“How’d you know?”
He winks. “You just told me.”
He unlocks the grow room again, and we step back into the warm, sweet-smelling air. “I kind of have to be. I make money from the dealing, but that pays my sorority dues and trips and t-shirts, and—” I wiggle my boot—“the pursuit of high fashion. Haircuts, electric toothbrushes, books and music. You know... the basics.”
He nods. “You don’t pay your tuition.”
“Thankfully. It would be a big drain if I was.”
With a stroke of his thumb over my knuckles, he releases my hand. I watch as he opens a cabinet under the countertop and pulls out a small, plastic box. From another cabinet, he grabs a few towels. He spreads them on the floor at the mouth of one of the aisles. Then he runs his hand along a panel of switches on the counter, and music comes on.
Classical music.
I smile. “Is this for the plants or us?”
His brows lift. “Are you mocking Chopin?”
“I wouldn’t say mocking so much as... noting.” I smile again, and sit down on the towels. “You’re surprisingly geeky.”
“I’ll have you know the Nocturnes are a strain favorite.” He sinks down beside me and opens the box. He takes out a blue and green, glass-blown pipe about the length of my hand. Then he pulls out a lighter and a bottle of water.
“Damn. The bud.” He laughs a little, but he’s gritting his teeth. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and looks down at it. Without looking back up at me, he says, “Can you grab something from that bin beside the Silent Stalker?”
There was a bin somewhere? “Sure,” I say. “What am I looking for?”
Still looking down at his phone, he points toward the end of our aisle. “It’s a bin with dried out stuff.”
I bring back a bud that’s about as long as my palm, and Kellan laughs.
I shrug, smiling. “I didn’t know how much to get.”
I sit down beside him, and his dancing blue eyes move over my face. “You know how to pack a pipe, right?”
“I’m not very good at it.” I laugh lamely.
“Cleo, Cleo. How can you call yourself a dealer?” He shakes his head, then pats the space across from him. “I’ll show you.”
He sets the bud down on the towel and starts to pluck eraser-sized kernels off it, his expert fingertips stacking the little tufts inside the pipe’s bowl with amazing speed. I think I maybe see his hands shaking, but I can’t be sure. Still, it sets my mind in motion.
“Who was on the phone just now?” I ask.
“One of my guys.” He lifts his eyes to mine. “It’s nothing, trust me.”
He sets one more tuft of weed into the bowl, then taps the side of it, knocking the little kernels of marijuana into the bottom.
“You’re good at this.”
“I used to smoke.” He holds it out to me.
I bite my lip and squeeze my eyes shut. “Please don’t laugh, but I don’t know how to light it. One of my friends... My friend from home, he used to light it for me and cover up the hole on the side of the pipe for me. I would just suck in.”
“Cleo—” his brows arch—“you can’t be serious.” His mouth pulls into a sort-of smile. “How do you vouch for your product?”
“I don’t know. No one ever asks me to sample it or anything. And Lora tells me how it is. It’s been like, years. Two summers ago I think is when I last smoked. And that was a few hits off a blunt, not from a pipe.”
“Tell me more,” he says, moving the lighter over the bowl. He looks at me over the pipe. “Why did you stop?”
I watch him flick the lighter and hold the flame over the bowl. The tiny pieces crinkle and snap, flaring red as he presses his thumb over the small hole on the side of the bowl and closes his lips around the business end of the pipe. His shoulders rise as he drags in. The bud in the small bowl pulses red and orange. I watch his chest expand as he pulls the smoke deep into his lungs.