Your One & Only(29)

“Listen, I don’t know what you’re doing here. Go home.”

Althea blinked at him, momentarily forgetting herself why she’d followed him. “You dropped this,” she said, holding out the inhaler.

He snatched it from her hand as if embarrassed that she should have seen it.

“Okay. You can leave now.”

He was being rude. She ignored him. What reason had anyone in Vispera ever given him to be nice?

“Did Samuel find you another guitar?” she said, spying the instrument propped in the corner.

“You mean after Carson smashed the first one? Yeah. You want to tell him about it, in case he’s itching to destroy another?”

“Show me how it works.”

He eyed her suspiciously.

“I’d like to see.” She picked it up, surprised by how heavy it was, and plucked one of the strings. “Please?”

At first his eyes narrowed, as if he was trying to figure out whether she was making fun of him, but then he took the guitar and his fingers fell naturally against the strings, finding placement without him even thinking about it.

“You’re not going to like it,” he said.

She shrugged.

He fiddled with the keys on the end, plucking the strings here and there, and then let out a slow breath. With a brisk movement of his fingers and hands, the guitar vibrated.

The sound made her gasp. It seemed to shake everything in the room, filling each inch of empty space the way the rain filled the air in the jungle outside. It was in her body, her lungs, that thrum and movement, a noise that clattered through her brain like the itch of a memory just out of reach. Right when she thought she couldn’t stand it anymore, he stopped, pausing to let the last tremor of the strings still to silence.

“That’s it?” she asked, more than a little confused.

“That’s it,” he said, like he didn’t feel the need or desire to explain it. Which was fine. At least he seemed calmer now. His anger when she’d first showed up had softened.

He held the guitar, his hand distractedly caressing its curves. As she watched his fingers ripple with the contours of the instrument, her skin, cold and damp from the rain, began to warm with a heat stirring in the pit of her stomach. He looked up to see her staring at him, and the warmth seemed to stir the air between them, a kind of communing unlike anything she’d known before. It was similar to the Pairing, actually, but at the same time so different that, without any warning, it scared her.

She suddenly wanted to see his smile. Maybe if she saw it, these feelings would go away and she could go back to her sisters without thoughts of him intruding on her, which seemed to keep happening. She only wanted his lips to part and reveal the slightly crooked bottom teeth, something she’d seen once and thought an imperfection, but somehow it no longer was. Unable to stop herself, she reached her hand up to trace the lines of his mouth.

His eyes shuttered as he turned his head away, leaving her more confused than before. He must have felt what happened between them, but he went back to his guitar as if it’d been nothing. After a minute, he was lost in his thoughts, but she didn’t want to leave.

Her room with her sisters was a simple, white-painted dorm, a row of beds on one wall with matching yellow coverlets, a row of desks on the opposite wall. It was exactly like all the other rooms in the Althea dorm. Jack’s room was crowded and chaotic. His bed was draped with a quilt of trim blue squares and white thread sinking into soft cotton. The walls were covered in pictures and paintings. There was a large poster of a human man, tall and dark, leaping into the air, a bright orange ball cupped in his palm.

“Football,” she murmured, recalling what little she knew of human history.

Jack finally acknowledged she was still there. “What?”

She pointed to the poster. “That’s what he’s doing. It’s a sport. Humans played it.”

Jack didn’t look at the picture. “Basketball,” he said. “You were close.”

“Samuel-299 gave you all this stuff?”

“My mother. She liked to find human things stored in the Tunnels and bring them to me. Like that,” he said, tipping his chin to the poster.

Jack had books stacked haphazardly on a shelf. They spanned at least five hundred years of human history, maybe more. If Inga-296 was trying to recreate a human’s room, Althea couldn’t pinpoint what century she’d meant to be represented. There were countless human artifacts in the Tunnels. They contained everything the humans and the Original Nine had wanted kept safe. It was deep underground, climate-controlled, and safe from contamination. Except for the Sample Room, the items in the Tunnels were merely of historical interest. Althea was intrigued by them, but only because she’d always liked history. Otherwise, the things kept there were mostly what the humans had valued but that Vispera had little use for. Things like the poster on Jack’s wall.

Althea straightened. Jack was still softly plucking the strings of the guitar.

“Well,” she said awkwardly. “I just thought you might need the inhaler.”

He glanced up. “Wait.” He put down the guitar and stood in front of her with his hands shoved in his pockets. He struggled for what to say. “It was nice of you. Thank you.”

“It’s okay,” she said. She’d only gone to the labs to talk to him, to apologize. She hadn’t really meant to be here, in this cottage with him. “I’m sorry for what Carson-312 did to your other guitar. I’m sorry I didn’t do more to stop him.” Althea didn’t just mean the Declaration, and she thought Jack could tell. “Also, I didn’t . . .” Althea meant to apologize for calling him unsocialized, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it again. “I’m sorry I didn’t like your book,” she finished lamely, tucking wet hair behind her ear. “Those dogs that fly . . .” She trailed off.