Pulse

Chapter 41

Cian

Vinny and I were alone in Lucie's kitchen.

Lucie was upstairs, messing with her hair or her clothes or whatever girls did, which left us two brothers sitting around her island and staring at each other. Being with Vinny had never been awkward before, but now it was, because he kept looking at me and then looking away and looking back up again. He sat on top of the island, legs folded underneath him. The authoritative older brother part of me wanted to scold him, but it's not like he was affecting the counter at all. As always: there but not there.

I rested my elbows upon the granite. "You look disturbed."

"I am disturbed," he answered promptly.

"Why are you disturbed?"

"Maybe because I've never seen you mash your mouth on someone else's. And, like, you were laying on top of each other," Vinny said with a grimace, wrinkling his nose. He shook his shoulders as if removing an invisible insect. "It was gross and weird. I've never seen two people so close."

"I don't think I was mashing," I argued, folding my arms. Vinny's eyebrows rose. "Mashing is a bit of a violent word."

"I don't care what you were doing. The main idea is that I did not want to see it."

"You should, like, knock!"

"There was no door! And regardless, knocking takes effort!"

"You could have announced your presence somehow!"

"I wouldn't have to if you two weren't vigorously mouth-mashing!"

I growled, "Vinny—"

"I cannot leave you two alone for five minutes without you both getting in some sort of fight," Lucie remarked as she strode across her tile flooring, arms folded. She'd taken her backwards hat off, and her dark curls spilled down to her shoulders, some hanging in the ebony of her eyes. She'd smoothed the wrinkles in her shirt, yet was still adjusting the fit of her denim shorts as she flicked her eyes from Vinny to me and back again. "I don't know whether to be annoyed or to be laughing at the fact Vinny has created the word mouth-mashing."

He harrumphed, blowing an ethereal strand of hair from his face. "I'm sure it was a word already."

"Sure," Lucie said, seating herself on the barstool beside me. She licked her fingers, one clean sweep of her tongue, and then reached in my direction. I shot her a bemused look as she ran her hand through my hair, replacing hairs I hadn't known I'd messed up. Done with her work, she sat back and looked towards Vinny, who, for a dead person, looked very green. "Stop looking at us like that and tell us what you randomly poofed yourself here to tell us."

"It's not poofing. It's not like I go 'abra cadabra' and magically appear places."

"Really?" I questioned, as Lucie and I shared a look of exaggerated curiosity, "because that's kind of what it looks like."

"I don't even know why I talk to you people!" Vince huffed.

"Maybe because we're the only two people who can respond," Lucie answered, and at the acidic look my little brother gave her, just sighed. "Fine. Sorry. In all seriousness, what happened with Eden?"

Despite the fact Vinny's lungs had stopped needing oxygen a long time ago, he nevertheless heaved a long sigh anyway, casting his eyes at the ground. Pale blond hair hung over his forehead, a curtain of spun thread. Narrow fingers tapped across the granite, stopped, tapped again. "I found her at a coffee shop. Nothing fancy—just a coffee shop. Everything was going fine until I knocked something over and she saw me."