Chapter 14: Your Turn Is Thursday

Before dawn on Sunday, Dante sent his mother's driver to the harbor to copy the name off the ship's bow.

It was the same name the cellar man had given, and the ship sat at the berths the old man had pointed out.

There was nothing more to do with it until the table met again.

Dante went back to the dormitory with it unspent.

Daniel came back from his aunt's house on Sunday noon with a tin of cookies and a face like a lighthouse.

He stood in the doorway of room fourteen and looked from the bed by the window to the bed by the door.

Both had been slept in.

One had been slept in by two people.

"No," Daniel said. "Don't tell me. I can see it. It's all over your faces."

"There is nothing on my face," Javier said, without looking up from his book.

"There's a lot on yours. Dante's is just quieter."

Dante, who was sitting very straight at the desk, said, "Thank you for the cookies."

"Don't you thank me. I've waited three weeks for this." Daniel put the tin down with great ceremony. "I had a bet with my aunt."

"You told your aunt?"

"She said by Halloween. I said by the midterm." Daniel looked at the ceiling, calculating. "I owe her twenty dollars, and I've never been happier."

Javier threw a pillow at him.

It was the first normal hour Dante had had in two lives.

He kept it in both hands all through Monday.

On Monday afternoon in the library, a fourth-year came and leaned both hands on Javier's table.

He was tall and easy and handsome, with a surgery pin on his collar.

"You're the one who caught the dose error," he said. "I'm on the anatomy review team. I could tutor you, if you like. Evenings. One on one."

He put his hand on Javier's forearm.

Dante, across the table, heard a small crack.

It was the pen in his fist.

He looked down at the two halves.

Then he looked up and met Javier's eyes over the fourth-year's shoulder, and Javier's eyebrows rose very slightly, and waited.

Term four, said the voice in Dante's head, in a wine-colored coat.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Died for His Lover, Then Returned to Win His Trust from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.