“Yeah, yeah,” I answer. “But even if we pull that story off, I don’t want to be broke in New York, living off your dorm food. So I need a job, but I bet they’ll cross-reference or something and figure out I ran away.”
“You won’t be a runaway though, since you’ll be eighteen. And I mean… I don’t think your parents will…” Kai drifts off. The end of the sentence, I know, is “be looking for you.” Dad lives a few hours away, and Mom works two jobs—maybe three now, I’m not sure. It hurt when I was younger, but now I can’t help but think of their indifference as a good thing—it’ll be easier for me to break ties. To leave with Kai and…
I pause, exhale, and say the thing I really want. “What if we just never came back when the intensive ends?”
Kai looks at me, then down, playing with a briar that’s pressing against the bench. “I can’t leave my grandmother forever. Five months away from her will be bad enough. You know how she is.”
Crazy, is how she is. All right, maybe not crazy, but neurotic at least—she sprinkles salt around the entire building on Halloween. She once refused to allow a couple to rent an apartment because they owned a black cat. She spends most of the winter locked up inside, wary to go out among “the beasts.” Winter and the beasts it supposedly brings are what she fears most of all.
Neurotic at the very least.
“I know. I was just wondering,” I say, which isn’t entirely true—I wasn’t wondering. I was hoping. For me, it’ll be easy to leave and horrible to come back. But I can’t stay in New York without Kai, and I’m certainly not going someplace new without him, so…
Kai slides his hand across mine, and I move closer to him in response. One inch at a time, testing the water until I’m leaning against him, relaxing against his side. He exhales and rests his cheek against my forehead.
“Anyway,” he says against my skin, “you never know. Maybe New York will end up sucking.”
I frown. “It could really go either way. TV shows have taught me I’ll become a fashion magazine intern or be murdered in Central Park.”
Kai laughs and pulls me toward him, kissing my cheek briskly, easily. It’s a gesture that’s evolved—he used to shove me playfully whenever I said something funny, or weird, or particularly me. Then the shove became gentler, then it became him wrapping his arm around me, and now finally, he kisses me. Silently says he loves me without me even trying.
“I guess it doesn’t matter if it sucks or you’re a magazine intern,” he says as he pulls away, squinting as the sun creeps lower, its bright light rebounding off a condo building. “In the end, it’s always just us. Together.” It’s not a question, not something he doubts or wonders about. “Unless that Central Park thing happens.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh, and as I do I lift up, feel his breath warm my still-freezing nose. We pause for a moment, just a tiny moment, and then our lips meet. This time, it feels like the kissing in movies looks, long and powerful and sweet and as if it’s melting me. He smells like cinnamon and soap, same as he always has—
“Whoa,” he says, pulling back.
I freeze. “What?” I ask, wondering if I should be embarrassed. What happened?
“Look,” he says, pulling one hand away to motion at the world around us. “It’s starting to snow.”
CHAPTER TWO
It’s tiny snow, sharp and icy, the sort that you don’t want to play in. I see people running to the windows of the glass-and-steel buildings to stare at it whirling around the city. It’s gotten colder almost instantly, a fact I don’t notice so much as I notice how hard I’m pressing against Kai to combat the new chill. His arms are still around my waist, the unzipped army jacket he always wears open on either side of me. It’s a silly jacket, oversize and at odds with the name-brand clothes Kai wears, but it’s incredibly warm and can almost wrap around both of us.
“It’s early for snow,” I say, mumbling the words into his shirt.
“Way early,” he agrees. “The roses aren’t going to last if we’re already getting snow in October.”
He’s right—I look around at the tiny specks of snow that cling to the flowers. They make the roses look sick with something akin to chicken pox, tiny spots covering bright red flesh. The wind rattles them around a bit. Is it snowing harder?
“Let’s go inside,” he suggests.
“We aren’t technically out of school yet,” I remind him. “We could build a fire?”
“Yeah…” Kai says, glancing to the metal barrel on a corner of the roof. We hauled it up here ages ago. Probably not the safest thing in the world, but it’s pretty glorious for roasting marshmallows over.
“We could go to my apartment,” I say, “if we’re quiet. Mom’s still sleeping, I think.” Truthfully, I’m not sure she knows what time school gets out anyway, though I’ve never told Kai this. The magic of us sneaking around would be lost if my mother made it easy by way of indifference.
“Nah, I don’t want to risk it,” Kai says as the snowfall undeniably intensifies. “We can just wait by the roof door till we’re out of school. I don’t want to be out in this.”
“All right,” I agree, and he steps away from me; the icy air sweeps around my body. I hug my own coat closer, but it’s nothing compared with Kai’s chest against me. He lets his fingers pause on mine for a moment, but then releases them, too—the path out of the roses is too narrow to walk side by side. We weave through the flowers, listening to the traffic below slow down to a crawl, drivers inching through the snow as if it’s feet thick instead of barely coating the ground. As we reach the access door, the wind picks up, blowing so hard that Kai struggles to open it. He yanks and tugs, and the wind grows stronger.
Are we trapped up here? Kai finds my eyes, and his are full of matching worry. He turns back to the door, leaving room on the handle for me to grab hold, too. Together we wrest the door open, sliding into the stairwell. We’re barely on the top step when the door slams shut. The wind howls behind it, as if it’s angry.
“I wonder if Grandma has noticed the weather yet,” he says, sitting down on the top step. He checks his watch—thirty minutes until we’d be out of school. Is she ranting about the Snow Queen already? Winter’s royalty, the ruler of the beasts Grandma Dalia fears. We’ve heard about the other beasts in somewhat disgusting detail—how they turn from men into monsters with fur and fangs, that they rip you limb from limb, eat you from the inside out. But the Snow Queen… we know little of her, other than that the thought of her makes Grandma Dalia’s face go white.