Page 58 of Edge of Stars

Or is there something Nancy Kane isn’t telling us?

There’s no way I’ll find out now, so I pivot to a subject that does have an answer.

“Hey,” I say, reaching out for one of his hands. His fingers are chillier than mine, so I pinch a curious frown nearly at once. “Did I wake you when I left?”

“Well, if delayed reactions count,” he replies tighter than I expect. “When you weren’t there, I searched the house like a madman. Thankfully, the master has the lagoon-view windows.”

“Doesn’t every room in this place have a lagoon look-over?” My crack doesn’t gouge the smallest dent in his tension—seriously, he’s practically growing fuming tumors now—I wrap my other hand around the five demigod fingers still in my clutched possession. “I’m sorry I made you worry. Hey, I really am.”

The huge hills of his shoulders rise and fall. His nose pulls in one more time, air moving into him with focused intensity, before he responds.

“I know that. And I accept the apology.”

“But…” I prompt, chasing his lead.

“You could have woken me up, Kara.” He’s subdued with the volume, not having to talk over anything but the lapping water and a few cicadas that survived past summer. “I know you probably wanted to let me rest, and I even appreciate all the concern that went into that call. I also respect that your brain has been messing around with you since before we got here, for all the really understandable reasons, and that you likely wanted to escape somewhere to properly sort out the bedlam.”

I sniff hard. Gulp even harder. How he sees this clearly into me…it’s incredible but unsettling at the same time. A part of me is astounded and grateful, feeling this thoroughly aligned and acknowledged. But does that mean to thank the man by giving him a bath of my scared, silly tears? He’s been through as much as me, if not more.

“Thank you,” I manage to blurt, keeping my shit mostly together. “For saying all that. For…getting it.”

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “I really do.”

“But…” I stretch it out longer this time, also adding a knowing smirk.

Nevertheless, Maximus makes me wait out a lengthy pause before his growly undertone gets to work again.

“But this, here…” He lifts his free hand and flicks a finger back and forth between our chests. “It’s not just you and me anymore. I know that you know it too, but coming out here to sort your head, when there were a lot of other places to get the job done…” He curls his hand back in until his white knuckles glow in the moonlight. “What if you’d fallen in? And what if I was still asleep and never heard it? What if there was the slightest possibility that you and Sprout—”

“Maximus.”

As soon as it blurts from me, full of aching emotion, I lunge to embrace him. Though I’m speaking everything more overtly, I already feel the matching severity of his feelings. Like the nightmares he had in hell, I can’t see everything from his mind in vivid color, but the reactions are enough. His worry. His terror. His conflict. And yes, despite his staunchest efforts to control it, a stab of frustrated anger. At me.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper into his neck, where his stress has caused a damp sheen under his hair. I burrow closer, feeling guiltier. Searching for something to say to make it better. “You need to know how much I mean it. But you also need to look out here. Hardly a ripple, right? And I do know how to swim. If something had happened, I could’ve—”

“Just glided back to shore?” He jerks back far enough so I’m nailed by his strained glare. “All right. What shore?”

A fast sweep of an assessing look, and I’m grimacing. He’s right. This gorge isn’t like miles of the Malibu shore. The framework for the water is solid rock all around, most of it high and steep and unclimbable. Even the land side of the pier is wedged as if a drill were taken to rocks older than dinosaurs.

So he’s really right.

But he also really knows it.

In the minute it’s taken me to confirm that with my own eyes, he’s gone from being a little terse with a wide layer of clemency to totally flipping the mix—minus the gentle part.

His demeanor takes me back to the first day of the semester, when everyone in that Alameda lecture hall forgot to breathe as he strode to the podium. Many of us just gave up on air for an hour, especially me. Notably from the moment that his look got close to black before he kicked my harassers out of the room.

In this moment, I wonder if I’d be next on the list if not for the water below us. The shimmering depths that he’s treating more like lava.

Overreaction? And even if I really think it, do I express it? The man has pointed out a pertinent landscape hazard and calls the university science guru his best friend.

But maybe there are things he doesn’t understand either.

“Well, I’m sure the lagoon has some shallows—”

“Which probably have craggy rocks or gossamer sand and slope toward the underwater trench that got us here.”

I stiffen my shoulders, avoiding a show of my reacting shiver. Once again, his point is valid—but it’s starting to feel like he’s lording with it instead of talking about it. Overly punishing me for the point, which happens to be a damn good one.