Breath by Jackie Morse Kessler Page A

tires.
    He flinched, waiting to hear the telltale crash, but there was no impact. A near miss, maybe.
    He blew out a breath. He was being ridiculous. So what that he hadn’t heard from Riley yet? Not everyone was glued to a cell phone. Maybe Riley was in a place with spotty reception. Maybe Riley’s phone was off, or the battery had run out, like Xander’s had.
    Maybe, maybe, maybe. Tons of maybes. A world of maybes.
    Sometimes, a hint of
maybe
was all that mattered.
    His head began to throb, so he grabbed a bottle of aspirin from the bathroom medicine cabinet, then went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. He’d have a quiet night tonight, he told himself as he downed the aspirin, would go to bed early. He’d been stressed out and sleeping poorly, even before Lex’s morning wakeup howls had begun in earnest a month ago.
    Xander was sure the stress was due to his decision to drop Carnegie Mellon. When he had turned the school down, that had been ugly. Colleges, as it turned out, didn’t like it when you reneged on early admission.
    And he’d had to keep it quiet for so long. He hadn’t said a word to his parents, let alone to Riley or his friends.
    It had all been worth it—the lying, the silence, the stress. The sleepless nights.
    He was going to Stanford to be with Riley.
    It wasn’t the best art school, not like Carnegie Mellon or Yale or any of those, and it was insanely expensive; he didn’t have any scholarships, and the thought of how he was going to foot the bill was enough to give him a minor heart attack. But he’d figure it out. Stanford was where he was supposed to be—because Riley would be there.
    He just had to figure out when to share the news, and how to do it. His folks were going to be mad, but eventually, they’d come around. The two of them had fallen in love in high school, even though they dated other people in college and didn’t get married until their midtwenties. Xander knew all this because he’d heard their love story plenty of times. His parents would understand that when it was love, you had to listen to your heart and not be tied up by your brain. All the planning, all the hopes for the future—none of that mattered, not when it came to love.
    Love didn’t conquer all; love
was
all. Love was everything that mattered.
    He’d do anything for Riley Jones.
    Absently rubbing his head, he drank the rest of the water. Between the stress over his secret college plans and his choppy sleep, he was a bit of a mess. No wonder he was having so-called blackouts, and never mind the drinking. All he needed was some quality sleep, then everything would be fine.
    Sleep, and figuring out when to tell Riley he was also going to Stanford, that they didn’t have to worry about a long-distance relationship.
    They were going to have a happily ever after—starting right now, he decided, setting down his water glass. He’d tell Riley everything. No more waiting for the right time, waiting to come up with the right way to say it. He’d just blurt it out.
    He marched back to his room and checked his phone.
    Still no text from Riley.
    No matter; he wanted to say it, not text it. He punched in Riley’s number, then hung up when he got voicemail. This wasn’t voicemail news.
    Nuts. Looked like he had to wait after all.
    Sighing, Xander went to the window and glanced out. He liked looking at the cityscape at dusk, just as the sun was beginning its slow descent from today to tonight. Granted, he didn’t care for being thirty stories up, but he was behind glass, safe. So he watched the colors play across the sky—the blues darkening and bleeding into purples streaked with pink like the air had gone punk. Clouds stretched lazily as they striped the sun. Xander looked, amazed by how easily something so radiant could be muted, subdued. Molten gold marred by cotton white, framed by twilight skies whispering promises of starlight and first wishes.
    Xander made a wish, made it with all his