danced and then spent the precious few moments they'd had together ghting about something as stupid as the color of her hair.
Callie had once had a boyfriend at Dover whom she'd broken up with after a ght over a toaster. One of them had jammed the thing with an oversized New York bagel; the other one had ipped out. Luce couldn't remember all the details now, but she remembered thinking, Who breaks up over a kitchen appliance?
But it was never really about the toaster, Callie had told her. The toaster was just a symptom, something that represented everything else that was wrong between them.
Luce hated that she and Daniel kept getting into ghts. The one on the beach, over her dye job, reminded her of Callie's story. It felt like a preview of some bigger, uglier argument on the way.
Bracing herself against the wind, Luce realized she'd come down here to try to trace where they'd gone wrong the other night. She was idiotically looking for signs in the water, some clue carved into the rough volcanic rock. She was looking everywhere except inside herself. Because what was inside Luce was just the vast enigma of her past. Maybe the answers were still somewhere in the Announcers, but for now, they remained frustratingly out of her grasp.
She didn't want to blame Daniel. She was the one who'd been na?ve enough to assume that their relationship had been exclusive across time. But he'd never told her otherwise. So he'd practically set her up to walk right into this shock. It was embarrassing. And one more item to tick o on the long list of things that Luce thought she deserved to know and that Daniel didn't see t to tell her.
She felt something she thought was rain, a drizzly sensation on her cheeks and her ngertips. But it was warm instead of cold. It was powdery and light, not wet. She turned her face toward the sky and was blinded by shimmering violet light. Not wanting to shield her eyes, she watched even when it grew so bright it hurt. The particles slowly drifted toward the water just o shore, falling into a pattern and limning the shape she'd know anywhere.
He seemed to have grown more gorgeous. His bare feet hovered inches o the water as he approached the shore. His broad white wings seemed He seemed to have grown more gorgeous. His bare feet hovered inches o the water as he approached the shore. His broad white wings seemed to be edged with violet light and were pulsing nearly imperceptibly in the rough wind. It wasn't fair. The way he made her feel when she looked at him--awed and ecstatic and a little bit afraid. She could hardly think of anything else. Every annoyance or nagging frustration vanished. There was just that undeniable pull toward him.
"You keep turning up," she whispered.
Daniel's voice carried over the water. "I told you I wanted to talk to you."
Luce felt her mouth pucker up. "About Shelby?"
"About the danger you keep putting yourself in." Daniel spoke so plainly. She'd been expecting her mention of Shelby to elicit some reaction. But Daniel just cocked his head. He reached the wet edge of the beach, where the water foamed and rolled away, and oated just above the sand in front of her. "What about Shelby?"
"Are you really going to pretend like you don't know?"
"Hold on." Daniel lowered his feet to the ground, bending his knees in a deep pli? when his bare soles touched the sand. When he straightened, his wings pulled backward, away from his face, and sent a wave of wind back with them. Luce got her rst sense of how heavy they must be.
It took less than two seconds for Daniel to reach her, but when his arms slipped around her back and pulled her to him, he couldn't have come quickly enough.
"Let's not get o to another bad start," he said.
She closed her eyes and let him lift her o the ground. His mouth found hers and she tilted her face to the sky, letting the feel of him overwhelm her. There was no darkness, no more cold, just the lovely sensation of being bathed in his violet glow. Even the rush of the ocean was canceled out by a soft hum, the energy Daniel carried in his body.
Her hands were wrapped tight around his neck, then stroked the rm muscles on his shoulders, brushing the soft, thick perimeter of his wings. They