The Law and the Codas

Chapter Fourteen

David and I lay beside each other in the cramped trunk of a car that smells as though in a previous life, it'd ferried hockey gear to and from frosty ice rinks. My outburst back at Izzer's must have gotten to David because he hasn't bothered to reach for my hand, even though our knuckles have grazed against each other a few times.

Some part of me wishes I could have slammed my eyeballs back into my skull when I learned of David's role in Elysium production, or maybe I could have bitten down on my cheek, made myself spit blood instead of those words for David and Della to overhear.

The car takes a pothole too fast and the back end dips before jumping in the air. My body goes with it, the tip of my nose banking off the trunk lid. When I reach up to feel the damage through the cloth bag, I freeze because there's another finger probing my nostril.

"Ow," I say, though it's doubtful David's overheard. Every breath that slips out of me is muffled by the bag and I imagine my pain is a little different.

"You okay?" he says, his finger runs from my cheek to my chin. There's a light pressure from where his skin presses into mine, which is a huge contrast from the immense pressure I feel ballooning in my chest. How can David be so hard one moment and so tender the next?

I nod, and silly me, I think he can see the gesture. "I'm fine." I crane my neck, just the slightest, so I can feel more of him against me. He doesn't seem to notice, or if he does, thankfully, I can't tell. "What about you?"

I think he chuckles, either that or he inhaled a little too much of the bag. "I'm not the one who smacked their face of the trunk lid."

"But I'm not the one who was blamed for two peoples' deaths." His finger stops dead in its tracks, before receding. David's warmth goes with it, and the chill it leaves in its wake, settles in my core.

At the sound of rustling fabric, nausea explodes in my stomach. He's shifting, turning away from me. Maybe I've gone and caught Sam's brash directness.

"We should get some sleep," he says, his voice more distant than a few seconds ago. "We'll have things to do --"

I grab on to a handful of fabric nearest my arm. If I've been infected by some of Sam's less-than-stellar tendencies, I might as well embrace them. I twist the fabric, ball it around my fist until I can feel David's body weight.

"I don't--" There's more shifting, though not much what with my talons' dug into David's shirt. He can't move without ripping free, and hopefully, he doesn't want to escape from me that badly. I gulp and take a deep breath, pulling the fabric of the bag toward my nostrils, then exhale. "I don't know you that well," I begin. "And I thought I did because I was around you, but really, maybe what I know amounts to a whole anthill of jack shit."

If Sam had been in the trunk with us, he would have laughed, called me old-fashioned, and remarked how I was talking like a true Codas.

David doesn't say anything, doesn't move. I can't even hear him breathe.

"But whatever trivial things I do know about you, have to be more than that prick Izzer knows. Or Della. I know your blood type and I know how your freckles blister-like tomatoes across your cheeks when you spend a second over thirty minutes under the lamps in the Yard. Your most recent search on the Network was for birds, the North American Wood Thrush, specifically." Nervous energy runs unrestrained through my veins. "I know you make Elysium, but I also know that Snitch's death affected you and that you always ask me how I am even when I think you're hurting more than anyone else and-"

"Ten," he says, stopping me dead. I swallow hard in the silence he affords this moment. "Are you confessing your love for me?"

"No-no!" I release his shirt and slam my hand into his back.