Broken Compass

Please let it be a good year.

“Syd! Hey, you coming?” Nate’s voice breaks through the warm sunlight and wraps around me.

Smiling, because I can’t help myself around him, I walk back to the building entrance where he’s standing, staring at me.

Kash is with him. That’s the first thing that registers.

He’s standing beside Nate, hands in his skinny jeans pockets, arms covered in dark ink, blond-streaked hair falling in his eyes. It’s cut shorter at the sides and back where it’s dyed blue, though the fringe is so pale it’s almost silver, and it brings attention to the silver hoop in his elegant nose and to his full mouth.

God. Damn. It’s the first time I see him in broad daylight, and he’s just breathtaking. I think I might be drooling.

“Earth to Sydney.” Nate’s normally warm voice is equal parts sharp and amused. “Do I have to drag you upstairs, Squirt?”

“Stop calling me that,” I say automatically, and make the mistake of looking at him.

Because, jeez, Nate looks damn fine, too, in his white tank top showing off his muscled, tanned arms. He’s taller than Kash and his jaw is more square, his brows heavie

r and darker, and…

“I give up.” Nate throws his hands up in the air with a huff and walks back inside. “Sometimes I feel like I’m your imaginary friend.”

“What? What are you talking about?” I glance at Kash who lifts his bony shoulders in a shrug and then I hurry back inside. “What’s up with you, Nate? Wait up.”

“Why, afraid you won’t find West’s apartment? That you’ll lose the way?”

“Very funny.” I lost my way long ago, but I don’t say that. My face too hot, I follow him, and Kash falls into step with me as we climb the stairs to the first floor.

“You owe me!” Nate calls out, not slowing down, rounding the first landing.

“What for?”

“For dragging him,” he jabs a thumb over his shoulder at Kash, “kicking and screaming out of the apartment.”

“He forced you to come?” I turn to Kash, and one corner of his mouth lifts at my outrage.

“Well, he did threaten me with bodily harm,” he says in that quiet, deep voice of his. “So how is it going?”

“Um, fine. I mean, it’s going fine. You?”

I’m about to tell him that I may have a student lined up for his tutoring lessons, and thinking that God, I’d love him to tutor me in something other than Russian and physics, when something catches my eye.

I’m not the most observant of people. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived with my head buried in the sand for so long, I don’t look, in the belief that others won’t look back at me, either. But the ring of black at the top of Nate’s arm when he lifts his hand to ring the doorbell to West’s apartment is hard to miss.

Nate has no tattoos. His skin is pale gold, smooth and unmarred.

Or so I thought.

“Is that…” Unthinkingly I make a grab for Kash, grip his taut forearm and he hisses out in surprise. “Are those bruises on Nate?”

The word doesn’t fit in a sentence with Nate in it. It can’t.

“I dunno,” Kash says. “Why don’t you ask him?”

I turn my frown on Kash, but he pulls his arm free of my grip easily and turns away to roll a cigarette, pulling a wad of tobacco from a black pouch.

Think, Sydney, think. The bruises must be from the sparring. Yes, this must be it. West and Nate have been sparring a lot more lately, God knows why, as it means cutting down on their sacred gameplaying time, but there’s the explanation for the bruises. I was so shocked to see them that my mind went blank for a moment.

It’s just… the way Kash said to ask Nate. Like he knows something I don’t.