Touch (Denazen #1)(4)

Without taking his eyes from me, he gathered the clothes in his arms and stared. His expression was so intense I had to remind myself to keep breathing. Something about the way he watched me caused my stomach to do little flips. The eyes. Had to be. Crystalline blue and unflinching. The kind of stare that could make a girl go gaga. The kind of stare that could make this girl go gaga—and that was saying a lot. I wasn’t easily impressed by a pretty face.

He seemed to accept this because he gave a quick nod and slowly backed out of the room and up the stairs. A few minutes later the shower hissed to life.

While I waited, I changed out of my muddy clothes and started a pot of coffee. Even if Dad didn’t find a strange guy in the house when he got home, he’d be pissed about the coffee. I couldn’t count the times he’d told me the El Injerto was strictly hands off. He even tried to hide it—as if that would have worked. If he wanted me to leave his coffee alone, he should go back to drinking the Kopi Luwak. No way—no matter how much I loved coffee—would I drink anything made from a bean some tree rat crapped out.

I’d almost finished folding the laundry when Kale came down the stairs.

“Much better. You look almost human.” The pants were a little baggy—Kale was a few inches shorter than Dad’s six three—and the shirt was a bit too big, but at least he was clean. He still had his feet crammed into my favorite red Vans. They were soaked. Had he worn them in the shower?

“Your name?” he asked once he’d reached the bottom, the sneakers sloshing and spitting with each step. He had worn them in the shower!

“Deznee, but everyone calls me Dez.” I pointed to the soggy Vans. “Um, you ever gonna take my sneakers off?”

“No,” he said. “I cut myself.”

Maybe something wasn’t screwed on right. There was a mental facility in the next town—it wasn’t unheard of for patients to get out once in a while. Leave it to me to find the hottest guy in existence and have him be a total whack job. “Oh. Well, that explains it all then, doesn’t it…?”

He nodded and began wandering the room again. Stopping in front of one of mom’s old vases—an ugly blue thing I kept only because it was one of the few things still in the house that belonged to her—he picked it up. “Where are the plants?”

“Plants?”

He looked underneath and inside, before turning it over and shaking it as though something might come tumbling out. “This should have plants in it, right?”

I stepped forward and rescued the vase. He jerked away. “Easy there.” I carefully placed the blue monstrosity back on the table and stepped back. He was staring again. “You didn’t think I was going to hit you or something, did you?”

In eighth grade I’d had a classmate who we later found out was being abused at home. I remembered him being skittish—always twitching and avoiding physical contact. His eyes were a lot like Kale’s, constantly darting and bobbing back and forth as though attack was imminent.

I expected him to avoid the question, or deny it—something evasive. That’s what abused kids did, right? Instead, he laughed. A sharp, frigid sound that made my stomach tighten and the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up.

It also made my blood pump faster.

He crossed his arms and stood straighter. “You couldn’t hit me.”

“You’d be surprised,” I countered, slightly offended. Three summers in a row at the local community center’s self-defense classes. No one was hitting this chick.

A slow, devastating smile spread across his lips. That smile had probably ruined a lot of girls. Dark, shaggy hair, tucked behind each ear, still dripped from the shower, ice blue eyes following every move I made.

“You couldn’t hit me,” he repeated. “Trust me.”

He turned away and wandered to the other side of the room, picking up things as he went. Everything received a quizzical, and almost critical, once-over. The trio of Popular Science magazines sitting on the coffee table, the vacuum I’d left leaning against one wall, even the TV remote sticking between two cushions on the couch. He stopped at a wall shelf full of DVDs, pulling one out and examining it. “Is this your family?” He brought the box closer and narrowed his eyes, turning it over in his hands several times.

“You’re asking me if”—I stood on my tiptoes and looked at the box in his hands. Uma Thurman glared at me from the cover, wearing her iconic yellow motorcycle suit—“Uma Thurman is a relative?” Maybe he wasn’t loony. Maybe he had been at the party. I’d missed the Jell-O shots, but obviously he hadn’t.

“Why do you have their photograph if they’re not your family?”

“Seriously, what rock did you crawl out from under?” Pointing to a small collection of frames on the mantle, I said, “Those are pictures of my family.” Well, except my mom. Dad didn’t keep any pictures of her in the house. I nodded to the DVDs and said, “Those are actors. In movies.”

“This place is very strange,” he said, picking up the first picture. Me and my first bike—a powder-pink Huffy with glitter and white streamers. “Is this you?”

I nodded, cringing. Pink sneakers, Hello Kitty sweatshirt, and pink ribbons tied to the end of each braid. Dad used it on a daily basis to point out how far I’d fallen. I’d gone from fresh-faced blonde with perky pigtails—his sunshine smile girl—to pierced nose and eyebrow with wild blonde hair highlighted by several chunky black streaks. I liked to think if my mom were alive, she’d be proud of the woman I’d become. Strong and independent—I didn’t put up with anyone’s crap. Including Dad’s. That’s how I imagined her when she was alive. An older, more beautiful version of me.