by Selena Scott
Her legs latched around his waist and he had one knee on the counter. He was over top of her, her hair halfway falling out of her bun and her t-shirt tugging to one side under his fingers.
He nipped at her lip and then broke away to breathe hot and cold against her neck. Somewhere, something inside him knew that he was selling his soul at that very second. That same little, pissant voice said don’t do it, Matt. Don’t lick across her collarbone. You’ll never be the same if you do. But Matt Woods hadn’t listened to the bullies who’d kicked his ass in grade school and he sure as hell wasn’t listening to any bullies now.
His tongue just barely beat his teeth across her collarbone and Inka made a noise, a perfect noise, that he could have sworn changed his DNA. The only thing that could have ever had him lifting his head from her neck was that noise.
Because he had to, simply had to, see her face right now. And he was not disappointed. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips teased and full, her eyes half-lidded, and those green, wide eyes? They weren’t looking at anything but him.
Inka’s numb brain was burning to the ground. She was vacillating between two completely new and immutable truths. 1. Matt Woods looked fine as hell with his shirt off and 2. Matt Woods could kiss the lights out.
Just as soon as she’d thought she’d gotten used to one truth, the other one reared its head and threw her for a loop. She thought she’d known exactly where he fit. Exactly how she felt. But then… this.
This heart-skipping, panty-liquefying, moan-inducing makeout was changing everything. Inka saw, with terrifying clarity, how wrong she’d been. That every second spent getting closer to Matt was just one step getting closer to this. This was inevitable. She saw it now.
“God,” she breathed, tossing her head to one side. “This was—this was always going to happen?” She was asking herself as much as she was asking him.
He raised his head and she saw, even through the fiery churning of desire for her, he had wheels turning, trying to answer her question. Even through this haze, he was listening to her, trying to respond.
“Never mind,” she murmured against his lips. “I don’t care.”
Her tongue swept back into his mouth and almost detonated all remaining thoughts for Matt. But her question reverberated in his mind. Because in some ways, this didn’t feel like chance, or a risk well rewarded. This felt like it was a hundred years in the making. A thousand.
Matt felt that every choice he’d ever made had ended up in him halfway on the counter, pressing Inka down like nothing else on this earth even mattered.
He gave her one last kiss. A press of his tongue and one heavy-lidded slice of blue eyes. And then he was up, off of her and yanking her to her feet.
“Wha-?” She felt as if she’d been roused from a dead sleep. She stumbled against him and he steadied her. He almost took her mouth again but he yanked himself back. He let out a thin breath at the moment he firmly traced his hands down her arms and back up.
“I have to show you my work,” he said, his voice hoarse.
“I—now?” She was looking up at him, confused as hell.
“Yes. Now.” Matt released her and took a step away, his hands tracing through his black hair for just a second before he was spinning back to her. “Definitely now.”
“Matt, you know I’ve always been curious about your work, but I was kind of thinking we could do something else right now.” Her heart was pounding in her chest as she reached for him again. Mmm. He was so tall and she fit right into that place in front of him where his arms couldn’t help but go around her.
“No, that’s exactly my point. I have to show you now because that kiss was…” he trailed off, unable to find an adequate word to describe it. He gave up. “And you’re just so…” He found he had to trail off again.
She scrunched up her face in that perfectly Inka way. “I don’t get it, Matty.”
Matt groaned and hauled her just a little bit closer. He dipped his head so that their foreheads pressed together. He’d already done the hard part, right? Now he just needed to do the slightly less hard part. Because if he didn’t, well, he’d worry and worry until he did. And if this was gonna happen, really happen, he wanted no barriers. He cleared the hoarseness from his throat.
“Inka, I tend to lose people once they find out what my research is. Hell, even my mother thinks I’m a whacko. I just—The idea of kissing you again and getting closer to you and then you changing your mind because of my research? I couldn’t handle that. So,” he grabbed her hand and tugged her out of the kitchen. “Let’s just get it out of the way and then you can decide how you feel, no hard feelings either way.”
“Matt.”
“Really, Inka, I wouldn’t hold it against you.”
“Matt.”
“I just can’t risk losing any more of myself down your rabbit hole. Wait. That didn’t come out the way I meant it. Scratch that from the record. I meant that you’re kind of like a tornado. No! Picture yourself as a whirlpool.”
“MATT!”
He pulled up short with one hand on the door to his lab. His eyebrows pulled together when he turned and saw Inka looking more angry than he’d ever seen her looking before. “Are you alright?”
“No!” She stamped one foot on the ground and more of her golden hair tumbled from the bun. She angrily yanked the hair tie out and Matt’s mouth watered as her hair was a waterfall at her shoulders. “I’m not alright. First you take all my marbles in your hand and you toss ‘em all over the kitchen. Completely discombobulate me because apparently Matt Woods gold medals in kissing a girl’s brains out her ears. And I’d never really thought of you like that before just now. But I’m thinking of you like that now!” She yanked her hair back up and the bun was just as messy as before. “But I also feel so snuggly toward you too, the way I always have, so now I have to combine those two feelings. But that’s not why I’m mad!”
She took a step toward him and he marveled at how her eyes could be so wide and vulnerable and so fierce at the same time.
“I’m mad because here I am, galloping for you,” she laid a hand over her heart. “And you think I’m gonna run for the hills because of what you have in that room? Don’t you know me, Matty?”
“You’re right,” he spoke immediately. “I wasn’t thinking exactly. Because you threw all my marbles on the floor, too.”
She cracked a little Inka smile and he couldn’t help but trace his thumb over her jaw. They stared at one another.
“So,” he started slowly. “Does this mean that you don’t want to see my lab right now?”
“Hell, yeah, I wanna see it!” She came up to her toes in her excitement. “I’ve been waiting for months! I’m so freaking curious.” But then she was jogging back toward the kitchen.
“Where are you going then?”
She came back a second later, already one huge bite into her sandwich and tossing his toward him. “I just wanted to get the sandwiches,” she said through her bite. “Wow, you’re right, this is really good pastrami.”
He had to laugh then. It was either laugh or fall on his knees. He just liked her. He just really, really liked her.
CHAPTER FOUR
“It’s probably not what you’re expecting,” Matt told her, one hand on the doorknob of the lab. “You know, you say ‘lab’ and people expect metal counters and colored liquids in beakers, but—”
“Just show me, Matty. I’m dying out here.”
She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting but she was not disappointed. The room was much homier than she might have thought it would be, with bedside lamps burning brightly in two corners and framed photographs lining one wall. The door of the closet had been removed and there were two computers on a desk shoved inside. Under the two windows on the opposite wall was a long worktable with neatly arranged odds and ends. Nuts and bolts, cuts of different sized piping, batteries of all kinds, what looked like lightbulbs, etc.
On the walls hung tools on tools on tools.
More than Inka had ever seen or could even name, and Ansel was a carpenter, so that was saying something. And on the last wall were blueprint after blueprint. Some of them huge and printed on architect’s paper and some of them were scratched on napkins.
“It’s so organized,” Inka noted, turning a slow circle.
“Yes,” Matt nodded his head. “Otherwise I risk forgetting something or losing something.” He paused. “Like my mind.”
She laughed. “This looks more like the workshop of an inventor than the lab of a scientist.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I’m a scientist moonlighting as an inventor, I guess. This is the part that I discovered in a lab.” He strode over to a safe that she hadn’t noticed before and unlocked it. In his hand was what looked like a small glass pill. He carefully cracked it open and she saw that it was supposed to hinge and unhinge like that.
“This is pretty much my life’s work.”
Inka clasped her hands behind her back and didn’t even breathe as he brought it up to her eye level. “What is it?”
“This is a tiny little echo chamber. It takes sound and throws it out at exact perfect frequency.”
“To separate molecules? Like you said before?”
He nodded again. “Maybe I should start at the beginning.”
“Great!” She snuck another bite of her sandwich and Matt chuckled.
He grabbed a swivel chair and sat down in it, unable to resist pulling her into his lap. He took a bite of his own sandwich and wrapped his free arm around her waist. He tried not to dwell on how good it felt. How temporary it might be.
“So, when I was a kid, about 13, I went to visit my abuela for the summer.”
“In Galicia?”
He blinked at her. “How did you know that’s where my family is from?”
“Por que hablas Español con un acento gallego.” Because you speak Spanish with a Galician accent. “And because all those photos are of different places in Galicia.” She nodded her head toward the framed black and whites on the wall. “Although that bottom one I think is actually in Portugal somewhere.”
He kissed her then, out of nowhere, and it had a different kind of passion in it. Just lips on lips. When he pulled back, her cheeks were flushed but her eyes were clear.
“Okay, keep going. I can’t wait to get to the part where I think you’re a lunatic and I never want to be seen with you again.” She crossed her eyes at him. “You were with Abuela…”
“And I was going to see this girl I had a crush on that summer. One night right before sundown, I was running through this backwoods shortcut, through this scrubby little gully. And I saw something.”
Inka’s eyes were wide as she chomped her sandwich. He absently traced a palm over her thigh, held her just a little tighter to him.
“What was it?”
He took a deep breath. “It was kind of a disturbance in the air. It was clear and fuzzy at the same time. It had these edges. And on the other side of it, well, there was, what I think was, another world. Or another dimension.”
“Uh huh,” she nodded, her eyes on his. She took another huge bite and then her gaze fell to his sandwich, as if she were partially contemplating it as well.
He cleared his throat. “Inka, did you hear that part?”
“The other world part? Yeah, of course. I’m listening.”
She furrowed her brow as he looked at her like she might be getting ill. His eyes searched hers, and in fact, one of his hands brushed at her brow, like he was taking her temperature.
“And that doesn’t completely freak you out? That I legitimately think I found a window to another world? Because I’m not joking. This was real.”
She nodded. “Of course it’s real. So what does the echo chamber thingy have to do with it?”
Besides the fact that Matt looked like she’d conked him in the head with a MagLite, Inka thought this was going very well.
“Ah. Right. Well.” He shook his head. “I was able to observe it for a month before it was gone.” He clamped a hand at her waist to steady her as he leaned all the way over to a drawer and pulled out a worn notebook. “These are all my notes and all my drawings.”
Inka took the notebook, flipped it open, and felt a piece of her heart gallop away. The handwriting was the impatient, messy scrawl of a thirteen-year-old, and the drawings were terrible, but detailed and careful nonetheless. Every page was filled with observations and thoughts. Including: Tried throwing rock through, rock ricocheted back and hit me in head.
“What interested me most was the edge. It was inconsistent. Firm in some places and soft in others. As if whatever it was made of wasn’t distributed equally.”
She nodded, hanging on his every word.
“Eventually, after intense study, I came to understand what I’d encountered. The edge of the disturbance was comprised of, of, extra molecules, if you will, that had been shoved to the side. And the center was—”
“The space between the molecules.”
“Ah. Right. But what interested me the most was that the molecules hadn’t been cleared equally. Some places were thick and some were thin. It seemed to have occurred almost naturally.”
“You think you can do it with a sound wave? That’s the tool that you’re making? It makes a special frequency that creates one of those windows?”
He cleared his throat. “Yes.”
She put her hands on Matt’s shoulders and leaned forward as if what she was about to ask was extremely important. “Can your tool close the windows back up as well?”
“Well, to be honest, the tool can’t do anything right now. I’m still working on it.”
“So you think that when the molecules of this world are cleared away, it kind of pulls back the curtain and reveals another world?”
“Exactly. Ah. Inka? You’re taking this really well. And I gotta say, it’s kind of freaking me out.”
She ignored him. “So you could see it, but you couldn’t go through it? The window?”
“Right.” His brow was pulled straight down to the bridge of his nose. “Nothing could get through it. It was impenetrable.”
Well, it was impenetrable to him. The weight of everything her family had discovered over the last two years hovered over Inka, but she deftly sidestepped it. She was too buoyant to get weighed down now. She knew that she and Matt had a lot of things to talk about. And she knew that she owed him some explanations. But the story he’d told her was his and his alone. If Inka were to tell her story tonight, she’d be telling Ansel’s story and Ruby’s and Griff’s and Milla’s and Alec’s and Kain’s. She’d be telling so much more than she had a right to tell.
She stood up, off his lap and paced toward his blueprint wall. She studied the hand-drawn ones and realized, with a galloping in her chest, that he hadn’t gotten any better at drawing over the years. She turned back to him and almost let out a sound of dismay at the pained expression on his face. Immediately she strode back and threw her legs over his lap again. He widened his knees and Inka realized that she was straddling him. She’d meant the gesture to be supportive and sweet, and it was, but it was also something else altogether.
She struggled to keep her head on straight as Matt anchored his hands on her upper thighs. His hands were strong and confident, as if they had a mind of their own, but his eyes were cautious still as he waited for her to speak.
“This is super cool, Matt.” She cocked her head to one side and swung her suspended feet in a few quick circles. “I’m really excited for you that you’re so close to a breakthrough. And I can’t wait to see what happens.”
“That’s it?”
“What’s it?”
“You don’t think I’m insane?”
She shook her head vehemently. “Not in the least.”
“And even though I just basically revealed that you’re living in a world that has windows to another dimension, you’re just… fine.”
She couldn’t lie to him. “Well, you didn’t exactly reveal it to
me.”
He went completely still under her. He was like a Matt Woods statue. “Do you mean to imply that you already knew about this phenomenon?”
She seemed, again, to be staring at nothing and she was quiet for so long that Matt thought he might scream. “Inka…”
She jumped, like she’d forgotten he was even there. “I’m trying to think of a way of explaining this. Okay. How about this: I have a lab, too.”
“Sorry?”
“Metaphorically speaking.”
“Inka, I’m not following.”
She sighed and leaned her forehead against his. “Okay. You wanted to stop kissing and show me your lab because it was something you hadn’t told me that you thought might drive me away. Right?”
“Right.”
“Well, I have something I haven’t told you that I think might drive you away.”
Impossible. That was the only word that came to mind. He couldn’t think of a damn thing she could tell him that would make him want to be away from her. He tightened his hold against her thighs. “So tell me. I promise to be open-minded. I mean, after the way you just absorbed my bomb drop, I owe it to you.”
“I can’t tell you.” She shook her head, those wide green eyes planted on his. “Because I’m not the only one involved. I have to ask the others if I’m allowed to tell you.”
“Hmm.” He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Disappointed. But also proud of her. She had principles. It was one of the many things that he liked about her. “Well. Alright.”
“Are you okay with waiting?”
“Waiting in what way?” Please don’t let her say she wants to wait to kiss again.
“Waiting for me to tell you.”
A warmth spread through his chest. “Can we keep kissing while we’re waiting?”
She smiled, all white teeth and pink lips and, he swore, pure sunshine. “Yes. Definitely yes.”
