He bends to kiss her, barely touching her lips with his. Each kiss is short, careful, punctuated by glances and the quiet murmurings of, “Okay?” and her reply, “Yes.” If he focuses too hard, he starts to wonder whether he’s even touching her. Physically, her kiss is so much less than every kiss he’s had before, but inside, he’s close to erupting. His hands find her waist, her hips, pull her closer.
She shivers, wincing. It’s too much. “Shit. Sorry,” he says.
But she tugs on his shirt and gives him a look of such determination that he bends, laughing a little, and just barely kisses her mouth.
He doesn’t want to be that guy, the one who pushes for more and more and more, because he knows every touch overwhelms her, but he’s dying to know how her skin feels, to see how her h*ps fit against his. He feels greedy. “I want you to stay.” His eyes hover on her mouth before nervously meeting her gaze.
“Can I?” she asks. “Is Jay gone for the night?”
“I think so.”
She lies back on his bed, and he bends over her, tracing an invisible line from her throat, past her collarbone, before unbuttoning the top three buttons of her shirt. No scar is visible on her skin. No heart beats beneath his fingertips, but something else seems to hum in its place.
Her short kisses melt like sugar against his tongue, and like a gust of wind, she rolls him to his back. He feels the weight of her over his thighs, how her shape pushes against his. Warm, but also somehow not. It’s the most beautiful torture: the shadow of sensation, gone before he even has a chance to process it.
It’s like he’s dreaming. All of the imagery, no actual relief from the way he aches for her.
“Colin . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Take off your shirt.”
He stares at her, seeing no trace of hesitation, and reaches behind his head. His shirt is gone in an instant. Her hands, and the illusion of her weight, press down on his chest; a teasing sensation brings goose bumps to his skin.
But every feeling is gone too fast as he sits beneath her, hesitant to touch for fear of flooding her with too much at once.
She whispers, pressing words against his neck, his ears, his jaw. I like the taste of your skin. You smell like soap and grass and the ocean. Her teeth tease at biting, pulling on the ring in his lip; her hands are everywhere.
His own hands grow desperate then, pulling her shirt from her shoulders, touching her stomach, her chest, grasping and wanting to memorize every curve.
“Too rough,” she gasps on an inhale. He’s afraid she’s trying to hide that he’s hurt her.
“Sorry, sorry,” he says, pushing his hands into his hair. He closes his eyes and pulls, grateful for the solid shape of this known sensation. He hasn’t ridden his bike in days, hasn’t run, hasn’t done anything, and he suddenly feels like a bear trying to carry a crystal; his muscles are going to burst from his skin and take off with this tension. He wonders if this is what people mean when they say almost having something is worse than never having it at all.
Her palm moves along his cheek, vibrating. “Look at me.”
He looks up into eyes the colors of blood and night and sky. Deep reds and blues, streaking indigo.
“You should . . . touch yourself if . . .” She doesn’t even blink. Doesn’t do a single one of those timid-girl things, like fiddling with her hair or covering her face. She just waits, watching.
“You mean . . . ?” He can feel his eyebrows crawling to his hairline. “Myself?”
“Yeah.” And then she smiles. It’s the sweet, dimpled smile that does him in, the way she seems both vulnerable and demanding. It makes the absurdity of it, the ingrained need for covertness, disappear.
He does what she asks, roughly shoving his pants down his h*ps and closing his eyes only when she whispers his name. It’s quick and familiar, and heat rolls along his skin as he tries to catch his breath. But it wasn’t really what he wanted. She’s watching him, her turbulent eyes never leaving his body. And although they blaze with fascination, he can tell it’s not what she wanted, either.
Colin urges her down into the blankets with him, curling to the side and pulling her back to his front. Her weight shifts between heavy and nothing, pressing and retreating like wind against a pane of glass.
They say good night, and then again, unwilling to let go.
She breathes, he realizes. Her short breaths match the rhythm of his own, and he settles into the comforting pattern. A bittersweet ache pulses deep in his chest. And as sleep begins to drag him under, he can’t fight the fear that the more he needs her, the more impossible it will be for her to stay.
His eyes grow heavy, his muscles grow lax, and he feels himself slip away.
Colin dreams of Lucy in her flower dress and white sandals, her hands clasped on her stomach and lilies all around her.
Chapter 14 HER
SHE’S TRYING TO STAY PERFECTLY STILL AS HE falls asleep, listening to the pattern of his breathing. Colin hasn’t biked in days, hasn’t beaten himself up and worn himself out like he used to. Lucy is used to seeing him always moving, almost vibrating with his barely contained vitality. But now, as he approaches sleep, he seems oddly quiet. It gives her the tiniest twinge of unease, even as his arms are tight and strong and his broad chest presses to the curve of her spine.
Colin inhales and mumbles something before his body seems to deflate, growing easy and tired and even warmer somehow. She misses that release, the physical letting go of sleep.
Lucy has been back here for more than two months. Sixty-five sunsets, and tonight is the first time she feels the sensation of drifting to darkness. She assumes people who love to sleep mean that they love this part of it most: the peaceful disengagement.
As she relaxes, she feels like she’s back on the trail, but this time it’s only in her mind and it’s different somehow. She’s underwater. Bubbles rise from her lips as she exhales, and when she looks up, they turn into silvery stars in a violet sky. Reeds become branches, stretching to touch each tiny spot of light. Ahead of her is the same dusty trail, but in the darkness it is a soft brown-black. The surface seems covered in a strange mixture of the lake bottom and tree bark from the earth outside.
The trail doesn’t go on forever as trails sometimes do in dreams. It ends straight ahead, where there is no turn or hill; there is only nothing. A soft blackness. In this world, where ghost girls can walk and touch and laugh, black isn’t a terrifying chasm. It’s just the other side of white.
She keeps walking until she’s not walking anymore; she’s simply moving. Turning left, then right, then left again until she’s back at her trail, waiting. Instinctively, she feels her body curve and press back against Colin one more time just before she lets herself fall into the black.
Chapter 15 HIM
HE’S NEVER STAYED OVERNIGHT AT A GIRL’S place, so maybe there’s a strange sense of intruding that he hasn’t yet experienced. But Colin has had girls sneak in and sleep over, and never in any of those nights did they ever up and leave while he slept. Lucy is gone when he wakes up, and even though it’s probably because she was bored to tears, he still feels a little ditched.
From his window, he can see that it snowed sometime during the night. A lot. The sky is heavy and gray, and it’s almost impossible to tell where it ends and the ground begins. He groans when he sees Dot’s garden. He broke his arm the day before he was supposed to clean it out. There are still a few pumpkins scattered around, and the tomato plants are brown and brittle, nearly bowed to the ground beneath the bulk of the snow. Their forgotten fruit stands out in gruesome contrast to the frost-covered vines, like little shriveled hearts draped over a blanket of white.
He goes downstairs to help shovel and salt the walks behind the kitchens, wondering the entire time if Lucy went back to her shed. He has no idea how someone so slight walks in the thick, wet snow. He tries to not think about her stuck somewhere, locked in a step that went too deep, unable to pull her weight out of the drift. For about the millionth time, he wishes he understood what the hell she is. By now he’s sweating, but his fingers feel like ice. The very thing he’s been avoiding—the fear that Lucy could be gone as quickly as she came into his life—presses in on him.
“Hey, stranger,” Dot says.
“Hey,” he answers absently.
“You okay this morning, hon?” she asks as he stomps the
snow from his boots. She’s buried in one of the lower cabinets, digging out a couple of large stockpots. “Sure.” Inside the kitchen, Colin opens cupboard doors and closes them again. He feels like he’s shorted out somehow, and nervous energy courses through his limbs. He’s not scheduled to work today, but somehow being surrounded by the hustle of morning chaos and grumbling employees is more comforting than the silence of his room.
“You seem a little anxious.”
“I’m fine.”
She eyes him skeptically.
Turning away, he starts putting bread into the huge industrial toaster. “Just wondering if I should put out some more salt.” He motions out the window, where white blankets the grass and walkways, drapes every shrub and tree.
“Let the groundskeepers do that stuff.” Dot steps up behind him and pats his shoulder to soften her words. “You’re a sweet kid, you know that?” she says, attempting to smooth his hair. “And you’re so much calmer lately. Haven’t seen you in the infirmary in more than a month.”
“Har-har.” He sits, takes a bite out of his toast. He hadn’t realized it had been that long.
“So either your bike, skateboard, and kayak are all broken, or you’ve found a new girl.” She hovers for a moment before stepping away, but Colin doesn’t bother answering. Now that the knows the truth, he wonders how Dot would react if she saw him with Lucy.
As she continues her morning routine, he listens to the familiar squeak of her shoes on the tile floors and pushes his food around the plate. If he didn’t have breakfast, Dot would bring in the cavalry. But each bite feels like hardened glue settling in his gut.
The minute he’s done, thoughts of doing anything but finding Lucy are out the window. Maybe it’s true that she came here for him, but it’s also now true that he feels a strange shift in the fabric of the sky, as if a weightless girl pulls the entire atmosphere with her when she leaves his room in the middle of the night.
The first thing Colin notices when he reaches Lucy’s field is that the snow is undisturbed. He tells himself it’s fine. He doesn’t even know if Lucy would leave footprints, but somehow he knows she hasn’t been back.
He’s panting by the time he gets to the shed and bursts through the door. The blankets on the old air mattress are smooth and untouched. Lucy’s book sits, undisturbed, on the table, a dried piece of lavender marking the page.
He’s running on adrenaline, and before he realizes it, he’s gripping the handrail and climbing the steps of Ethan Hall. The bell has rung, the halls are empty, and a strange sense of déjà vu washes over him.
He looks in every classroom on the first floor before heading upstairs. In the library, he checks the little alcove near the storage closet where she likes to sneak away and wait for him to finish work.
She’s not there.
Colin checks the bathrooms on the second floor, peeks into each classroom that he passes, the dining hall, and even the janitor’s closet. Nothing.
He texts Jay to meet him near the auditorium. Jay comes whistling down the hall, but the moment he sees Colin, his expression sobers. “Whoa. What’s wrong?”
“Have you seen Lucy?”
“Not since yesterday.”
Colin presses his forehead against the window.
“Col, what—”
“She’s gone.” His voice sounds so hollow and strange, like it belongs to someone else, and his breath fogs up the glass in front of him. “She was with me last night, and when I woke up . . . she was gone.”
“Relax. She’s probably just with—”
“She doesn’t have anyone else.” He meets Jay’s eyes, waiting, wanting him to understand what he’s saying without actually having to say it.
“I think we’re having a moment here,” Jay says, trying to ease Colin’s suffering. It works, and he almost smiles. Then, serious again, Jay adds, “She’s kind of a quirky girl, isn’t she?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“All right, man. Let’s find your Lucy.”
But they don’t find her. When they trudge out to the trail, Jay doesn’t say a word. When they circle the entire lake, he follows in Colin’s wake. When they cut across the snow-covered field and step inside the little shed to find it empty, he doesn’t ask Colin any questions.
Lucy doesn’t come back that night. And when Colin skips school the next morning to wait for her in the shed, she doesn’t show up then, either.