The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(96)

“I know,” she said. “That’s my origin story, if you’ve been paying attention.”

Immediately, Nico faltered again. “I know,” he said, more to his feet than to anything. Was this what it was like to be Libby? He was almost never so oafish, nor so concerned with his own oafishness. He’d met plenty of pretty girls, and certainly a handful of attractive mean ones. He should have been prepared for this.

“I’m not mean,” Parisa corrected, “I’m brusque. And before you facetiously blame a language barrier,” she added, pausing him once he opened his mouth, “I am also conversationally trilingual, so that’s not an excuse.”

“A toast to your linguistic superiority, then,” grumbled Nico, stung.

Parisa glanced at her page, flipping it.

“Sarcasm,” she remarked, “is a dead form of wit.”

Reference to mortality of any sort was enough to make Nico flinch, and Parisa glanced up at the motion of it, sighing.

“Just say it,” she suggested, tossing the comic aside. “I can’t have you tiptoeing around like this, Nicolás. If you go soft then I’ll have to be soft, and I can’t begin to tell you how little time I have for pretense—”

“You died,” Nico said, “in my head.”

Parisa paused for a moment, possibly to dip a toe inside the head in question. She was barefoot, he realized, observing the petal-pink of her toenails where they rested on the chair beside his. He focused purely on the observation, hoping it would be less telling than anything else she might find running through his thoughts.

“Don’t concern yourself with the me in your head,” Parisa said eventually. “She doesn’t exist, Nico. Only I do.”

Good advice, theoretically. In this case, it barely applied.

“I feel responsible somehow,” he admitted, “which is—”

“Ridiculous,” she supplied.

“—I was going to say possibly unfair,” he corrected, “but still. Why—?”

He stopped.

“Why did I choose to use your head and not one of the others?” Parisa prompted. “I told you, Nico, because you’re the least capable of guile.”

“Sounds like an insult.”

“Why?”

“Makes me sound… I don’t know.” He was mumbling, half-shamed. “Na?ve.”

“What is this, machismo?” Parisa sighed.

Nico shifted in his chair, glancing at her toes again.

“For what it’s worth, it’s you I’d most want in bed,” she remarked, subjecting him to untold decades of trauma simply by holding his gaze while she said it. “It’s rare that I’m selfless enough to keep my distance, truthfully, and rarer still that I summon any restraint. Unfortunately I find myself with such a pressing desire not to ruin you.”

He slid a hand to where her feet were idly sat atop the chair beside his, stroking a finger along one arch. “Who says you’d ruin me?”

“Oh, Nico, I would love for you to be the one to ruin me,” she said flippantly, shifting to rest her feet in his lap, “but much to my own detriment, I wouldn’t allow it; and anyway, you do things much too openly, with far too much of yourself. You’d fuck me with your whole heart,” she lamented, “and I can’t put you in that sort of danger.”

“I am capable of casual sex,” said Nico, wondering why he felt the need to make it true. He curled his palm around her heel, drawing it up to the bone of her ankle and caressing her calf slowly, molding his hand to the shape of her.

“For you, it can either be good or it can be casual,” she said. “And I can’t take the chance of having one without both.”

She dug her toes into his thigh, sliding down in her chair.

“What do you do in your dreams?” she said, and then, “You speak to someone,” she answered herself, drumming her nails along the wood of the table. “I can hear you doing it sometimes.”

“Oh.” He cleared his throat. “I… it’s really not my—”

“Not your secret to tell, I know, only I already know it, so there’s very little telling involved. His name is Gideon,” Parisa produced matter-of-factly, like a familiar character she had plucked from the pages of a comic book. “He worries you constantly. Gideon, Gideon, Gideon… he is in your thoughts so often I think his name sometimes myself.” She sighed a little as Nico continued to work his palms mindlessly into the slender muscle of her calf, strumming the tender fibers of her. “He’s a traveler, isn’t he, your Gideon? Not a telepath.” She closed her eyes, exhaling again when Nico’s fingers brushed the inside of her knee. “From what I can tell he operates in dreams, not thought.”

“Actually,” said Nico, and stopped.

Parisa eyes opened and she shifted her leg again, this time adjusting so the arch of her foot sat perilously atop Max’s prized vulgarity of choice.

“Actually?” she prompted.

For once she wasn’t smiling coyly. She didn’t intend to seduce him into an answer. She meant to crush him if he did not.

Nico liked her more for that, which was troubling.

“Don’t be troubled,” she assured him. “You may be the only person who likes me for the right reasons.”