Stories Beneath Our Skin by Veronica Sloane Page A

attracted to over the last few years, of course, but it had been all too easy to keep them at a distance. This was different. He recognized the sickening freefall of his stomach and the sweat on his palms. Klaxons blared in his ears, warning danger, but there was nothing he could do about it now.
    " Liam?" Gene said, a note of amusement in his voice.
    " What?" He blinked.
    " I was just telling Ace here that I've got to rest my eyes a bit. Maybe you could use a bit of a nap too. Sounds like you had a late night."
    " Yeah." He rubbed at his eyes. "You're probably right. I'll come back this afternoon, okay?"
    " Sure thing. Pick me up some orange juice? There's no pulp in the stuff they serve here. That's like sour water."
    " Pulpy orange juice. I can do that."
    " It was nice meeting you, Ace." Gene smiled sleepily. "You watch out for my boy."
    " Shouldn't be a problem. Been accused of having a staring problem already."
    When the door closed behind them, tension Liam hadn 't realized he was storing up bled out of shoulders.
    " Come on, Professor. I'll buy you a burger."
    " Oh, you don't--"
    "' Course I don't." Ace headed back down the hall. "But it's lunchtime. Might as well. You can drop me back off at the shop after. Be about time to open up by then. There's a decent place a few blocks from here."
    " I know where you're talking about. I did grow up here, you know." Liam walked past Gretchen and offered only a small wave instead of stopping to chat like usual. She frowned, and he felt like an ass.
    " Doesn't show." The sun burnished Ace's dreads white gold. "You sound like you're from somewhere else entirely. California, maybe."
    " Berkeley."
    " What about it?"
    " You wanted to know what college I go to." He unlocked the car, letting the hot air escape. "I've been there three and a half years. Whatever accent I had, I lost."
    " You weren't kidding when you said it wasn't a party school." Ace whistled. "Smarter than you've been letting on, Professor?"
    " I'm good at school. Study hard, write solid papers. I'm not a science student or anything."
    " Right. English major. Shakespeare and all that."
    " And all that," he agreed.
    The diner hadn 't changed at all. It still smelled of caramelized onions, and the walls were still too cluttered with knickknacks. It was bizarrely intimate to sit across in a booth from Ace instead of next to him on barstools. Liam's legs were too long for the cramped space, but he worked hard to keep them on his side of the table. The waitress seemed to know Ace, not bothering to ask his order after she was done taking down Liam's.
    " What kind of classes do you take for an English major anyway?" Ace asked as soon as she'd closed her pad and turned away.
    " Just the usual stuff, I guess."
    " Pretend like I never went to college." Ace picked up the butter knife, setting it on its end and spinning it slowly. "Because I didn't. Don't have clue one on the usual stuff ."
    " Um, okay. Let's see... I took a lot of survey type classes. English novels and East Asian literature. But I'm down to seminars in my major now. I did 'Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche' last semester. Not sure what I'll take to finish it all off. I only need a few more credits and some other required classes."
    " Nietzsche was the guy who said God is dead, right?" The knife spun on, hypnotically slow.
    " Sort of. I mean, that's one of his main ideas, but it's used wrong a lot. He was interested in people evolving beyond religion. He thought that it was a crutch stopping us from reaching our full potential." Liam frowned. "The Nazis adopted his philosophy of the ubermensch, the superman, but he would have hated that."
    " Why?"
    " Aside from the fact that he wasn't an anti-Semite and hated the state? He was advocating for a more amoral lifestyle. The superman wouldn't be hampered by religion or any kind of conventional morality. Less Nazi, more anarchy. He wanted a world where no one was master or slave. Everyone was equal and the master of their own