"Alright, what do you say we start watching Planet Earth?"Nova, who was clearly still excited to be in a new place, sat on the couch with a grin. I sat beside her and Eric sat on her other side, and we didn't speak while the opening clips of Planet Earth played.Rain started to fall about three quarters of the way through the episode, and Nova leaned on my arm. I heard her light snore start after a few minutes and sighed. Apparently all the excitement of Eric's home with his back window that looked out on the forest and the sound of the steady rain had exhausted her. Eric switched off the TV."I thought she liked Planet Earth.""She does," I said. "I guess she's just tired." I reached down and brushed her dark hair out of her face, tucking it behind her ear.Eric gazed at us, his

I stared at him, the air seeming to have been sucked from the room. He had me in the palm of his hand right then, and I didn't mind it at all. He was sitting so close to me, and I could have reached out and pulled him so our skin collided and our lips met. It wasn't a challenge this time. It wasn't that I wanted to prove him wrong about anything. I had already done that in the forest. It wasn't because I just had feelings for him, because in all honesty, they were all for him.It seemed our thoughts paralleled each other, because suddenly he was closer, and I could feel his breath on my skin, soft and warm. He reached up slowly and traced my bottom lip with his thumb, his touch hot on mine. He was there, he was right there, and he was the only thing in the whole world.But he wasn't. The whole world contained many, many more things. Including:

"Luna," he said, my name passing his lips with a light sigh."I know I bother you about this a lot, but…he never oversleeps. He has never overslept in the morning once in the time he's been mayor. I don't know what it means, but I just feel wrong about this election and I don't know why." I hated repeating myself again and again, but I couldn't help it. The instinct had been nagging at the back of my brain for days, and Eric was the only person I wanted to tell about it."Alright," he said, his voice lowered, his arm stretching across the table to offer me his palm. "What exactly do you think is going on, then?"I reached forward and took his hand, his palm warm and soft. "I…" I stopped. "I don't know, and I sound completely paranoid and I'm sorry but I just have this gut feeling. I'm afraid I'm boring you by bringing this up over and over, but…I'm sorr

I got home later that night close to eleven o'clock, trying to put away my jacket and shoes as quietly as possible. The house was silent and still, all the lights turned out. I started climbing the stairs slowly, the knowledge of my father's scandal weighing me down with each step I took. A door opened upstairs. "Luna?" I met my father's eyes, reaching the top of the stairs. He stood in the doorway to his and Genevieve's bedroom, still dressed in his work clothes. "Hi." "Where have you been?" "I was at Eric's." He furrowed his brow. "Why?" "We were talking." "You've been spending an awful lot of time with him, I've noticed."

Madison had always been a very quiet town. The biggest events to occur over the past decade or so had, in fact, been the DWIs of Anita Greenwood. Other than that, the town was placid, friendly, static. Why now, suddenly, was everything changing?"Nothing makes any sense," I said, staring at the single hairline crack in the ceiling of Eric's room. "You saw how Celia acted right after the incident. She was cold and aloof and then she showed up last night at my door asking for my forgiveness. She looked like she was about to cry."Eric hummed in agreement, his pen still flying across the page of his notebook. It was one in the afternoon the next day, a Saturday, and I was laying on Eric's mattress-bed contemplating while he sat beside me, writing in his journal. I didn't know which category of his journals he was writing in, but the sound of his pen scratching across the paper was oddly pleasant to