The air conditioner's hum had been fighting the same losing battle all afternoon. Vanessa lay on her back on the silk sheets, one knee up, watching the ceiling fan turn and turn and turn.
Her dad was in Australia. He'd said it like it was a vacation. "Fighting Perry the Platypus in the Outback, Vanessa! The heat is a worthy adversary in itself!" He'd been packing -inators into a suitcase shaped like a kangaroo. She'd watched him leave from the driveway, and the moment the hovercar disappeared over the treeline, the house had gone quiet in a way it almost never did.
No clanking. No evil laughter. No monologuing echoing up through the vents.
Just her, the lair, and the whole weekend ahead of her with nothing in it.
She'd showered twice. She'd reorganized her closet. She'd eaten half a pint of ice cream standing at the counter and thrown the rest away because it tasted like nothing. Now she was lying here in a black tank top and denim shorts, fresh from her third shower of the day, and the jasmine perfume she'd put on was starting to feel like a joke she was telling herself.
She was nineteen. She was alone. She was bored in a way that had teeth.
Her phone was on the pillow beside her. She'd been looking at it for ten minutes without deciding anything.
Then she thought of Ferb.
Not in a big way. Not the way you think of someone when you've already decided something. Just—he surfaced, the way he always did when her mind went quiet. Green hair. Blue eyes that didn't look away. That stillness he carried around like it was worth something. The way he'd said "Touche" to her once, months ago, and she'd thought about it for a week.
She sat up.
Her thumbs moved before her brain caught up. hey. you around this weekend?
Three dots appeared almost immediately. Then stopped. Then appeared again.
The reply came through at 4:17 PM, and Vanessa read it twice before she let herself believe it. Yeah. What's up? Short. Ferb in a nutshell. She chewed the inside of her cheek and typed back, nothing. just bored. come over, then hit send before she could dress it up into something less naked.
He didn't ask why. He didn't ask if her dad was home. Give me an hour, he sent, and Vanessa dropped the phone onto the pillow and stared at the ceiling fan again, but the ceiling fan had stopped meaning anything. She got up, pulled the sheets straight even though they'd be rumpled again in a few hours, and caught herself doing it and stopped.
She heard the Fletcher driveway gate from her window — that particular squeak, the one she'd memorized years ago without meaning to. Then footsteps on the path, unhurried. He never hurried. She stayed on the bed, propped on her elbows, and made him knock twice before she called out, "It's open."
Ferb came through the door with a canvas bag over one shoulder and his green hair pushed back off his forehead, damp at the temples from the walk. He looked at her — one slow pass, head to foot, taking in the tank top and the bare legs and the hair she hadn't bothered to fix — and something in his face did a thing she couldn't name. Then it was gone, and he set the bag down by the desk like he'd done it a hundred times.
"You brought stuff," she said. "Plural stuff. That's a whole weekend bag."
"Candace said it was fine." He shrugged out of his overshirt and folded it over the back of her chair, edges aligned, because of course he did. "She was relieved, actually. Said she'd rather have a quiet house than another one of Phineas's projects eating the garage."
"So you just told her where you were going."
"I told her I was going to a friend's. She didn't ask which friend." He paused. "She looked at me for a second, though. The way she does."
Vanessa laughed — low, in her chest. "Candace has been reading people since she was twelve. She knows exactly which friend."
"Probably," Ferb said, and that was all he said about it, and somehow that was the most reassuring thing anyone had told her in months.
They fell into it the way they always did — her sprawled across the foot of the bed, him sitting on the floor with his back against the frame, the two of them talking in the loose, unfinished way that didn't need momentum. He told her about a trebuchet he and Phineas had built last week that launched a watermelon three blocks and got them a very specific visit from city zoning. She told him about her dad's latest -inator, which apparently turned things into slightly smaller versions of themselves, and how he'd tested it on his own shoe and spent an hour walking in circles.
At some point she got up for water and came back with two glasses, and when she handed his down to him he looked at her — really looked, the way he'd been not-quite-looking all afternoon — and said, "You look better without the jacket."
Vanessa stopped, glass halfway to her mouth.
"The leather one," he added, like that clarified anything. "You're always wearing it. Even in summer."
"You're saying that because you like looking at me."
Ferb didn't flinch. He never flinched. He tilted his head a fraction and said, "Touche," and Vanessa felt the word land somewhere low in her stomach, the exact same place it had landed months ago, except this time he was sitting on her floor in her room and there was no one in the house but the two of them.
She sat down on the edge of the bed, close enough that her knee almost touched his shoulder. Neither of them moved away from it.
The silence stretched. It wasn't awkward — it was the other thing, the thing that happens when two people both know what the room has become and neither wants to be the one to say it first. The AC clicked off. The fan kept turning. Ferb shifted his weight and then went very still, and Vanessa noticed, because she noticed everything about him when he was in her space — the way his hands had curled against his thighs, the way his jaw had set.
She followed his eyes without meaning to. Down. Then back up, fast, but not fast enough, and the shape of it was right there in his lap, unmistakable through the denim.
Ferb cleared his throat. "Can I be excused for a second."
"No."
He looked up at her.
Vanessa set her glass on the nightstand and turned to face him properly, cross-legged on the bed, looking down at him where he sat on the floor. Her heart was doing something stupid and fast and she ignored it. "That's not a bathroom thing," she said. "You're not getting up because you have to pee."
Ferb's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "No," he admitted.
"Okay." She bit her lip — the tell, the one she hated — and then stopped biting it, because there was no point pretending anymore. "So I'm going to say something, and you're going to hear all of it before you say anything back. Deal?"
He nodded, once.
"I've never done this," Vanessa said. "Anything. With anyone. I know how that sounds, given—" she gestured vaguely at the lair around them, at the whole ridiculous life she'd grown up in, "—all of this. But I haven't. So if we do this, it's both of ours. First time. Yours and mine." She held his gaze. "I want it to be you. I've wanted it to be you for a while, actually, and I've been too chickenshit to say so until right now."
Ferb was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that she started to feel the floor tilt under her.
Then he said, "Okay," and reached up, and his hand landed on her knee, and that was the whole answer. His palm was warm and rough with calluses and it didn't move, just rested there, like a question he was willing to wait on forever.
"Okay," Vanessa echoed. She swung her legs off the bed and slid down to the floor to meet him, and the two of them ended up kneeling on the rug facing each other, close enough that she could see the exact color of his eyes — not just blue, but that particular blue, the one she'd been failing to describe to herself for two years.
She kissed him first. She'd decided that on the way down. It was clumsy for half a second — noses, angle, the usual — and then it wasn't clumsy at all, because Ferb tilted his head and his hand came up to the side of her jaw and he kissed her back like he'd been waiting for permission his whole life and had a plan for what to do with it.
When they broke apart, both of them were breathing harder than the kiss should have justified.
"Okay," Ferb said again, quieter. His thumb was moving along her jaw, slow, like he was memorizing the shape of it. "Your room. Your rules. Tell me what you want."
Vanessa's hands found the hem of his t-shirt and pulled it up over his head, and he let her, arms lifting, and then there he was, pale and lean and real in the afternoon light, and she pressed her palm flat against his chest just to feel the heartbeat under it. Fast. Faster than his face let on. Good.
"I want to take care of you," she said. "That's the first thing. You're going to sit there and let me."
Ferb's throat moved. "Yeah," he said. "Okay."
She got his belt undone with fingers that were steadier than she expected, and then his jeans, and he lifted his hips to help her work them down, and when his cock came free of the fabric she stopped for a second and just looked at it — thick, flushed, curving up toward his stomach, the head already slick at the tip. He was bigger than she'd let herself imagine, and she was going to have all of it in her mouth in about thirty seconds, and her whole body had gone hot and tight at the thought.
"You're staring," Ferb said. Not smug. Just observing.
"I'm allowed." She wrapped her hand around the base of him and felt him twitch against her palm, and the sound he made — small, involuntary, immediately swallowed — was the best thing she'd heard all year. "Tell me if I do it wrong."
"You won't."
"You don't know that."
"I know you," he said, and that was so unfair that she had to put her mouth on him just to stop him from saying anything else.
She went slow at first — lips, tongue, just the head, tasting salt and skin and something warmer underneath. Ferb's hand came down and hovered at the back of her head, not pushing, just there, and she appreciated that, and she took him deeper to show him she did. His breath caught. His thighs went rigid under her free hand. She worked her way down an inch at a time, jaw stretching, tongue flat along the underside, and when she felt him nudge the back of her throat she held it there for a count of three before pulling back up with a wet sound that neither of them commented on.
"Okay?" she asked, voice already gone rough.
"Yeah." His voice had dropped half an octave. "Yeah, keep — yeah."
So she did. She found a rhythm, hand working the base in time with her mouth, and Ferb's hands left her head and went to her chest instead, cupping her through the tank top, thumbs dragging over her nipples through the cotton until she made a sound around him that vibrated up her own throat. He did it again, deliberately, watching her face, and then he pulled the tank top down off one shoulder and got his hand on bare skin, and squeezed — not gently, the way she hadn't expected and absolutely wanted — and Vanessa's hips shifted against nothing and she took him deeper in answer.
They built it like that, back and forth, her mouth and his hands, until his breathing had gone ragged and his grip on her breast had tightened to the edge of too much. She pulled off him with a wet gasp and looked up.
"I'm not going to finish like this," Ferb said, and his voice was careful, like he was choosing each word. "Not the first time."
Vanessa wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. "Then get on the bed."
He got on the bed. She shucked the tank top and the shorts and stood there in front of him for exactly as long as it took him to look his fill, and then she climbed over him and settled onto his thighs, and reached down between them and guided him to her entrance herself, because she wanted to feel the exact moment it happened.
She sank down slow. It stung — a sharp, bright pressure that made her eyes water and her breath stop — and she paused halfway with him only partway inside her, thighs shaking, and Ferb's hands came up to her hips and just held, not pushing, not pulling, waiting.
"Keep going," she said, when she could. "I want to feel it."
She took the rest of him in one long, deliberate slide, and the sting gave way to a fullness so specific it took her breath, and then she sat there with him buried to the hilt and her palms flat on his chest and every nerve in her body reporting in at once. Ferb's eyes were wide. His mouth was open. He looked like a man who'd been struck by something he'd been expecting his whole life and still wasn't ready for.
"Vanessa," he said. Just that. Her name, like it weighed something.
"Yeah." She started to move — slow at first, learning the angle, the drag, the way he filled her on every downstroke. "Yeah. I know."
He caught her rhythm and met it, hips lifting to meet her, and the room filled up with the wet sound of it and the slap of skin and the two of them breathing like they'd been running. She rode him hard — harder than she'd planned, harder than she'd thought she had in her — and his hands moved from her hips to her breasts and back again, squeezing, dragging, and she let him, and every time his thumb found her nipple she clenched around him and he groaned and it fed back into itself until neither of them was in charge of it anymore.
"Don't stop," she said. "I'm close. Don't stop."
"I'm not going to last," Ferb said, strained. "Where do you—"
"Inside. I want it inside."
He made a sound at that and his hips snapped up hard, and Vanessa rode it out and came first — a bright, clenching wave that rolled through her from the inside out and left her gripping his shoulders with both hands and saying his name in a voice she didn't recognize. Ferb followed a half-second later, buried deep, and she felt every pulse of it, warm and spreading, and she stayed exactly where she was through all of it, watching his face go slack and then open and then, finally, soft.
Neither of them moved for a while. The ceiling fan turned. Downstairs, the AC kicked back on with a rattle.
Vanessa finally lifted off him and flopped onto her back beside him, and they lay there side by side in the warm, wrecked quiet, both of them staring at the ceiling. After a minute Ferb reached over and found her hand, and laced his fingers through hers, and that was the whole conversation.
"So," she said eventually.
"So," he agreed.
"You're staying the weekend."
"I brought a bag."
"I noticed." She turned her head and looked at him — green hair stuck to his forehead, mouth still red, eyes half-closed — and the thing she'd been feeling all afternoon finally had a shape she could name, and she didn't name it. She just squeezed his hand and pulled the sheet up over both of them. "Good."
He was asleep before she was. She listened to him breathe for a while, and then she drifted off too, and the lair stayed quiet around them, and somewhere over the ocean a hovercar shaped like a kangaroo was carrying her father toward a fight he was definitely going to lose.
The bed had gone cool on his side by the time Vanessa woke, and the first thing she registered was the smell — her own sheets, but underneath that, something else. Cut grass. Metal. The particular clean sweat of a boy who spent his days building things with his hands.
She turned her head. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the frame again, one knee up, phone in his hand, wearing his jeans and nothing else. The afternoon had gone gold at the window. He'd been awake a while, she could tell — his hair was dry now, pushed back, and he had that stillness that meant he was thinking about something.
"How long have you been up."
"Twenty minutes." He didn't look at her. "Phineas texted."
Vanessa sat up, sheet to her chest. "Phineas texts you?"
"He texts everyone. He doesn't know how not to." Ferb turned the phone so she could see, and she read it upside down, squinting. dude isabella showed up at the tree in a BIKINI and she won't say why she's here and I think I'm going to die. Then, two minutes later: disregard that. everything is fine. Then: ferb.
Vanessa laughed — the real one, the one that came out before she could style it. "He typed 'disregard that.' Who types that."
"Phineas does." Ferb set the phone face-down on the rug, and something in the way he did it told her he was already done thinking about it. "Isabella's been in love with him since she was five. He's the only person in Danville who doesn't know."
"And you're just going to let him fend for himself."
"He's not fending. He's at the tree." Ferb finally looked at her, and the look had heat in it again, low and banked. "I'm not at the tree."
Vanessa felt that land right where the "Touche" had landed. She let the sheet drop and crawled to the edge of the bed and sat there, close enough that her knees bracketed his shoulders, and he tipped his head back against the frame and looked up at her like she was the only thing in the room that mattered, which — she was. She was.
"You brought a whole weekend bag," she said.
"I did."
"Then we've got a lot of hours to fill."
He reached up and put his hand flat on her thigh, and the calluses dragged, and her whole body woke up like it hadn't been asleep ten minutes ago. "Yeah," he said.
Six blocks east and one street over, under the tree that Phineas and Ferb had climbed, hung from, built forts in, and once accidentally set on fire, Phineas Flynn was discovering that his brain did not work in the presence of a pink bikini.
He'd been fine. He'd been fine. He'd come out to the backyard to sketch ideas for a hover-cart upgrade, and Isabella had walked up the path in the bikini, and he'd said something normal like "hey Isabella" and she'd said "hi Phineas" and sat down in the grass, and then the last forty minutes had happened and he still didn't have a single line on the page.
"You're not drawing," she said.
"I'm thinking."
"You're thinking about the cart." She was lying on her back in the shade with her arms folded under her head, one knee bent, and the sun through the leaves was putting little coins of light all over her — her stomach, her shoulder, the top of her thigh. She hadn't looked at him in a while. That was somehow worse than if she had. "What's the upgrade."
"Gyroscopic. So it doesn't tip on the turns."
"Mm."
He rubbed the back of his neck. He'd been doing that for ten minutes. He knew he was doing it. He did it again anyway.
Isabella turned her head and looked at him, and the look was not the look she'd given him at the tree when they were twelve, or fourteen, or last summer. It was flat and certain and it didn't blink. "Phineas," she said. "Come here."
"I'm — I'm right here."
"Closer."
He put the sketchbook down. He moved the way you move when you've already decided and your body is just catching up, and he sat down in the grass beside her, and she sat up and got a hand on the back of his neck and pulled him in and kissed him.
Phineas had imagined this. He'd imagined it in the way you imagine things you've filed under probably never — a shape with no detail on it. He had not imagined that Isabella kissed like she'd been rehearsing for years and was done waiting to be asked. Her mouth was warm and she tasted like the cherry popsicle she'd had on the walk over, and her hand on the back of his neck was not gentle, and when she pulled back an inch her eyes were open and on him the whole time.
"Okay," she said. "That's the part I've been trying to get to since I was five."
"Isabella—"
"I'm not done." She pushed him back into the grass and got on top of him, thighs on either side of his hips, and the grass was cool and her skin was hot and the pink bikini top was right there, and Phineas's hands did not know where to go and she solved it for him by taking both his wrists and putting them on her waist. "There. That's better. You can keep them there or you can move them, but if you move them, move them somewhere."
He moved them. Up her back, under the strap, and she made a sound low in her throat that he felt everywhere, and she leaned down and kissed him again, deeper, hips rolling against his, and there was no hiding what was happening in his shorts and she ground right onto it like she wanted to feel it. Which she did. She wanted to feel it.
"Isabella," he said, when she let him breathe. "What are we—"
"I'm going to fuck you," she said. "Under this tree. Right now." She sat back up and looked down at him, and her hair was loose and damp and her jaw was set. "If you don't want to, tell me and I'll get up and we'll never talk about it. But I've been patient my whole life, Phineas, and I'm done."
He stared up at her. His mouth opened. Closed.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"Okay." He swallowed. "Yeah. Okay."
She got his shorts open before he'd finished saying it, and got her hand inside, and wrapped her fingers around his cock and squeezed, and Phineas made a noise he would have been embarrassed about if he'd had any brain left to be embarrassed with. She stroked him — slow, fist tight, thumb dragging over the head where it was already slick — and watched his face the whole time, cataloguing it, and he had the distinct feeling that she was going to remember every expression he made and use them later.
Then she sat up on her knees, hooked the bikini bottom to the side with her thumb, and lowered herself onto him.
He felt it all at once — the wet heat of her, the tight stretch of it, the way she had to work her hips to take him and didn't stop, didn't slow, just bore down until he was all the way inside her and her hands were flat on his chest and her breath was coming fast. The grass under his back. The bark of the tree six inches from his head. Her, everywhere.
"Oh," Isabella said. Just that. Her eyes had gone wide and glassy and she was looking down at where they were joined like she couldn't believe it had finally happened. "Oh, that's — okay. Okay."
"Are you—"
"I'm fine. I'm better than fine." She started to move, and the first stroke pulled a sound out of both of them. "I've been waiting for this since I was five years old, Phineas Flynn. I'm not going to be delicate about it."
She wasn't. She rode him like she was making up for lost time — hard, fast, thighs gripping his hips, one hand braced on his chest and the other in the grass beside his head, and every downstroke landed with a wet slap that the tree's shade swallowed up. Phineas grabbed her hips with both hands and met her, and she leaned back and changed the angle and he felt himself slide deeper than he'd known he could go, and she gasped and did it again on purpose.
"You feel—" he started.
"I know." She was grinning, actually grinning, breathless and bright. "You feel it too. I can tell. You're doing that thing with your neck."
"What thing."
"The thing where you—" she rolled her hips and he made the sound again, and she laughed, low and satisfied. "That thing."
He reached up and got the bikini top off her — the knot gave with one pull and she helped, shrugging one strap and then the other, and then her breasts were out in the dappled light and Phineas put his hands on them and she closed her eyes and pushed into his palms. Her nipples were hard against his thumbs. He dragged them and she clenched around him so hard he had to stop moving for a second or it was going to be over before he wanted it to be.
"Don't stop," she said.
"I'm not—"
"I felt that. You almost came." She opened her eyes and looked down at him, and there was something in her face that was almost tender and entirely merciless. "Not yet. You don't get to finish until I say."
Phineas laughed — a real laugh, surprised out of him. "Since when do you—"
"Since always." She started moving again, slower this time, drawing it out, and every stroke was deliberate and long and she watched his face the whole time like she was reading a book she'd been waiting years to open. "You're going to come inside me, Phineas. That's the deal. That's the whole deal."
"Isabella—"
"I want your baby." She said it plainly, hips rolling, no shame in it at all. "I've wanted it for a while. I'm not going to pretend I don't."
He should have said something. He should have asked a question, or slowed down, or made a joke — that was what he did, that was how he handled things that were too big. But she was riding him under the tree in the gold afternoon light and she'd just said that to his face and his body had already made its decision, and all he could do was grip her hips and hold on.
She came first. He felt it happen around him — the long clench, the shudder that ran up through her, the way her rhythm broke apart into short grinding rocks and her mouth opened and stayed open. She braced both hands on his chest and rode it out on him, and when she came down she didn't stop, just changed the angle and went harder, and Phineas felt the pressure build at the base of his spine and knew he had about ten seconds.
"Now," Isabella said. "Now — inside, come on, please—"
And that was it. He came with his hips bucked up off the grass and her name broken in half in his mouth, and she stayed right where she was and took every pulse of it, hips still working, milking him through it until he was shaking and she'd wrung out the last of it. Then she sat there. Breathing hard. Looking down at him with her hair in her face and her mouth red.
"Okay," she said, finally. "That's one."
Phineas blinked up at her. "One?"
"You didn't think we were done." She shifted her hips, and he was still inside her, still half-hard, and she felt it and smiled. "I told you, Phineas. I've been patient my whole life."
She leaned down and kissed him, and started to move again.
Back in the lair, the ceiling fan had been turned off an hour ago and the room had gone dim and close. Vanessa was on her back with her legs hooked over Ferb's shoulders, and he was above her with his forearms braced on either side of her head, and he'd been going slow for a long time now — so slow it was almost cruel, pulling nearly all the way out and then sliding back in an inch at a time, watching her face do things she couldn't stop it from doing.
"You're doing that on purpose," she said.
"You did it to me first." He said it without any particular expression, which was somehow the most infuriating thing he'd ever done. "You said you wanted to take care of me."
"I did take care of you. Twice."
"Three times." He pushed all the way in, slow, and her breath caught, and he held there. "I'm returning the favor."
Vanessa's hands were fisted in the sheet on either side of her, and her whole body was one long taut wire, and she had never in her life been this close for this long. He'd found the spot early — the angle that made her see white — and then he'd just stayed there, patient and steady, and she was going to kill him.
"Ferb."
"Yeah."
"Harder."
He did it. The bed frame knocked against the wall and she heard herself make a sound that would have embarrassed her in any other room, and he kept the same rhythm, same depth, just harder, and it built and built and she came with her heels digging into his back and his name in her mouth and her hand clawing at his shoulder hard enough to leave marks. He came a few strokes later, buried deep, and she felt it — every pulse, warm and spreading — and she held him there with her legs locked around him until he'd finished.
He collapsed onto his elbows and then rolled off her, and they lay side by side in the dark, both of them breathing like they'd run somewhere.
After a while, Vanessa found the lamp and turned it on, and the room came back — the folded overshirt on the chair, the canvas bag by the desk, her own clothes in a heap at the foot of the bed, his jeans somewhere in the middle of the floor. She looked at all of it, and at him, lying there wrecked and quiet with the sheet barely covering him, and the thing she'd been feeling all afternoon had a shape now and she still wasn't going to say it.
"So," she said.
"So," Ferb agreed. He reached over and laced his fingers through hers again, easy, like they'd always done it.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. She reached for it one-handed, still holding his, and looked at the screen.
She was still holding his hand when she read it, so he felt the small hitch — the way her fingers tightened, went still, tightened again.
"What," he said.
"Nothing." She turned the screen away from him and then, because that was stupid, turned it back. It was her mom. Your father's flight got moved up two days. He'll be home Sunday morning instead of Monday. He wants to know if you've been eating. Vanessa read it twice. Sunday morning. That was — she did the math on the ceiling — that was tomorrow morning, bright and early, and the whole weekend she'd built in her head had just lost a day and a half off the back end.
"Your dad," Ferb said. Not a question. He'd read it upside down, the way he read everything.
"Sunday. Like, early Sunday." She let go of his hand and sat up, and the sheet slid down and she didn't bother with it. "He's going to walk in here at nine in the morning and there's going to be a boy in my bed and a boy's bag on my floor and I'm going to have to explain—"
"You won't have to explain anything. I'll be gone by nine."
He said it flat, the way he said everything, and it took her a second to understand that he'd already decided — that the sentence wasn't a question or a concession, it was just the schedule. He was going to leave. That was the plan he'd made, sitting on her floor for twenty minutes while she slept, and she hadn't been in the room for it.
"You could stay," she said. "Sunday morning. He's not — he's oblivious, but he's not going to notice a—" She heard herself and stopped. She wasn't going to finish that sentence. She looked at the phone again, at her mother's three sentences, and then she put it face-down on the nightstand and lay back down and pulled the sheet up over both of them.
"Vanessa."
"We've got tonight," she said. "That's the whole weekend now, basically. So we're not spending it talking about my dad's flight."
She rolled onto her side to face him and put her palm flat on his chest, and under it his heart was doing something steady and slow, and she felt her own catch up to match it, and she didn't know which one had moved first.
She kissed him before he could answer, and for a while there wasn't any talking left in the room. He got a hand in her hair and she let him, and the sheet ended up on the floor, and the lamp stayed on because neither of them reached to turn it off, and she found out that Ferb laughed — actually laughed, low and startled — when she bit his shoulder, which she filed away for later.
Afterward she lay with her cheek on his chest and listened to the lair. The pipes ticking. The low hum of the backup generator two floors down. Somewhere in the dark, the empty -inator platform sat waiting for a man who wouldn't be back until Sunday.
She did the math again without meaning to. Sunday morning. Nine o'clock. That gave them — she counted on his sternum — maybe fourteen hours if they slept at all, and she was not going to sleep.
"You're doing it again," Ferb said.
"Doing what."
"Counting."
She lifted her head. "How do you know I'm counting?"
"Because you stopped breathing for four seconds and then started again." He said it to the ceiling, mild as ever. "You do it when you're deciding something."
Vanessa looked at him. Pale skin, green hair flattened on one side from the pillow, blue eyes that gave away exactly nothing and somehow everything. He'd been in her house for six hours and he already knew how she breathed.
"I'm deciding," she said, "whether to be annoyed that you noticed."
"Verdict?"
"Still out." She sat up and swung her legs off the bed, and the floor was cold, and she went to the desk where her water glass was and drank half of it standing up. Her reflection in the dark window was a girl with her hair everywhere and a mark on her shoulder that hadn't been there this morning. She looked at it for a second longer than she meant to.
Behind her, the bed creaked. She heard him get up, and then his feet on the floor, and then the sound of him picking his jeans up off the boards — and she turned around, because she wanted to see which he'd do.
He didn't put them on. He stood there holding them, looking at her, and then he dropped them back on the floor and crossed the room and put his hands on her waist from behind, and they stood in front of the window together, both of them naked in the dark glass.
"You said the whole weekend," he said, quiet, near her ear.
"I said tonight."
"You said that was basically the same thing."
She watched his reflection say it. "You're going to hold me to that."
"I'm going to hold you to a lot of things." His hands moved, one up her ribs and one flat on her stomach, and he wasn't being clever, he was just — there. Present. Waiting. "You started it."
Vanessa set the glass down on the desk and turned in his arms and looked up at him, and this close she had to tilt her head, and she hated that she liked it.
"Okay," she said. "New plan."
"I like plans."
"We sleep for three hours. Then we're up before it's light, and you're out of here with time to spare, and my father walks into an empty house and never knows." She said it flat, like a briefing. "And in between, we do whatever we want. No counting."
Ferb considered it. "Three hours."
"Three hours."
"That's not very much sleep."
"I know." She reached past him and turned off the lamp, and the room went dark except for the thin green glow of the generator panel under the door, and she pulled him back toward the bed by the wrist. "That's the point."
They didn't sleep for three hours. They slept for one, tangled, her leg over his and his arm under her neck, and then she woke because he'd moved, and because the lair was making a sound it didn't usually make.
She lay still and listened. A door. Downstairs, the big one — the service entrance her father never used because it set off the alarm, except he'd disabled the alarm years ago and never re-armed it because he kept forgetting. A door, and then footsteps, and then a voice she knew so well it was almost part of her own body, echoing up the stairwell, cheerful and enormous.
"—and I said to him, Perry the Platypus, if you think a little thing like a booby-trapped didgeridoo is going to stop me, you have clearly never met my daughter—"
Vanessa was upright before she was awake. Ferb was already sitting, already reaching for the floor, already — she grabbed his wrist hard.
"Don't move," she whispered.
"That's your dad."
"That's my dad."
"It's not Sunday."
"No." She was listening past him, tracking the footsteps. Two sets. Two — she heard the second voice, higher, and her stomach dropped. "He brought someone."
The footsteps stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Doofenshmirtz's voice boomed up the shaft like it was built for it.
"Vanessa! Are you awake? I know it's late — or early — the time zones are a nightmare, sweetie, don't ask — but I have a guest, and I need you to come down and be normal about it!"
Vanessa looked at Ferb. Ferb looked at his jeans on the floor, six feet away, and then at the door, and then at her.
"Window," she breathed.
"Third floor."
"There's a maintenance ladder on the east wall. The -inator platform's right under it." She was already out of bed, already grabbing his shirt off the chair and throwing it at him, already pulling her own tank top over her head. "Go out the window, get on the platform, take the ladder down to the loading dock, and walk. Don't run. If anyone sees you, you're — you're delivering something."
"At two in the morning."
"You're Ferb. You deliver things at two in the morning. People believe you." She shoved his bag at his chest. He caught it one-handed, still pulling his shirt down with the other, and he was moving now, quiet and fast, jeans up, shoes in his hand, and she went to the window and got the latch and pushed it open, and the night air came in cold and smelled like the sea.
"Vanessa!" Her father again, closer now, on the stairs. "I'm coming up! Put on — I don't know, put on something! There's a man with me!"
Ferb had one leg out the window. He stopped. He looked back at her, and in the dark his face was the same as it always was, and his voice was the same as it always was, and that was the thing that undid her.
"I'll text you," he said.
"You don't have my number."
"I have your number." He said it like it was obvious. Then he was gone, and the window was empty, and she heard the soft thump of him landing on the platform and then nothing at all.
Vanessa closed the window. She looked around the room. The sheet was on the floor — she kicked it under the bed. The bag was gone. His water glass was on the nightstand and she took it and put it in the bathroom and shut the door. She pulled on the first shorts she found and ran her hands through her hair and pinched her own cheeks, hard, twice, and then she sat down on the edge of the bed with her phone in her hand like she'd been there all night.
The door opened.
Her father filled the frame, lab coat and all, arms wide, and behind him, in the hallway light, stood a woman Vanessa had never seen before — tall, blonde, in a trench coat, holding a small suitcase and looking around the lair with an expression of polite, professional interest.
"Sweetie!" Doofenshmirtz said. "You're awake! Of course you're awake, you're always awake, you're like me — sleep is for the weak, and for Perry the Platypus, who is currently in a holding tank in the Sydney airport, long story, don't ask." He gestured grandly at the woman. "This is Agent — well, she's a friend of mine from the agency, it's complicated, we're not calling it anything, but she's staying the night because her flight out of Danville got canceled and I said, hey, I have a guest room, and she said—"
"Heinz," the woman said, gently.
"Right. Right. Vanessa, this is — you know what, I'll let her introduce herself, I'm going to make tea." He was already turning, already halfway down the hall. "Nobody tell me anything! I don't want to know!"
He vanished. The woman stayed in the doorway.
Vanessa stood up. She was aware, suddenly and completely, of every single thing in this room that was wrong — the smell, the sheet shoved under the bed, the shirt on the chair that was not hers, the fact that her hair was a disaster and her neck was red and there was a mark on her shoulder that her tank top did not cover.
The woman looked at her. She had grey eyes and a face that had been trained not to give anything away, and she gave nothing away.
"I'm sorry to barge in," she said. "He's very enthusiastic."
"He's my dad."
"Yes." A pause. "I'm Charlene."
Vanessa shook her hand because there was nothing else to do with her hands. The woman's grip was dry and firm and brief.
"You've got a — " Charlene touched her own shoulder, mirroring. "On the left."
Vanessa's hand went to her neck before she could stop it. "Bug bite," she said.
"Mm." Charlene's eyes moved, once, across the room — the chair, the floor, the window — and came back. She didn't smile. She also didn't not smile. "I'll take the guest room. Your father said it's the one at the end of the hall."
"It's the one at the end of the hall."
"Thank you." She turned to go, and then stopped, and looked back over her shoulder with something that was almost, but not quite, amusement. "He doesn't suspect a thing. In case you were wondering. He's been talking about the didgeridoo for six hours."
And she was gone down the hall, and Vanessa stood alone in her room with her heart going like a hammer and her phone in her hand, and the phone buzzed.
Unknown number. East wall. Ladder's rusted through in two places. I made it.
She sat down on the bed. Then she lay back on it, on the sheet that still smelled like him, and she stared at the ceiling and typed back with both thumbs.
You have my number.
I have your number.
She waited. The pipes ticked. Downstairs, her father was singing something in the kitchen, badly, and the kettle was starting to whistle.
Charlene, she typed. Do you know her?
The reply took a minute. No. But she clocked me on the platform. She was at the window when I came down.
Vanessa read it twice. Then she got up and went to the window and looked out, and the east wall was dark and the ladder was dark and there was nothing down there but the sea and the long black shape of the loading dock, and somewhere past it, in the dark, a boy was walking home with his shoes in his hand.
She went downstairs. Her father had three mugs out and was explaining the didgeridoo to Charlene, who was sitting at the kitchen table with her coat still on, listening with an attention that Vanessa recognized, because it was the exact attention she herself used on her father every single day of her life.
Charlene looked up when Vanessa came in. Their eyes met. Neither of them said anything.
"Vanessa!" Her father pushed a mug at her. "You're going to love this part. So there I am, upside down, in a booby-trapped didgeridoo—"
"Dad."
"—and Perry the Platypus is just standing there, and I'm thinking, this is it, this is the moment I finally—"
"Dad." She took the mug. "It's two in the morning."
He stopped. He looked at her, really looked, the way he did maybe twice a year, and his face went soft in a way that made her want to leave the room.
"You've been eating?" he said.
"Yes."
"You look tired, sweetie."
"I've been up."
"Well." He patted her arm, twice, awkward and enormous-hearted. "Well. I'm home now. I'll make you breakfast in the morning. Real breakfast. Eggs, the whole thing." He turned back to Charlene, already talking again, already gone. "So anyway, the didgeridoo—"
Vanessa took her mug to the far end of the table and sat down across from Charlene, and drank her tea, and listened to her father tell a story he'd told a hundred times, and under the table her thumb moved on her phone screen, and the phone lit up in her lap.
Home. Candace saw me come in. She didn't ask.
She typed back, one-handed, without looking down.
Good.
Then, after a second:
Sunday. The guest room. She's staying.
Three dots. Then: I know.
Vanessa looked up. Charlene was watching her over the rim of her own mug, grey eyes steady, and she did not look away, and she did not smile, and she did not ask. She just held the look for one long second, the way people do when they've decided to keep something, and then she turned back to Doofenshmirtz and said, "And then what happened with the didgeridoo?"
Vanessa put the phone face-down on the table and wrapped both hands around her mug and listened to her father laugh.