“Um, no, actually.”

Now his gaze turned wary. “How do you not know that?”

“Maybe because you’ve never said it? Maybe because you are the king of mixed signals?”

Suddenly, I was crying. And suddenly I was the one who was angry. Something inside me had snapped. I spun around, so fast I almost slipped and fell on my face—because that would have been the perfect dignified exit. Since I didn’t fall, I marched away as fast as my feet would take me—which wasn’t nearly fast enough, given that not only did Leon have longer legs, he could also teleport. I quickened my pace, until I was nearly running. I heard him calling my name, but I ignored it. Let him know what that felt like. I raced all the way to the lake, to the end of the dock, and decided that if he followed me there I would dive in and swim and keep swimming until I was too tired to care anymore.

Instead, when I heard him come up behind me a second later, I whirled around and gave him a hard shove, right in the chest, sending him backward into the water.

He rose up sputtering. “What the hell?”

Fuming, I stalked back and forth on the dock in front of him. “I have had enough of this, okay? I made a mistake!”

“I tell you I love you and you push me into a lake, and I’m the one sending mixed signals?” His gaze was pinned on me, and the way his eyes narrowed told me that I should flee if I didn’t want to be submerged.

But if I fled, he’d just follow and catch me and toss me in, so I decided to deprive him of the satisfaction. Giving him a defiant glare, I folded my arms, then stepped off the dock and plunged into the lake.

The water was cold, much colder than I’d anticipated. I broke the surface with a gasp, remembering belatedly that these were the only pair of shorts I had with me, and now they were going to smell like algae and weeds and whatever else was growing at the bottom of the lake. I’d also lost one of my sandals. It floated to the surface, bobbing on the water beside me. I grabbed it and shoved it into my back pocket.

Leon paddled toward me. We weren’t deep enough in that his feet couldn’t touch the bottom, but he must have decided it would be faster to swim than to wade. I considered retreat, but while I hesitated, he reached me.

“If you’re planning to dunk me,” he said, “I’d advise against it. Can we continue this conversation on dry land?”

“So you can just ignore me again?” My teeth were chattering, but I gave him another mutinous look. “I made a mistake. And I lied to you. I knew who he was, and I knew what he did, and I lied to you. And I can’t take it back, so what do you want me to do? I’ve said I was sorry. How many times do you want me to say it? Do you want me to grovel? Beg?”

“No!”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know.”

I kicked through the water and started making my way to shore. Leon swam up beside me, water lapping around him. He caught my hand.

“I want you to understand,” he said.

“I do.”

“You don’t.” He drew in a ragged breath, not releasing my hand. Ripples chased out around us, glinting in the falling light. “I told you I hated my parents. But that’s…only part of it. I was angry for a long time. And I was horrible to my grandfather. He kept trying to explain it to me, to tell me stories about my mother, and how much she loved me. That’s why he kept taking me to the lake year after year, until I finally just started refusing.” Another pause. He lowered his gaze. “Then, when I was thirteen, I got so angry that I took all of his photo albums and burned them. Every picture.”

I stared at him. So that was why he didn’t have any photos of his parents. There weren’t any left.

He rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand. “When my grandfather found out, he didn’t even punish me. He just—looked at me. But he stopped trying after that. He didn’t talk to me about my parents anymore. He never brought me to the lake again.”

I looked down into the water, at the waves sliding against us, at the space where our fingers met beneath the surface, distorted by the swell of the current. Leon had told me once that he didn’t think of his parents often. But that wasn’t true, I realized. And I’d been wrong to ever believe it. When I lifted my gaze to his now, I saw it. The hurt was there, in his eyes. Questions always forming in his mind. Who they had been. What they would have thought of him. He could never know them. He would never see their faces or hear them speak his name. Because Verrick had killed them.

I thought of him going out to his parents’ lake alone. He went there to think, he’d told me. I saw him taking his motorcycle and driving beneath the sweaty summer sky, the horizon thick with stars; I saw him heading to the park and sitting on the picnic tables that overlooked the water. He’d brought me there, when I’d first learned about the Kin. To make me feel better. To comfort me in the place that comforted him.

I didn’t know what to say—if there was anything to say. I just moved toward him, sliding my arms around him and laying my head against his chest.

He didn’t say he forgave me then, but I felt it. There was an easing in the way he stood, in the way he gently disengaged my arms, taking both of my hands and sliding them into his. When I looked up again, he was looking back down at me, and for once his face wasn’t inscrutable, but open, like it had always been this way, like he’d never been difficult to read. I wondered how it was that I’d missed these things before—that through the seriousness that lived in his eyes I could see that closed door and the boy who waited behind it, who was still waiting and probably always would be. I could see all the way up north if I looked hard enough, to the great blue empty of Lake Superior, and an angry, scrawny youth, all arms and legs, who raced across a track not to see how fast he could run but to find how far they would chase him. I could see the night he was called, a little light suddenly flaring within, and the way he fought against it hour after hour, week after week, until one day he finally got on his motorcycle and drove south, drove all the way to Minneapolis in the hot July evening to step through the grass and stand before me.

Now, around us, dusk was fast approaching. In a nearby cabin, someone had lit a fire. The air was warm and smoky. We moved out of the lake. Up past the dock and onto the grass, where the ground was cool underfoot, and insects were humming. By the time we reached the cabin, he was kissing me, his hands moving up under my shirt, peeling it off my wet skin.

“We should get into dry clothes,” he was saying, like that was the reason he’d tossed my shirt over my head, not even watching where it landed. His mouth made its way to my throat, and his hands fumbled with unbuttoning my shorts.

“Well, there’s a problem with that,” I said, excited and somewhat breathless.

He paused what he was doing in order to look at me. “Yeah?”

“These are the only pants I have.”

Leon didn’t reply. Laughing, he bent, hooked an elbow under my knees, and swung me up into his arms.

We lay facing each other, the last of the light from outside falling onto the sheet between us. Leon’s eyelids fluttered closed now and then, until I blew air on his face and he opened them again. The third time I did it, a smile tugged at his lips.

“You’re a brat,” he said.

“You’re a suck-up,” I countered.

“You’re a smartass.”

I would’ve replied, but he moved forward and sealed my mouth with a kiss.

I felt weightless lying there, speaking in hushed tones, like we were all alone in the world, in some separate space of the cosmos where nothing could reach us. No worries could intrude, no harsh reality that existed beyond the walls would steal its way in through the windows we’d left open. The air that hung around us was flecked with gold—never mind that it was only dust stirred up by the evening wind, which drifted through the cabin and brought the faint scent of the bonfire in with it. Leon laced his fingers through mine, and I looked at the knots of his knuckles, the puckered line of the scar that made a long jagged path down the back of his hand. His skin was warm, and when I slid my fingers down his wrist I could feel the steady beat of his pulse. I would be perfectly happy to never move again, I thought. I could just stay there, listening to Leon’s breathing and watching the dusk recede around us.