Bookish and the Beast - Ashley Poston Page 0,31

myself from the edge of my bed.

My mouth feels like sandpaper, and every one of the glasses in my room is empty.

“Elias,” I call hoarsely, but when he doesn’t answer, I pull up my hood over my greasy week-unwashed hair and crack open the door to my room. “Elias?”

Some indie-pop band blares from the speakers downstairs in the kitchen, so I highly doubt he can hear me. He must be baking—there’s a sweet scent in the air. Apple pie?

I shuffle down the hallway and descend the stairs, rubbing at my eyes. I either sleep too much or not enough and I don’t know which it is. I fell asleep at some point last night, but I can’t remember when, just a lot of shooting and dodging and capturing stupid neon-colored flags with Imogen, until she had to go to bed. She—for some terrible reason—decided to choose morning university classes, something which I will never understand.

“Elias, could you turn that trash down?” I call as I shuffle into the kitchen.

But Elias is not here.

There’s a pie in the oven, but I don’t see Elias anywhere. He must’ve gone to the loo or something. So I check the pie—definitely apple, one of my favorites—and yank open the refrigerator to grab a cup of yogurt.

And I hear footsteps.

I close the refrigerator door, about to tell him how unsafe it is to leave the kitchen while cooking when—

“Mr. Rodriguez, I’ve got a question about the organization of volumes fourteen through twenty of the Starfield extended—” The girl freezes the second she turns into the kitchen, empty pitcher in one hand, glass in the other, and realizes that it’s me. Her face closes off like the snap of a mousetrap.

In the daylight she looks just about as normal as they come—brown hair pulled up away from her heart-shaped face, framed with a fringe that curls every which way in that endearing sort of way I don’t quite understand. There is a peppering of freckles across her cheeks. Surprisingly long eyelashes framing hazel eyes. And she can’t be more than five-one, so tiny she barely reaches my shoulders.

And in the moment she reminds me of the girl I met at ExcelsiCon. Her hair had been pulled back the same way, exposing a rose-shaped birthmark just behind her left ear—

Bloody hell.

The yogurt cup slips from my hand and clatters onto the ground.

It’s her.

She blinks at me.

I know what I must look like—a tall, barely washed guy in a gray hoodie and Naruto boxers (that I am kicking myself for sleeping in). And it’s her. The girl from the balcony.

Her.

She doesn’t recognize me, does she? No, she can’t. I wore a mask that night. She did too, but that birthmark is unmistakable. I asked her about it over hash browns.

“Oh, yeah, I’ve had it since I was born,” she had said sheepishly, picking at her hash browns. “My parents named me after it.”

“Rose, then?”

She smiled, and even behind her mask it made something strange flutter in my stomach. “It’s a secret, unless you tell me yours.”

“I’m no one,” I lied.

It seemed innocuous back then. I didn’t want to ruin the moment by telling her the truth, but then when morning came, I thought I heard my name so I looked over my shoulder. And the next second, she was gone.

And now here she is, again, reappeared like some reoccurring dream.

Or perhaps a nightmare.

She hesitantly puts the pitcher down on the island counter. “Um—sorry. I thought you were Elias.”

“I am not,” I reply.

She rubs her hands on her jeans—they must be sweaty; I know mine are—and then holds out her hand as if she wants me to shake it. Her lilac nails are painted with sparkly glitter. “I think we got off on the wrong foot, maybe? I’m Rosie. Rosie Thorne.”

A rose-shaped mark.

Rosie.

I look down at her hand.

“Maybe we could—I don’t know—be friends?”

Friends.

The only friends I’ve had, aside from Imogen, have all gossiped behind my back and sold my deepest secrets to the tabloids. And if she finds out—when she finds out—that I was that bloke in the General Sond costume at ExcelsiCon? All of the secrets I told her, all of my fears, and hopes, and dreams…

I don’t want to risk them getting out.

So it will be best if I don’t become her friend at all, because the closer she gets the more likely she will see behind my mask. That night on the balcony was a mistake. Meeting her was a mistake.

I won’t make another one.

The tabloids