“I wouldn’t have gotten it without the clue.”
“No one else got it with the clue,” she says.
I try not to imagine who else has been looking at Thalia, touching the cigar, trying to guess who she is. It’s absolutely none of my business but the thought of some drunk frat boy ogling her and asking if she’s the sexy Monopoly Man makes my stomach curdle.
“Do I win something?” I ask. “Free psychoanalysis?”
Thalia laughs, then steps forward, and now she’s even closer. Too close, close enough that it sends my pulse skipping and racing, and she puts both hands on my temples.
And stares deeply into my eyes.
All my alarms go off at her touch. All of them. She shouldn’t be doing this and I should be stopping her, but she is and I don’t.
“I was expecting to lie on a couch,” is what I say.
“Shh, I’m analyzing,” she says. “And it turns out —”
“Vellllcome back to ze second portion of our eeevening!” announces Mike, and we both look up, to the balcony, where his voice is booming from though we still can’t see him. “Next, I vill be playing anozer delightful piece by Johann Sebastian Bach…”
She’s still looking at me, dark eyes made wicked by black wings, by the shadows of the organ loft, by the low lights and the moonbeams just barely coming in through high windows.
I don’t hear what Mike announces. It’s another organ piece, the opus and movement or whatever lost on me anyway.
“It’s your mother’s fault,” she says quickly, the moment he stops talking. “Also, I’m sorry for last week.”
“What’s my mother’s fault?” I ask, my voice hushed in the quiet, and Thalia just shakes her head.
“Forget it, it was a dumb psychotherapy joke,” she says, taking her hands off my face. “Freud had a penchant for blaming everyone’s problems on their mothers —”
Then the organ notes hit, filling the room, and the rest of her sentence is lost, her red lips still moving but her voice drowned as she scrunches her face quickly, shoots a glare over our heads at the organ loft.
“I’m sorry!” she shouts. Someone to our right turns, looks at us. A run of organ notes ripples through the air between, and I bend down, my lips an inch from her ear.
“What for?” I ask.Chapter Twenty-SevenThaliaI close my eyes. I pull my jacket tighter around myself, as if it can erase the fact that I walked over to Caleb and struck up this conversation with my tits and ass basically out.
Until he looked at me, I didn’t feel almost naked. Slightly underdressed, yes; not wearing as many clothes as I normally would, yes. But the second he looked at me I suddenly felt like I’d gone on a romp through a Victoria’s Secret catalog and was now wearing the barest minimum of clothing that could be considered clothing.
I stand on my toes, put one hand on his shoulder to steady myself.
“I’m sorry I was such a bitch last week when you walked me home,” I say, as succinctly as possible.
I meant to do this in a reasonable tone of voice, while the intermission was going on, but it’s like I hate making things not-awkward.
“You weren’t,” he says, his voice deep and rumbly, cutting through the organ music, both of them raising goosebumps on my skin, making me feel like I could float away.
I tighten my grip on his shoulder — his hard, muscled shoulder — and try not to think about it.
“I kind of was though,” I say, still half-shouting to be heard, even into his ear like this. “I didn’t have to say it that way, I was just tired and stressed and hungry and —”
I wobble slightly on my toes, and then his hand is on my waist, steadying me. I catch another glare from the same girl as before.
“And felt like I was taking advantage?” he asks, removing the hand.
“What? No,” I say, now to his face, now shouting, and now this girl is full-on glaring me down, lasers practically shooting from her eyes.
I am fucking this up. I’m not good at apologizing, I’m not good at talking about my emotions, and I’m really not good at talking to men I’m interested in, so this is some sort of horrible hat trick of Thalia Makes Things Weird.
Caleb just raises his eyebrows. I glance around, organ music humming and soaring around me, and spot a door in the wood paneling of the entryway.
Without thinking twice, I make for it, stepping over a few people and dodging around a few more. I look over my shoulder just enough to make sure that Caleb’s following me, and sure enough, he is.
The door’s unlocked. I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t be. I’m altogether sure that I shouldn’t be opening it and going through it, but I do it anyway and find myself in a short, narrow hallway that leads to a tall, narrow staircase, a bannister running the length of one side.