Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute(34)

“Bradley?”

My head jerks up. Celine.

“Can we talk?”

I ignore her butterfly eyes and nod. “Okay.”

Raj grins as Celine and I crawl into the tent.

Inside, Celine headbutts the saggy part of our roof like a fault-seeking missile and looks at me. “Um.”

“Don’t judge.”

She rolls her eyes, but the action is more amused than scathing. Weird. Very weird.

“I thought you were pissed at me,” I blurt, then instantly regret it. Why would I mention that? I could honestly sink into a hole.

Celine blinks and echoes my thoughts. “Why?”

“We didn’t talk. Yesterday.”

Her brow furrows, like you could press a fingertip between her eyes and smooth the creases out. In this shadowy, raindrop-stained blue universe, she is very soft and dark, like falling into bed at night after a long, hard day. “I didn’t think we needed to talk. You said…not-enemies.”

So she wasn’t ignoring me—just being infuriatingly literal and pragmatic and other Celine-like qualities. “Typical. I put my pride on the line to negotiate an historic peace treaty and you can’t even tell me good morning?”

“Do you hear yourself?” she asks me curiously. “Like, when you speak? Or is it just noise?”

I’m going to strangle her.

“Why do you look like you’ve got gas?” she asks.

I rub a hand over my face. “You know what I admire about you, Celine? Your class and sophistication.”

She snorts. “Bite me.”

“No, it’s impressive. You’re like a debutante, or something. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you’d gone to finishing school.”

Her laughter is unexpected and tastes like treacle and it does not implode reality. I wait for something, anything, to come along and sour this conversation, making us utter and abject enemies again, but nothing happens. My palms start to itch.

Her smile fades. “Hey,” she says awkwardly. “Um. So, I want your…advice?”

In my head, I collapse from shock and Celine holds smelling salts under my nose. Out loud, I say, “Makes sense. I am wiser and smarter than you and always knew this day would come.”

“Would you like to see the pictures I took of my tent?” she asks sweetly, tapping her phone. “Holly poked her head in and said it was perfect. I assume she then emailed Katharine Breakspeare about how I’m a shining example of teamwork, leadership, and strategy.”

“All right, Celine, give it a rest.” I tut at my saggy privacy curtain. “Raj says it’s a feature, not a bug.”

“Raj says a lot of things. He’s incurably positive.”

“Just so you know,” Raj calls, “I can hear you out here. Like, you do realize tents are not made of brick walls?”

We ignore him. Celine reaches up and starts fixing my saggy tent. She seems to be hooking bits and pieces together through the fabric. If we were more than distant acquaintances, I might be impressed by her never-ending competence.

She turns her head and catches me staring. My cheeks feel flammable. What’s wrong with me today?

But clearly Celine doesn’t think anything of it, because she just jerks her chin as if to draw me closer. I crawl over until we’re a foot apart. There’s a tiny dot of mascara under her lower lashes, and she whispers to me. “It’s Aurora’s eighteenth on Friday.”

I watch her mouth moving for a second before the words sink in. “What? Oh. Really? That’s rough.” Imagine turning eighteen out here, sleeping on a borrowed mattress in a room with very old carpet that probably hasn’t been shampooed for months or even years. It’s tragic. Like, literally Shakespearean.

“…lovely,” Celine is saying, “so I want to do something for her, but I’m not sure…I’m not really…My ideas all seem…” She fumbles her words in a deeply un-Celine-like manner, and I try not to smile. She’s like a toddler who’s still learning to verbalize feelings. The urge to squeeze her around the middle is therefore completely normal.

“Yeah?” I ask, still not smiling. “All your ideas seem what?”

She scowls in response. The tent is fixed and officially Celine-standard. “Oh, never mind.”

“Go on.”

“It’s nothing,” she snaps, turning to crawl away.

Well, now I feel bad. “Hey, hang on…” I don’t realize I’m touching her until it’s already done. My hand is on her upper arm and I only have a split second to shrivel inside with the sheer awkwardness of it all before I let go.

Her arm is really soft. Silk-soft. Cloud-soft. Honestly, who has skin like that?

I clear my throat and close my hand into a fist. “Just…what were you planning to do? For Aurora?”

She eyes me warily. “I want to throw her a party. On Friday. After curfew.”

“Sorry, what?” I splutter. “A party? You?”

“Will you lower your voice?”

Good point. I continue winding her up at a lower volume. “An illicit, illegal, after-hours—”

“It’s not illegal, Bradley, come on.”

“We can’t be in each other’s rooms after curfew,” I remind her.