The Naturals

Lia considered the question. “Do you want to?”

Michael glanced at me, then back at Lia. “Not particularly.”

“Then, yes,” Lia replied. “You do.”

Beside me, Sloane raised her hand.

“Yes, Sloane?” Lia said pleasantly. Apparently, she wasn’t concerned that our resident numbers girl might object.

“I’m familiar with the gist of the game, but I’m unclear on one thing.” Sloane’s eyes gleamed. “How do you win?”

Michael grinned. “You have to love a girl with a competitive streak.”

“You don’t win Truth or Dare,” I said. In fact, I deeply suspected this was the kind of game that everybody lost.

“Is that an objection?” Lia asked.

From across the room, Dean was telegraphing the words SAY YES to me, as clearly as if he’d hired a plane to write them in the sky. And if I’d been in a room with any other teenagers on the planet, I would have. But I was in a room with Michael, who I couldn’t quite profile, and Dean, who’d said the other day that Naturals didn’t work on active cases anymore. I had questions, and this was the only way I was going to get to ask them.

“No,” I told Lia. “That wasn’t an objection. Let’s play.”

A slow smile spread across Lia’s face. Dean banged his head back against the fireplace.

“Can I go first?” Sloane asked.

“Sure,” Lia replied smoothly. “Truth or dare, Sloane?”

Sloane gave her a look. “That’s not what I meant.”

Lia shrugged. “Truth. Or. Dare.”

“Truth.”

In a normal game of Truth or Dare, that would have been the safer option—because if the question was too embarrassing, you could always lie. With Lia in the room, that was impossible.

“Do you know who your father is?”

Lia’s question took me completely off guard. I’d spent most of my life not knowing who my own father was, but couldn’t imagine being forced to admit that in front of a crowd. Lia seemed fond of Sloane, more or less, but clearly, in Truth or Dare, the kid gloves came off.

Sloane met Lia’s eyes, unfazed. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

“A swing and a miss,” Michael murmured. Lia gave him a dirty look.

“Your turn,” she told Sloane, and from the look on her face, I guessed she was bracing herself for payback—but Sloane turned to me.

“Cassie. Truth or dare?”

I tried to imagine what kind of dare Sloane might come up with, but drew a blank.

“Statistically, the most common dares involve eating unpleasant food, making prank phone calls, kissing another player, licking something unsanitary, and nudity,” Sloane said helpfully.

“Truth.”

Sloane was silent for several seconds. “How many people do you love?”

The question seemed harmless enough until I started thinking about my answer. Sloane’s blue eyes searched mine, and I got the distinct feeling that she wasn’t asking because she thought it would be amusing to hear my answer.

She was asking because she needed data points to compare to her own.

“How many people do I love?” I repeated. “Like … love how?”

I’d never been in love, so if she was talking about romance, the answer was easy.

“How many people do you love, total?” Sloane said. “Summing across familial, romantic, and all other variations.”

I wanted to just choose a number at random. Five sounded good. Or ten. Too many to count sounded better, but Lia was watching me, very still.

I’d loved my mother. That much was easy. And Nonna and my father and the rest—I loved them. Didn’t I? They were my family. They loved me. Just because I wasn’t showy about it didn’t mean that I didn’t love them back. I’d done what I could to make them happy. I tried not to hurt them.

But did I really love them, the way I’d loved my mom? Could I love anyone like that again?

“One.” I barely managed to get the word out of my mouth. I stared at Lia, hoping she’d tell me that wasn’t true, that losing my mom hadn’t broken something inside of me and I wasn’t destined to spend the rest of my life two shades removed from the kind of love that the rest of my family felt for me.

Lia held my gaze for a few seconds, then shrugged. “Your turn, Cassie.”

I tried to remember why I’d thought playing this game was a good idea. “Michael,” I said finally. “Truth or dare?”

There were so many things I wanted to ask him—what he really thought of the program, what his father was like, beyond the issue of tax fraud, whether there had ever been more to his relationship with Lia than trading verbal barbs. But I didn’t get a chance to ask any of those questions, because Michael leaned forward in his seat, his eyes gleaming. “Dare.”

Of course he wasn’t going to let me dig around in his brain. Of course he was going to make me issue the first dare of the game. I racked my brain for something that didn’t sound lame, but also didn’t involve kissing, nudity, or anything that might give Michael an excuse for trouble.

“Hit me with your best shot, Colorado.” Michael was enjoying this way too much. I had a feeling he was hoping that I would dare him to do something a little bit dangerous, something that would get his adrenaline pumping.

Something Briggs would disapprove of.

“I dare you …” I said the words slowly, hoping an answer would present itself. “… to dance ballet.”

Even I wasn’t sure where that came from.

“What?” Michael said. Clearly, he’d been expecting something a little more exciting, or at the very least risque.

“Ballet,” I repeated. “Right there.” I pointed to the center of the rug. “Dance.”

Lia started cracking up. Even Dean bit back a smile.

“Ballet is a tradition of performance body movement hailing back to the early Renaissance,” Sloane said helpfully. “It is particularly popular in Russia, France, Italy, England, and the United States.”

Michael stopped her before she could orate an entire history of the art. “I’ve got this,” he said. And then, a solemn expression on his face, he stood up, he walked to the center of the room, and he struck a pose.

I’d seen Michael do smooth. I’d seen him do suave. I’d felt him push a piece of hair out of my face—but this. This was really something. He stood on his tippy-toes. He twirled in a circle. He bent his legs and stuck out his butt. But the best thing was the look in his eyes: cold, steely determination.

He capped the performance off with a curtsy.

“Very nice,” I said between hysterical giggles. He sank back onto the sofa and then turned dagger eyes on Lia.

“Truth or dare.”

Not surprisingly, Lia chose truth. Of all of us, she was probably the only one here who could lie and get away with it.

Michael smiled, as genial as Lia had been when she’d started this whole thing. “What’s your real name?”

For a few brief seconds, vulnerability and irritation passed over Lia’s features in quick succession.

“Your name isn’t Lia?” Sloane sounded strangely hurt at the idea that Lia might have lied about something as simple and basic as her own name.

“Yes,” Lia told her. “It is.”

Michael stared at Lia, raising his eyebrows ever so slightly.

“But once upon a time,” Lia said, sounding less and less like herself with every word, “my name used to be