These were nice people, but someone needed to teach them when to shut the fuck up.
“Actually, you know what?” His voice came out loud, more forceful than he’d meant it to. “I think it’s time to give Rosemary a break.”
“I’m all right,” she said. Her fingers plucked at the knee of her travel pants.
He was squeezing her hand. He didn’t know how that had happened. “I know you’re all right, but we’ve been traveling for, shit, I don’t even know—thirty-six hours?” He looked squarely at Winston. “Something like that, anyway, longer if you count Lukla, and before that she was in the middle of climbing the highest mountain on earth when she got interrupted by an avalanche. It’s reasonable to think, you know, probably Rosemary could use a shower and some fucking rest.”
Kal wasn’t sure if this was some kind of pissing contest or what, but if it was, he was determined to win it. This guy was rich, and he seemed nice enough, and Rosemary had known him for a very long time.
On the other hand, he’d scooped her up at the airport and then picked a fight with her in the kitchen. Not cool.
Kal beamed the message to Winston via blank-stare telepathy.
Winston cleared his throat, glanced at his watch, and said, “Quite right.”
Two minutes later, Winston and Allie were heading out the door, with Allie throwing directions back over her shoulder for Rosemary to check the bedroom closet for clothes if she needed anything.
Rosemary gathered her hair at the nape of her neck, pulled it forward over her shoulder, and sank into the couch with her eyes closed. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
They soaked in the quiet. Kal drifted, breathing in airplane aromatherapy. It would be ironic if it put him to sleep now, smelling it off Rosemary’s skin.
“Kal?”
“Yeah?”
“How far away is Wisconsin?”
“A couple days’ drive, probably. Maybe one really long day. Or you could fly. Be there in a few hours.”
She blew out a long breath. “It’s strange to be in New York.”
“Strange how?”
“It’s so big. There are so many cars, and everything seems really clean and…I don’t know, easy. The weather’s like summer, even though it’s only May. I feel like I’ve been on a different planet.”
“Alien.”
“Yes.”
Kal hadn’t noticed—not like she meant. But he imagined Rosemary hadn’t spent a lot of time feeling alien. She’d said she was wallpaper, and not in a good way, but at least wallpaper blended in. He’d never blended anywhere except in Jackson Heights. Everywhere else, he was the brown kid in a room full of white ones, or the Sherpa kid where there weren’t any other Sherpa people, or, in a group of Sherpa, the one whose dad wasn’t Sherpa, the American, Merlin’s kid.
It wasn’t the same as being out of place. He had a place—a home, a family, circuits of places he liked to go and things he liked to do. It was just that everywhere he went, something marked him as different. “The thing about being alien is, it gives you good insight into things,” he said. “From the outside.”
“I’m not sure I have the capacity for insight just now.” She turned her body toward him, tucking her legs up beneath her. Her eyes were heavy-lidded. She yawned, as if on cue.
“You’ll get there.” He turned from the waist, dropping his shoulder into the back of the couch to bring their heads closer together.
They passed a few minutes, quiet.
He liked how she felt in the quiet. Like he could be around her, her energy over there, his over here, and neither one of them rippling over to mess up the other. Just themselves, together.
She had her eyes closed now, and her breath had sped up and dropped deeper into her chest the way it did when someone was right on the cusp of falling asleep. Her hair slipped from behind her ear and covered part of her cheek. Her eyebrows were a shade lighter than her hair, close to white. Her skin looked soft.
Kal thought about how she’d smiled on the airplane when he teased her.
How every muscle in her face relaxed after she came, and the contrast made him remember how alert she was most of the time, how tight her control was.