Chapter 648 | A Gross Combination [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 648: 648 | A Gross Combination [CASTLE BONUS]

I read that last line twice. Four hundred meters gave me distance, and distance gave me time, and the second I walked into 1-A’s building she would feel the guilt and the satisfaction and the strawberry-vanilla mess of my whole evening hit her ribs before I opened my mouth.

That decided it, then. I would tell her first thing, before she could feel it and draw her own conclusions in her own head.

I set an alarm for five fifteen, then changed it to five ten because Sloane ran at five thirty and I knew exactly which path she took past the eucalyptus line. I lay back and stared at the ceiling, counting ninety-six tiles out of habit, and the second heartbeat pressed once under my sternum, warm and slow, like it approved of the plan.

Sleep came fast and dreamless, and it felt like I had blinked once before the alarm went off.

The campus at five twenty in the morning carried a thin grey fog that sat low across the training fields and turned the eucalyptus trees into ghosts. Dew soaked through my sneakers in the first thirty steps across the grass. A groundskeeper in an orange vest drove a cart along the Academic Spine with a coffee in his cupholder and the radio playing softly, and he lifted two fingers off the wheel at me without slowing down.

I took the long path toward 1-A’s Prometheus House and stopped at the bench by the fountain, just outside fifty meters. The bond sat in my chest at its usual distance frequency, warm and steady and asleep, and I could feel the exact moment she woke up because it jumped from restful to awake in the span of a breath.

Through the bond came grogginess first, then the sharp clean focus she always had in the first minute of her morning, and then her hand reaching for her phone.

I texted her before she could text me.

I’m at the fountain. Come out when you’re ready, and wear your running stuff. I need to tell you something before your run.

Her reply landed in four seconds.

Why are you awake.

I came to see you, babe.

A long pause followed, eleven full seconds of nothing, and then three words came through.

Don’t move. Coming.

I sat on the edge of the fountain and watched the 1-A doors through the fog. The water behind me trickled over stone, and the air carried the sharp medicinal bite of eucalyptus and wet asphalt.

She came out at five twenty-nine, a full minute earlier than her schedule allowed, because Sloane Fitzgerald had never once in her life waited for anything she wanted to know.

She wore black compression leggings that clung to every inch of her legs, the thick muscle of her thighs and the hard curve of her calves built by nine years of mornings like this one. A cropped white sports top hugged her chest and stopped above a stomach so toned it looked carved, and her pink hair sat in a high combat ponytail that bounced every time her running shoes hit the path. The black choker sat tight against her throat where it always did. Her blue eyes found me through the fog from forty meters out, narrowed, and locked on.

She walked faster.

At fifty meters the bond snapped fully open, and I felt her hit the edge of it at the same instant she felt me.

She stopped walking in the middle of the path.

Whatever I was carrying reached her all at once, and I felt it register on her end because it came back to me through the Emotional Duplex in a wave of her own reactions. First came confusion, then a cold spike of recognition, then something that clenched hard behind her ribs and made her hand curl into a fist at her side. Amber light popped once around her knuckles, small and sharp, before she shoved it back down.

She closed the last forty meters slowly. I stood up to meet her and kept my hands visible at my sides, and when she stopped two feet away the fog curled around her ankles and her breath came out in short white clouds.

"You feel happy and guilty at the same time," she said, her voice flat and quiet in the cold. "That’s a gross combination, Lukas, and I hate it."

"I know you do, and I’m sorry for how it lands in your chest."

"Don’t apologize yet, because I don’t know what you’re apologizing for." Her jaw worked once. She stepped in close enough that I could smell lavender dryer sheets and the sharp mint of her toothpaste. Her nose went to my neck, the same as it did in the stairwell, and she breathed in once, deep and slow.

When she pulled back, her eyes had gone glassy and hard at the same time.

"You showered, but you missed a spot behind your ear, and it smells like vanilla."

"Felicity texted me last night after the bus dropped me at the gate."

"And you went to her room." She didn’t make it a question. Sloane never made the things she already knew into questions.

"I went to her room, and I stayed there until she fell asleep, and we slept together." The words came out steady because I had practiced them at five ten in a dark dorm room. "Nobody else told you first, nobody filmed it, and I came straight here so you’d hear it from me."

The bond went very quiet.

Sloane looked at me for a long time without speaking. Behind her the fog shifted, and somewhere off toward Field Epsilon a sprinkler head popped on and started its slow tick across the grass. Her pulse came through the Duplex fast and hard, and under it ran something I had felt in her before, in a hospital room and a hallway and on a plaza floor while she counted my breaths.

"She told me she would tell me herself," Sloane said at last, her voice cracking on the second word and steadying on the third. "In the sublevel, before Camille shot the jammer, Hardy looked me in the face and said she’d never sneak around me."

"She’s planning to tell you herself today, from her to you."

"Of course she is, because she’s annoying like that." Sloane’s laugh came out wet and short and furious. She pressed the heel of her hand against her eye and held it there. "You both kept your promise, and that’s the worst part, because now I don’t get to be mad at either of you for lying."

"You can still be mad at me for the rest of it."

"Oh, I’m going to be mad at you for the rest of it all week." She dropped her hand and glared up at me, and her eyes had gone red at the rims but her chin stayed up. Amber sparks crackled along her knuckles again, brighter this time, and she let them stay. "I’m going to be mad at you on my run, and in Hale’s drills, and through every class you’re in the same building for, and you’re going to feel all of it."

"I’m going to feel every second of it, and I’ll deserve it."

"You will deserve it." Sloane grabbed the front of my hoodie in both fists, and the sparks singed the fabric and filled the cold air with the smell of scorched cotton. She pulled me down until our foreheads touched, and her breath came hot against my mouth. "Did she make you feel good, at least? Tell me the truth, and don’t you dare edit it."

The bond flooded open between us, and I could not have lied to her if I had wanted to, because she would have felt the lie land before it left my teeth.

"She made me feel good," I told her. "And the whole walk here at five in the morning, I kept thinking about you."