Fallen - Lauren Kate [48]
Groan.
An audible sigh erupted from station seven—Daniel.
Miss Sophia turned to him. “Daniel? Do you have a problem with this assignment?”
He sighed again and shrugged. “No, not at all. That’s fine. My family tree. Should be interesting.”
Miss Sophia tilted her head quizzically. “I’ll take that statement for an enthusiastic endorsement.” Addressing the class again, she said, “I trust you’ll find a line worth pursuing in a ten-to fifteen-page research paper.”
Luce could not possibly focus on this right now. Not when there was so much else to process. She and Cam in the cemetery. Maybe it hadn’t been the standard definition of romantic, but Luce almost preferred it that way. It was like nothing she’d ever done before. Skipping class to mosey through all those graves. Sharing that picnic, while he refilled her perfectly made latte. Making fun of her fear of snakes. Well, she could have done without that whole snake development, but at least Cam had been sweet about it. Sweeter than Daniel had been all week.
She hated to admit that, but it was true. Daniel wasn’t interested.
Cam, on the other hand …
She studied him, a few stations away. He winked at her before he began pecking at his keyboard. So he liked her. Callie wasn’t going to be able to shut up about how obviously into her he was.
She wanted to call Callie now, to bolt out of this library and take a rain check on the family tree assignment. Talking up another guy was the fastest—maybe the only—way to get Daniel out of her head. But there was that horrible Sword & Cross phone policy, and all the other students around her, who looked so diligent. Miss Sophia’s tiny eyes panned the class for procrastinators.
Luce sighed, defeated, and opened the search engine on her computer. She was stuck here for another twenty minutes—with not one brain cell devoted to her assignment. The last thing she wanted to do was learn about her own boring family. Instead, her listless fingers began to tap out thirteen letters entirely of their own accord:
“Daniel Grigori.”
Search.
EIGHT
A DIVE TOO DEEP
When Luce answered the knock on her door Saturday morning, Penn tumbled into her arms.
“You’d think it would dawn on me someday that doors open in,” she apologized, straightening her glasses. “Must remember to stop leaning on peepholes. Nice digs, by the way,” she added, looking around. She crossed to the window over Luce’s bed. “Not a bad view, minus the bars and all.”
Luce stood behind her, looking out at the cemetery and, in plain view, the live oak tree where she’d had the picnic with Cam. And, invisible from here but clear in her head, the place she’d been pinned under that statue with Daniel. The avenging angel that had mysteriously disappeared after the accident.
Remembering Daniel’s worried eyes when he whispered her name that day, the near touch of their noses, the way she’d felt his fingertips on her neck—all of it made her feel hot.
And pathetic. She sighed and turned away from the window, realizing Penn had moved on, too.
She was picking things up off Luce’s desk, giving each of Luce’s possessions careful scrutiny. The Statue of Liberty paperweight her dad had brought back from a conference at NYU, the picture of her mom with a hilariously bad perm when she was around Luce’s age, the eponymous Lucinda Williams CD Callie had given her as a going-away present before Luce had ever heard the name Sword & Cross.
“Where are your books?” she asked Penn, wanting to detour around a trip down memory lane. “You said you were coming over to study.”
By then, Penn had begun to riffle through her wardrobe. Luce watched as she quickly lost interest in the variations of dress code-style black T-shirts and sweaters. When Penn moved toward her dresser drawers, Luce stepped forward to intercept.
“Okay, that’s enough, Snoop,” she said. “Isn’t there research we should be doing on family trees?”
“Speaking of snooping.” Penn’s eyes twinkled. “Yes, there is research we should be doing. But not the kind you’re thinking.”
Luce