinking about Watt.
It was the strangest thing, but her anger toward him was deflating. It felt like an artifact left over from long ago; like something that belonged to a harder, more bitter Leda, the Leda who was still feuding with her parents. Who had never visited Eris’s grave.
Leda no longer believed that Watt was some kind of human trigger for the darkest side of her. Not anymore. Maybe because she had confronted her darkness—had looked it squarely in the face and wrestled it away—and now there was nothing left for her to fear.
