One (One Universe)

instead of my voice. Thankfully. It means he understands me. I’m getting a little better at it, too — understanding myself.
    “Um. I like how you smell?” He stands up, looks to the side, and smirks.
    I stick my elbow straight out to the side and hit his ribs. “Weird.”
    “I mean, your shampoo. Your hair always smells so good. And since your head is, like, pretty much at my smell level…”
    “Shut up,” I say softly, floating up to his height and grabbing his face in my hands, slamming a kiss on his mouth. Even my One is good for something with Elias around.
    He wraps his arms around my waist without having to bend down, and the noise he makes leaves my lips tingly. Then he pulls back so his lips move against mine when he talks. “Whenever you’re ready.”
    When he buries his face in my neck, I catch the buzz, and we shoot up into the sky, toward Historic Superior. He pushes the air much more strongly than I can, and he almost always controls the trajectory.
    When I realize how close we’re getting to town, I yell, “Are you crazy?”
    He grins. “Everyone’s at Homecoming,” he reminds me.
    “Go Raiders,” I say, smiling.
    Everyone’s at the big football game, including Leni, who’s cheering, and Daniel, who will go to watch Leni cheer even though he hates football and revelry and painted faces and general high school happiness of any kind. No one will notice us soaring around old town Superior. We’re supposed to be at the game, too, actually. Lying to my parents about what we’re doing is second nature now, but I rationalize that on any given night we’re not doing anything that regular teenagers wouldn’t do — calculus homework, sharing an ice cream cone, making out in a cornfield.
    Except for the flying. The flying is not normal.
    If Mr. Hoffman hadn’t already brought the Hub to me in the Nelson High library, my first reaction would have been to bring this straight to them. But Elias doesn’t suggest that we tell anyone, and his dad works there. I don’t know who’s supposed to know what — all I know is that I want to keep flying with Elias, I want to keep my application for the internship intact, and I don’t know if anyone finding out about the flying would ruin that. So, even though we never talk about it, neither of us tells anyone about the flying either.
    It’s weird, a bit laborious, to haul the backpack with us. Unexpectedly so, but as I think about it, we’re just a couple of floating, air-pushing kids. So it’s basically like we’ve run three miles holding that pack, with only Elias’s muscle to back it up.
    My mind puts it all together — backpack, Homecoming night, not telling me where we’re flying. He’s been planning this for a while. A vague sensation scuttles along my shoulders, setting the hairs at the back of my neck on end. It’s worry, something I haven’t felt with Elias since that night at his house when he wanted to give me the tour. I had to figure out what he really wanted, whether it was really okay to be alone with him. For the first time since then, I feel it again. It kills me. I don’t want to feel that way about Elias.
    We land on the roof of one of the historic houses. If we look out to one side we can see old Superior, but if we turn around we see the fields, the sky above them dripping with colors, so bright they’re almost unreal. The silhouettes of some old phone poles reach, spindly and graceful, into the watercolor backdrop.
    “Which way to do you want to sit?” Elias asks.
    “Do you have to ask?” I grin as I fight to still the trembling in my knees. This time it’s not from the aftereffects of flying. I place my hands gingerly on the shingles below me and settle down, sitting Indian-style, tucking my skirt around my legs. “Away from Superior.”
    Elias smiles, a little sadly, I think, though I can’t understand why. “Of course.” He unzips the backpack and sits down next to me.
    Then he snakes his hand up along my shoulders and down the back of my neck, all the way to the base of my spine. His long fingers clutch at my waist, and his lips press against the sensitive skin just below my ear, then my collarbone. Electricity skitters through me and ties my stomach into knots. For the past few weeks, I’ve been working under the assumption that Elias is different from other boys. But when a boy takes you on a mystery date and the two of you are all alone, it means something, doesn’t it? Means he wants something,