In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds #3)(33)

The dazed look faded from his face as he watched me, waiting.

I want to...I felt my face flush, but I couldn’t tell if it was out of embarrassment or because of the images flashing through my mind. I’d never felt so awkward and tense. I’d kissed him before, really kissed him, but every time before had felt like it had been prompted by stress or urgency or anger, and each had been cut off by the demands of the world around us. This was really the first chance I’d had to think about him, all of him, slowly; to make a thorough study of him. The feel of his hands. The rasp of his stubble. The small, breathless sounds he made at the back of his throat.

We were in a pantry and there were kids working outside in the kitchen. The rational part of me knew the limits of this moment, but next time, if we were somewhere else, and if we had another moment to ourselves alone—what then? I felt a small tremor work through me, powered by equal parts panic and longing. I wouldn’t know what to do. How not to mess it up.

Liam’s hands covered mine as he leaned back against the shelves. Relief broke over me when I saw his smile. He understood. Of course he did. From the moment I’d met him, he’d known me better than I’d known myself.

When he spoke, his voice was sweet, but his expression was anything but. There was mischief in his eyes, a hungry look. There was a jolt low in my gut as I realized it was because of me. “Now, darlin’, I just had myself a little thought.”

“Did you?” I murmured, distracted by the way he reached up to run his thumb over my bottom lip.

“I did indeed. It being that you are seventeen and I’m eighteen, and we have every damn right to make out like teenagers. Like normal, happy, crazy kids.” He hooked two fingers over the waistband of my jeans and tugged me closer. I loved his voice when he lowered it like that. His accent broadened, warmed like summer air in the minutes before a thunderstorm. It was the full-on Stewart charm assault, and I was totally helpless against it. “You want to hear the rules?”

My heart jackhammered as I nodded. That same hand slid around my hip, up under my shirt, and felt warm and perfect against my lower back. I closed my eyes as his lips just barely brushed mine. His touch made me feel brave. It pushed the uncertainty back until it couldn’t reach me.

“The first one is you can’t think too hard about it. The second is you say when you want to stop. The third is you do whatever feels good to you. The fourth is—”

“—you stop talking,” I said, blindly reaching back to pull the door shut, “and kiss me?”

He was still chuckling as he complied, and then I was laughing, too, because of the bubbling nerves, because his happiness was infectious, and because that dumb first rule didn’t matter at all. Liam was the only thought inside my head. He was the hundreds of wild feelings exploding inside my chest. He deepened the kiss and coaxed my lips open to his; I mimicked the stroke of his tongue and was rewarded with a small growl of approval.

Normal. Happy. Crazy. For him.

It was a half hour later, after hearing him call for me repeatedly from down the hall, that Cole finally strolled into the kitchen and started banging around in the large, beat-up refrigerator. It gave me a second to disentangle myself from Liam and pull myself back together before going out to meet him.

“The animal needs to be fed,” Cole said, filling a paper cup with water. “Or did you forget about him?”

And just like that, the weightless, wonderful happiness evaporated under my feet and I crashed back down into reality.

“I never forget about Clancy.” My words were sharpened by irritation. “Was I not supposed to trust you to take care of it?”

“No, you weren’t,” Liam called from the pantry.

Cole grinned. “He’s going to have a bitch of a headache after the drugs we loaded him with. The kid was only starting to come around when I secured him in his little cage. Looked like he was mad enough to shit a brick.”

“All right. Let’s get it over with.”

Rather than taking us back upstairs, Cole led the way down the hallway of the lower level, passing several bunk rooms before reaching a door marked FILE STORAGE. He pulled out a small key ring and passed it to me. The lock gave me some resistance as I slid the key in. I took a quick glance around to make sure no one was watching, and rattled the handle to make sure it would stay locked. We slipped inside. Cole reached up to tug on the string for the lone light bulb overhead.

There were those simple, utilitarian metal shelves, stuffed with random boxes and piles of paper—archived Ops files, supposedly, if you believed the lie that had been etched onto the door. It was convincing enough at first glance. My eyes roamed the library of folders and binders, all neatly lined up on the shelves, as Cole moved to the two shelves that were flush against the back wall.

“This one,” he said. “With the red storage box. Give it a tug.”

I reached over the top of the letter-size box. The dust on the lid had been recently disturbed by hands reaching to get to the hidden latch on the shelf’s back support bar. My fingers curled around it and yanked up. There was a loud, satisfying click as the entire bookshelf swung out toward me. The automatic lights in the hallway beyond it clicked on, flooding the small storage room with blinding, ultra-white light.

It was a short walk down the bare hall to yet another locked door. Here, I had to insert the key and punch in an access code—4-0-0-4-0-0-4—before the door sprang open with a hiss.