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Luz was unaware of what she was doing with her fingers: only dimly the physical sensation, and definitely not the greater cultural significance.
In one hand she held a tiny book with a soft leather cover and a pliable spine, wedging it open with her thumb. It looked like a pocketbook or a journal, but Luz had seen multiple tiny copies of it on the bookshelf Amity had plucked it from, and it had a proper title embossed on its cover (“Of Arcane Magicks and Occult Knowledges from the Isles & Beyond”), so she supposed it qualified as a real book. From the spidery cursive text to the obtuse and outdated wording to the soft light in Amity’s hidden room at the Bonesborough Library, it was a tough read. Luz’s tongue was stuck in the corner of her mouth in concentration as she slogged through a paragraph that might have some relevant information: The Bloode of the Titain has ere been of the Moste Elusive and Wilde reagents. Search it naught by the Laughing Moon, for a witch would be so vexed as to cometh with bare ash twixt her claws. Heede naught the sorcerers whom purport possession of a single Phial, for obtaining the potent Bloode canst be twinned as one giveth coin for the milk of the goat…
Luz was so focused on the book that she didn’t know what her other hand was doing.
She had been idly fiddling with Amity’s hair, Amity resting her head against Luz’s leg as she, Luz, was occupying her usual reading spot in the corner. Amity, too, had been reading -- researching -- from a heavy tome she kept suspended above her with her perpetually circling finger. For a long while the only sound between them was the occasional rustle of the pages, but Luz imagined (whenever she lost her place in her reading, which was often) she could also hear, very quietly, her fingers scraping the stubble of Amity’s short hair, the not-quite-hidden part that was still the brown of her roots. Amity’s hair fascinated her, because Amity fascinated her, and she took any available opportunity to touch it. She was still a little in awe that this was something she could do. Something Amity permitted. Encouraged sometimes, even.
“Girlfriend” was a huge concept Luz was still taking time to fully comprehend.
Luz had needed to concentrate on what she was reading, and her hand had drifted. When she lapsed out of the old book (which she suspected wouldn’t give out any concrete answers, but rather turn out to be another “the magic of the Titan’s Blood was inside you the whole time” kind of deal), she found she wasn’t touching Amity’s hair.
She found instead she was stroking Amity’s pointed ear.
It was warm, and soft, and smooth, and a welcome distraction from the jumble of words she had been mired in. Luz traced the tip with utmost care, marvelling at the point that it came to. Witch ears weren’t all that different from human ears, she supposed, but she had never had the opportunity to study human ears in such close proximity so she couldn’t be completely certain. Clearly this required further study, she thought, brushing the tip of her finger across the back of Amity’s ear-tip.
It twitched under her touch, an automatic response. Like a horse shooing an insect with its tail. Like blinking away a mote of dust.
Okay, Luz thought, human ears definitely don’t do that.
She could have disappeared completely into toying with Amity’s ear. The open book in her other hand was already forgotten, she could have lost herself in this new aspect of fascination with her girlfriend.
She may have, too, if she hadn’t noticed Amity had also stopped reading and was watching her.
Watching was perhaps the wrong word; staring more accurately described what Amity was doing. There was intensity in her eyes Luz hadn’t seen before, and she didn’t think it was completely due to seeing them upside-down. Without taking her eyes off Luz, Amity closed the book she was reading with deliberate slowness and placed it beside her on the floor. Luz noted she didn’t put a bookmark between its pages, which she had observed Amity do with almost every other book she had watched her close without finishing.
Amity turned over and rose level with Luz in one fluid motion, not for a moment letting her gaze waver. Luz couldn’t not look into her burning yellow eyes. In the low light, they seemed brighter than the candles.
“Was I--” Luz began, and as she started speaking she saw how flushed Amity’s cheeks had become. She didn’t know exactly what she had been about to say, probably a question about if she had been bothering Amity, but it didn’t matter.
Amity lunged forward and kissed her.
This was not their first kiss. Kissing was also something they had taken every available opportunity to explore together, during moments alone, occasionally while together at the Owl House (often accompanied by either a sly comment from Eda or a demand for attention from King, sometimes both), and once in a fit of daring as the bell screamed for them to get to their next class, a burning blush heating both their faces as they walked away to their respective classes. But at the same time, this was their first kiss, something wild and untamed, filled with passion and urgency and desperation. Luz had read about kisses that took people’s breath away, but she had considered it a poetic turn of phrase right up until Amity pressed her up against the wall with her insistence.
Luz only remembered the book she had been holding when it was taken from her hands. Amity must have also discarded it to the floor, she couldn’t see. It didn’t feel right to open her eyes, and even if she did her vision would be full of Amity. Amity’s fingers entwined with hers as she pulled herself into Luz’s lap, straddling her. Amity’s free hand touched her cheek, brushed her hair, traced the contour of her ear. For a brief moment Luz wondered wildly if Amity was just as fascinated with her round ears.
Then she felt Amity’s teeth lightly on her lower lip, and all at once it became very difficult to wonder about anything at all.
Amity’s free hand roamed down her side, a nimble explorer. Luz gasped when she touched the hint of skin just beneath her hoody.
She froze when Amity’s hand began to shift higher. Her breath caught in her throat. She couldn’t think. Neither in a good way.
Immediately Amity sensed her discomfort, and pulled back from her. “Luz?” she asked, her voice full of concern, her eyes no longer with their previous predatory gleam. “What’s wrong?”
Luz blinked at her. Maybe they had been on the fast side of moving their relationship forward for a first relationship for either of them, if there even was a standard timeline for these sorts of things, but what had just happened was something else entirely. Logarithmic acceleration. Impulse to warp seven. Other comparisons Luz knew Amity wouldn’t understand flashed in her mind, bursting and fading like a fireworks display.
“Too fast,” she squeaked, more complicated words failing her.
As if the last few minutes hadn’t been confusing enough, Amity’s reaction was one Luz would never have predicted with a thousand guesses.
She frowned, and said, mostly to herself, “I don’t understand.” Her expression looked like she hadn’t come up with the correct number at the end of a complex math equation.
“What,” Luz asked, “is there not to understand?”
“But you were…”
A realization bloomed in Amity’s face, and to Luz it didn’t look like a completely happy one. Amity slumped over Luz’s shoulder like the air had gone out of her. Luz heard her head collide hard enough with the wall to make a sound in the silence.
“...Human ears aren’t very… sensitive, are they?” Amity asked the wall.
“Not really, no.” Luz was unsure what to do with her arms, as usually if Amity was this close to her they would be hugging. She left them awkwardly at her sides.
Amity’s next words came in a whisper so quiet that Luz might not have heard her if she had been anywhere in the room other than right beside her.
“...Witch ears are.”
“Oh?” Luz said, and then it clicked for her as soon as she had spoken. “Oh!” The signal she must have been sending, unaware of what it meant. “...Oh.”
“Yeah,” Amity mumbled.
“I’m sorry,” Luz said, “I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t know. How could you have?” Amity sighed. “I should have realized your physiology might be a little… um, different. It’s my fault. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry.” Luz brought an arm around Amity to embrace her, and having Amity accept it made things feel a little closer to the normal of a few moments ago. “It’s just one of those things that’s going to come up with inter-realm dating.” She forced herself to smile even though Amity couldn’t see it. “No big deal.”
“I guess.”
“I mean,” Luz continued, “I hadn’t even really been thinking about…” She bit her lip, looking for the right word. “That,” she said, settling for the most vague euphemism, “so…”
She trailed off as Amity said something in a voice too quiet for Luz to hear.
“Hm?” she asked.
A long period of silence followed. Luz had just about convinced herself that she had misheard when Amity spoke.
“I have,” she said in a small voice.
“Oh,” Luz repeated.
In lieu of knowing what to do with that information, she held Amity tighter with both arms. Maybe that would prevent her from sitting up and looking at her face to face. Their current position was awkward, but it fit for the awkward conversation. She didn’t think she could get through it if she had to see Amity’s reactions to her reactions.
“I don’t want to pressure you or anything,” Amity said, “so don’t feel like you have to--”
“No, no,” Luz said over her, “I don’t.”
“That’s good. Because I don’t want to pressure you.”
“You said that.”
“I know.”
“I,” Luz said, trying to smile again, “think that it is good that we are talking about this. In a sensible, mature way.”
“Yes,” Amity agreed in a similarly stiff voice. “So we can get a sense of where each other’s… um... “
“Boundaries?” Luz supplied.
“Yes,” Amity said, “where each other’s boundaries are. That is a good thing to know about in a relationship.”
“It is.”
“So, I am going to let you let me know when you want to progress further,” Amity said. “If you want to progress further.” She gave Luz’s shoulder a quick squeeze. “No--”
“No pressure,” Luz finished, and she heard Amity chuckle. “I know. I will.”
“Just so you know,” Amity said after a long pause, “I haven’t really thought about it that much.”
To this, Luz had no reply.
“Just maybe once or twice. And it wasn’t even… it was pretty abstract, it wasn’t about anything specific, just…”
Luz realized something: she could feel Amity’s face having turned bright red.
“...I’m going to stop talking now,” Amity muttered into Luz’s shoulder.
Luz patted her head. “Do you want to go back to reading?” she asked cautiously.
“Yes,” Amity breathed. “Please, yes.”
Luz never did get an answer out of the book she had been reading. She found it very difficult to move beyond the paragraph she had been stuck on.
-/-
Luz lay on her back with one leg crossed over the other, looking up at the ceiling of her bedroom without seeing it. She didn’t hear the chirps and squeaks of the echo mouse as it scurried about in its enclosure. She was back in the hidden room in the library, turning the moment over and over in her mind like she was examining a rare jewel.
I have, Amity had said. Had whispered, like a confession. It echoed in her thoughts, creating permutations, variations, half-finished images. I have thought of you. I have thought of what I would want to do to you. With you.
I have thought of you, while.
Luz couldn’t finish that particular thought without a bundle of nerves writhing in her stomach and a flush of warmth spreading all over her.
Sex wasn’t a foreign concept to her. She’d grown up with an above-average curiosity, a single parent who often had to work odd hours, and the Internet, how could it possibly have been? Luz was willing to bet she actually knew significantly more than Amity, although a lot of that was probably information she didn’t really need nor want to share. She wasn’t above reading the odd piece of smutty fanfiction (as long as it had some decent characterization, and wasn’t too gratuitous). She wasn’t some blushing romance heroine who had never had an impure thought in her life.
But when Amity had kissed her, when she had touched her, suddenly she had felt like one.
She had just been surprised. That was all. Luz tapped her foot in the air. The suddenness would have surprised anyone. Also maybe just a tiny little bit not being able to believe still that Amity would like her, Luz, for exactly who she was right now. That was maybe more than a little of her apprehension.
Maybe a lot of it.
“It’s not true,” Luz told herself, not for the first time.
And it wasn’t. Amity had told her as much. I have, she had said. I have wanted you. I have desired you.
Luz brought her knees up to her chest, curling into a ball to try to quiet her nerves.
It was so hard to accept as real. That was the problem.
She had shamelessly projected herself onto a thousand fictional characters, imagining herself going on their adventures, saying their iconic lines, living in their skin. She had yearned to be the one giving and receiving the kisses (and possibly more than that, in the case of some of the better smutty pieces of fanfiction). But as hard as she had wanted it all, it was all in her mind.
Maybe she had convinced herself that in her mind was all it was going to be.
Luz sighed. She stretched her legs back out, lying flat on her makeshift bed. “It’s not true,” she repeated, firmer this time.
Her hand was resting on her stomach, another futile remedy for her tangled nerves. If she moved it just a little, it would be resting on the spot where Amity had touched her.
Her skin felt warm beneath her fingers.
Very lightly she rubbed with the edge of her thumb, looking up at the ceiling but not seeing it as she stroked her own side. It was light enough to almost tickle. Whoever said a person couldn’t tickle themselves was a liar, Luz thought. Although perhaps tickle wasn’t exactly the right word to use.
She did feel very jittery and squirmy if she imagined Amity’s hand in place or her own, though.
She moved her hand to somewhere less sensitive, high up on her stomach. It was less intense, physically, but it brought a whole host of new thoughts. For one, her hand was definitely, without question, under her shirt. It wasn’t quite all the way to achieving the full connotations of a hand being under a shirt, but it was more under there than not. Luz could feel her heartbeat with her fingertips. She imagined she might even be able to see it beating, beating like the tight skin of a drum.
For another thing, this is also where Amity’s hand had been.
Luz filled up her lungs as far as they would go, held the air for a moment, and let out a long shaky breath. With all the thoughts colliding in her head, she was a manageable amount of nervous. The nerves in her stomach wouldn’t let up, but she could breathe. She kept taking deep breaths, just to prove it to herself.
It had been mostly surprise, that first time, that caused her to freeze up. That’s all.
And the next time wouldn’t come as such a surprise, would it? Luz tapped a finger against her chest under her hoody, smiling to herself. She had complete control over when that would be. Amity had told her as much. So it wouldn’t come as a surprise at all.
It was something right within her reach, for lack of a better phrase.
-/-
“Okay,” Amity said, setting the armful of books down on the floor next to Luz, “this is the last of what’s in the public section. I thought that…”
She trailed off after looking up at Luz.
“...Why do you look like that?” she asked.
“Like what?” Luz tried to make her expression as neutral as possible. She didn’t think she did a very good job.
“Like you’re up to something,” Amity said with a slight smirk.
“This is how I look normally!” Luz waved her hands in front of her face. “This is my completely normal face.”
“It’s okay if you are up to something.” Amity was really smiling at her now. “You’re just not doing the best job of hiding it, if you wanted it to be a surprise.”
Luz threw up her hands. “What would I be hiding?”
Amity shrugged. “You’re the one who’s up to something.”
“I’m not--” Luz spluttered as Amity divided the stack of books into two piles. “Okay. What do you think I’m up to, exactly?”
“I don’t know.” Amity didn’t look up from examining the spine of a book with a blank cover. “Just, something.”
“You don’t have any ideas?” Luz asked, inching closer.
“I do not.” Amity had flipped open the cover of the blank book and was studying the inner cover. She wasn’t paying attention to Luz at all.
Perfect.
“Not even a guess?” She was just about close enough, she judged.
“Nope. Luz, what--”
Luz reached out and brushed back Amity’s hair. As Amity took her focus off the book to look at Luz, she very deliberately ran her finger along the length of Amity’s exposed ear.
Immediately the hidden alcove went silent. Luz saw Amity swallow.
“...Are you sure?” Amity asked. She reached up to take Luz’s hand in hers.
Luz nodded.
“Now?”
Luz nodded again, with a little more vigor.
“...Here?”
That caused her to break out into a grin. “Why not?” she asked. “I like it here. It’s, um… private.”
Amity closed the book she had been holding open. “That’s true.”
She placed the book on top of its original pile and sat beside Luz, their shoulders touching. Luz drummed the fingers of her free hand on her knee, looking everywhere in the tiny room that wasn’t in Amity’s direction.
“So,” Amity said in the silence.
“So,” Luz agreed.
She felt Amity squeeze her hand. Amity sat forward a little to reach her frenetic fingers, covering them with her other hand. She finally found the courage to look at Amity, look into her warm lamplight eyes.
“So,” Amity said again, as she smiled, and leaned into her, and kissed her.
Kissing was good. Kissing, Luz could handle. It didn’t make her nervous at all.
She felt Amity’s fingers run through her hair. “Is this,” she asked her between kisses, “okay?” Luz gave her a soft murmur of agreement, and squeezed her hand. When Amity touched her ear, taking it lightly between her fingers, Luz smiled, and she heard Amity laugh a little. It did feel kind of nice, even with her insensitive human ears.
They were both smiling. Smiling through kisses. Everything was fine. She was totally calm.
Luz didn’t even really notice that Amity had stopped playing with her ear.
But she did notice when Amity touched her side.
She jumped. She gasped.
She froze.
Immediately Amity began to apologize. “I’m sorry!” she exclaimed, “I’m sorry,” but the words were from somewhere far away. Luz saw the whole moment fading, slipping away like driftwood with the tide.
She wasn’t going to let that happen.
“It’s okay,” she assured Amity.
She was in control of the situation here. She was controlling it.
“Are you sure?” Amity asked her, looking like she didn’t know what the answer would be.
“Yeah.” Luz took a shaky breath. “Your hand was just cold. I got startled. That’s all.”
“Oh. Okay.” Amity glanced away to somewhere nonspecific on the floor.
Luckily, Luz immediately thought of the perfect recovery. “I,” she said, “might know how to warm it up a little.”
Amity looked up at her. Luz waggled her eyebrows and grinned, and Amity snorted a short burst of laughter at her.
Nothing like classic Luz cheese to break tension, she thought. Back in control. Everything was fine.
“What were you thinking, exactly?” Amity asked her, and by her smile Luz could tell Amity knew exactly what she had been thinking.
Nevertheless, she held out her supposedly cold hand.
Luz took it. For a moment both their hands remained joined, suspended, frozen.
Then Luz pulled Amity’s hand towards her. To her stomach. To the edge of her hoody.
To underneath her hoody.
She pressed Amity’s hand against her skin high on her stomach. Not quite where you could call it her chest. Maybe you could. It was a kind of undefined area. Maybe it was just far enough for Amity to tell by touch she wasn’t wearing anything else under the hoody. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Amity had no idea that was unusual for her (there was a fair bit of room in her cat-eared hoody, it would be kind of hard to tell). Maybe she did know, and that was one of the things that tipped her off about Luz having been up to something this afternoon.
Amity’s hand wasn’t cold. Not at all. Luz could feel her heartbeat through Amity’s fingers. For a long moment, that was all she could concentrate on.
She was fine. She could still breathe. Everything was fine.
“Luz, are you okay?”
She was okay.
“Luz?”
“Fine,” was all she could manage.
“We can do something else,” Amity said, starting to pull her hand away, “if you’re not--”
But she was. She had to be. It had to be now. Right now.
And that moment was slipping away, like Amity’s hand out of hers.
In a fit of frustration, Luz yanked her hoody over her head. She crumpled it into a ball and dropped it in an inglorious heap on the floor of the hidden alcove.
The look of shock and dumbfounded amazement on Amity’s face almost made the entire debacle up until this point worth it.
But then her expression started changing. It didn’t become anything like the predatory trance that had come over Amity after Luz had accidentally been touching her ear. Far from it. This was a look Luz knew. She had seen it on Amity if she stayed up too late trying to coax information out of the echo mouse. She had seen it when she had mentioned dizziness and seeing little bubbles in the corner of her vision at the onset of having the Common Mold. This was concern.
And right now, Amity was showing her a lot of concern.
It was at that point that Luz began to think this may have been a bad idea.
“Luz--” Amity started.
“I’m fine!” She saw how Amity jumped. “I’m fine. It’s fine.”
It didn’t feel fine.
“Everything’s fine.”
She wasn’t convincing herself, and she wasn’t convincing Amity, either.
“Everything’s…”
Her breath hitched. Caught in her throat.
“Luz.”
Amity covered Luz’s hand with her own. She looked into her eyes with nothing but concern.
“Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?” she asked.
Luz wanted to tell her nothing was wrong, because she was fine.
Instead, she burst into tears.
Amity seized her in a hug, and Luz cried into her shoulder. She held on to Amity for support, and felt her arms stroking her back.
“It’s okay,” Amity was saying, “it’s okay.”
Luz didn’t agree, and continued to cry.
“It’s okay that you’re not ready,” Amity said, “you don’t have to force yourself to--”
“But I want to,” Luz pushed through her tears. “I want to want to.”
“You don’t have to.” Amity brushed a hand over her hair. “It’s okay.”
But she did have to. It had to be now. Or soon. Because time was running out. Because soon she’d have to get the portal working, and she’d have to go through it, and her time here would be up. And she’d be back in the human world, where the humans didn’t like her. Someone had been filling in for her while she was gone and in a matter of weeks she had done a better job at being Luz than Luz ever had, and she wasn’t even human. So she didn’t even really have her crummy human life to go back to. This was it, this was her chance to actually have a connection with someone else that was real and wasn’t something she imagined, like she was a normal person like everyone else and not some freak nobody could understand. Once she was back in the human world, she’d be alone again, only it would hurt even more this time because she knew what it was like to have friends now. She’d be alone and she’d die alone, because she belonged here and not there. She never should have made that stupid promise. Why did she have to promise her mom like that?
“Promise? What promise?”
Luz’s eyes shot open, the tiny room blurry through her tears. She hadn’t realized she had been speaking. She hadn’t realized she had been saying any of those things.
Amity pulled back to look at her. “Luz,” she asked, her hands on her shoulders, “what promise?”
Luz rubbed her arm. “That when I found a portal back home,” she said in a quiet voice, “that I wouldn’t be coming back here.”
She didn’t look up at Amity. She didn’t want to see how she was looking at her.
“I didn’t have enough time,” Luz continued, speaking to her lap. “I couldn’t think! But my mom was so scared, and I had to tell her something. I couldn’t just… let her think I’d disappeared.”
She sniffed. Her throat felt raw.
“She’s the reason I’ve been trying to get home. That’s it. I… there’s nothing else I want to go back to. Everything else important is here. Being a witch and learning magic, and all my friends, and Eda, and… and you. And…”
Luz swallowed. She didn’t want to say the next part. But it was going to come anyway.
“And the longer I stayed here, the more I hoped that maybe I’d never have to go back. That it would all just work itself out, somehow. Part of me was happy when I destroyed the portal. And it keeps being happy with every dead end with making a new one, because that’s more time I get to stay here. It would be really sad if I never got to see my mom again, but…”
Her voice fell to a whisper.
“I don’t want to go back home. I want to stay here.”
She hung her head.
“I’m a horrible daughter.”
Luz felt Amity’s arms around her again. “You’re not,” she told her.
“I feel like I am,” Luz sniffed.
“I think your mom would be happy to know you’re somewhere that makes you happy.” She held Luz close to her and kissed her forehead. “She sounds like she cares about you a lot.”
Luz screwed up her eyes, trying to prevent more tears. “She does.”
“And it sounds like you care about her a lot, too. You’ve been doing nothing other than trying to get that portal up and running.”
“Well, almost nothing,” Luz said, nudging Amity with her head.
She heard Amity chuckle. “Okay, almost nothing. Still, that’s enough for you to qualify for being a not-horrible daughter.”
Amity leaned down and gave her a chaste kiss. Luz mumbled a noncommittal agreement.
“We’ll do all we can to get you and your mom time to talk things out, okay?”
She looked into Luz’s bleary eyes, unblinking.
“I mean,” Amity said, biting her lip, “you know I don’t want to lose you to the human world, right?”
A smile broke across Luz’s face that threatened to bring the tears back. She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against Amity’s. “I know.”
Amity took hold of Luz’s hands again. “I didn’t know things were like that for you,” she said. “I sort of thought you were just as cool there as you are here.”
Luz blinked. “Amity,” she said, “I’m not cool here.”
“You just watch it,” Amity said with a smile, “that’s my girlfriend you’re saying isn’t cool.”
That caused Luz to smile, too. “Okay,” she said, “but you never saw me around other humans. Nobody thought I was cool, at all.”
“Were you that different from right now?”
“Aside from actually being able to do magic, not really.”
Amity gave her a quick peck on the cheek. “Humans are dumb for not thinking you’re cool, then.”
Luz sighed, and smiled at her. “They can be.”
“So,” Amity said. She squeezed Luz’s hands.
“So,” Luz echoed. She took a deep breath. “Should we start reading for today?”
Amity pursed her lips. “Isn’t there maybe something you might want to do, before that?”
Luz leaned in to kiss her, slightly confused. Somehow, she didn’t think that was what Amity had meant.
Judging by the puzzled look Amity was giving her when she leaned back, it wasn’t. “Something… else?” she asked with raised eyebrows.
Luz shrugged, then was immediately reminded by her bare shoulders. She jumped and folded her arms in front of her.
“Could you, um.” She could feel her face turning red. “Could you close your eyes for a second, please?”
Amity made a show of covering her eyes with her hands. As Luz reached for her discarded hoody, she realized it was kind of silly. If Amity had wanted to take a look at her, she would have had plenty of opportunities. Still, it was nice of her to make sure she couldn’t see.
The knowledge that she probably had seen, at least for a moment (probably more) was contributing to the heat in Luz’s face. She would need some time to consider that.
Later.
She brushed her thumb over the back of Amity’s hand. “Okay,” she said, “I’m good. You can look now.”
Amity let her hands fall. She fixed Luz with a gaze she was unable to decipher.
“What?” she asked after a moment, a slight smile creeping at the corner of her mouth.
“Nothing,” Amity said. “I just like to look at you, is all.”
Luz didn’t think she could have blushed harder than she was already, but it turns out she was incorrect.
She buried her face in her hands. “We should read,” she mumbled, although a part of her might not have minded if no reading was done that afternoon.
When she looked up at Amity, she was grinning at her. She was also holding the book with the blank cover. “We should,” she said.
Luz didn’t find any useful information in her reading that day, and neither did Amity. Even if this was a dead end, it was still a road she was glad to have walked down.