Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful. Arwen Dayton Elys

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СКАЧАТЬ we never really talked before this year. Why is that?” he asked. Before I could answer, he added, “When you came back to school, I realized that—that I wanted to get to know you.”

      “Yeah, me too,” I said, trying not to stare at his sexy hands. “We’ve been at the same school for almost three years. Why don’t we know each other better?”

      Honestly, I was spouting almost random words to fill up the space between us; I wasn’t looking for an answer to this question. I already had a theory as to why Gabriel had finally noticed me after basically looking through me for years. (Even back when we were fourteen, when he’d still been short and really skinny and I’d had breasts, he hadn’t been interested.) But when they’d rebuilt my left eye, the orbit had changed shape a little bit; I’m talking about just the ordinary plastic surgery when the surgeon had to put it back together, not fancy stuff like they did with the rest of me. Then, because the left was different, they’d changed the right eye socket to match so it didn’t look like the two halves of my face were arguing with each other. When this was done, something in the overall appearance of my eyes and eyebrows had been subtly altered for the better. I don’t think it was on purpose, but when I healed, my eyes were a little wider and more perfectly shaped, and I was a little bit prettier.

      So … Gabriel’s new interest was easily explained: I’d been attractive when I got back to school, and he assumed I was just growing into my looks, because as far as anyone at St. Anne’s knew, I had only broken my legs and my jaw in the accident. It felt like cheating, getting his interest this way, but why should I be ashamed of finding a silver lining?

      We lapsed into silence as, up on the screen—or rather, hovering in the air outside our car, so crisp and hyper-detailed that they were almost more real than reality—a parade of superheroes in the coming attractions threw 3D stuff at each other, stuff like cars and horses and battleships and, I am not kidding you, even an orca that appeared to spin around right in front of our windshield, spraying water from its toothy smile onto the glass. I laughed involuntarily and made a sort of choking snort—a sound my friend Lilly had kindly pointed out was like a barfing dog. (Laughs are weird sometimes; it’s something to do with the partial larynx, or maybe the way the meshline travels through it. I forget exactly.)

      “Are you okay?” Gabriel asked, because of, you know, the barfing dog sound.

      “Um, yeah—taco went down the wrong way,” I lied.

      He held my drink out chivalrously, and as I took it, his hand brushed against mine, sending a shiver up my arm.

      “Is, uh, is Milla short for something?”

      I dread this question, because the answer usually takes too long—but this time it didn’t. I said, “I’m named for St. Ludmilla, who lived in the Czech Republic like twelve hundred years ago—”

      “Wait,” he said, interrupting, “are you talking about St. Ludmilla of Bohemia?”

      I was thrown. “Yes.”

      “I know her.”

      “What, like personally?” The sarcasm slipped out. It wasn’t intentional. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of the genuine interest that had appeared in his eyes.

      “I know who she is,” he said. He was shaking his head in mild disbelief. “St. Ludmilla.”

      I stared at him a moment. “You are seriously one of the only people who has ever known who she was.”

      “She brought Christianity to her people,” he continued, very pleased with himself. And even better, our conversation no longer felt awkward.

      “Well, she tried,” I said. “Then her daughter-in-law had her strangled.”

      “You mostly don’t get to be a saint by living happily ever after,” he pointed out, with what struck me as a rather sophisticated worldview.

      “That’s true. Getting murdered helps a lot. Are you Catholic?” We recognized saints in the Episcopal church, but he seemed unusually knowledgeable.

      “My mom’s sort of Catholic, but the Episcopal school was less expensive and she says it’s basically the same. My grandmother thinks I’m going to school with a bunch of dangerous nonbelievers, so she made me memorize the life stories of a hundred saints before I started at St. Anne’s.”

      “And Ludmilla was one of them?” There were thousands and thousands of saints. This was a huge and unlikely coincidence. Had he secretly been researching me? Had he been as in love with me all this time as I’d been with him? When I’d imagined him touching me with those hands, had he been imagining the same thing?

      “My grandma’s from the Czech Republic, so it was, like,mostly saints from around there that she wanted me to focus on,” he explained. “I liked St. Ludmilla. She was cool.”

      Ah. I felt a stab of disappointment. Only a coincidence. Still, the ice had broken. Gabriel was gazing at me and I fancied there were hidden depths in him that I hadn’t suspected.

      “You have really pretty eyes,” he told me.

      I smiled, and mentally I thanked Dr. Watanabe for his facial reconstruction skills.

      On the screen were more movie trailers, and on every side of the car were rows of other cars, all the occupants trying hard to block out the rest of the audience and pretend, like I was doing, that they were the only people in the world at that moment.

      His comment about my eyes, and the way he kept glancing over at me, sent hormones racing into my bloodstream in poorly regulated batches. He was into me, I realized. More than I could have hoped. My body translated this knowledge into an unbearable level of excitement and an equal portion of terror. The adrenaline and make-out hormones were sliding past each other like aggressive rival gang members. All the parts beyond the meshline were beginning to give me that weird tingle/hotness/overload feeling that meant the fake parts didn’t know what to do with everything I was throwing at them. I started to freak out. What had I been thinking, coming on this date with him? My body, my voice, any part of me might do something drastically wrong—

      “Do you care about the movie, Milla?” Gabriel asked. The trailers had ended and the theater was dark as the movie began. His voice had gone all whispery. He was leaning toward me so his breath brushed my cheek.

      Holy shit, he was really into me. Something was going to happen right now, unless I stopped it. But Gabriel was giving me his full attention, those dark eyes, his jawline, the curve of his shoulder muscles beneath his shirt, his hands …

      “No, I don’t care about the movie,” I found myself whispering back.

      He turned down the volume, inched closer, and said, “Hey.”

      Stop him! I yelled at myself. Get out of here!

      I did neither of these things. Instead I sat rooted to the seat as he gently put his lips on mine.

      Gabriel Phillips was kissing me. Alone in my hospital room, alone in my bedroom at home, I had seen this moment a thousand different ways. But now it was real: lips, pressure, warmth.

      When the kiss was over, my mind replayed it obsessively on an auto-loop. I might have been staring at him in mute shock for СКАЧАТЬ