her forehead for the stark nakedness even in her eyes.
"Then, this is really irresponsible, isn’t it?" she asked, and he knew it, it was, so it didn't hurt him. She made no moves to cover up.
“I’m married,” he said, and the words were awkward, textured in his mouth. It was apparent that even she did not buy into his conviction.
“Well, obviously,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Look at you. And your sweater,” she said, and her hair couldn’t have been any straighter if it had been ironed on a board. He could feel that just from what little she said, it was possible either she or her parents were from the Gyeonggi province.
Her tongue was light and familiar around her words and he really wondered what it was about girls who grew up around cities that made them so sure, so affecting. His own parents had been from much farther north, and their speech didn’t carry a hair of the kind of Anglicisms that were so filled with the teeth and throat. He wondered if she could hear that lacking in him. “But that’s not really my business,” she said, sitting with her legs apart like a man. Something he noticed when he could no longer pretend not to look.
They looked out of the windshield, and Venus was still smoldering, seemed to be even bigger now, though reports were saying that it was possible it wasn’t going to stop its descent until impact. It was almost a funny thing that earth was going to perish under the blaze of such an indifferent, non-descript planet, filled with such cloud cover no one had yet been able to truly characterize its surface.
“I would be so jealous if I was the sun,” she said, and outside he could see slices of the sky evaporating. It wasn’t technically possible to see the ozone layer pull itself away, but there were great rivulets of steam and cirrus drawn into thick white curtains, unfurling downward with the force and weight of rain. He never felt more keenly the chasm of age between them, her own self-
Raven Leilani | 17