“It’s your favorite color, not a trivia question about the Earth’s circumference, Crew.”
“Twenty-four thousand nine-hundred and one.”
My nose ran up his throat, stopping right at his jaw before I leaned back to look at him. “I’m pretty sure that isn’t a color unless you’re giving me a hex code.”
He smiled, letting go of a soft laugh that froze time. Nothing else mattered when Crew laughed. “No, it’s the circumference of Earth in miles.”
“Are you boasting?”
“No, I’m just good at numbers.”
“Mm-hmm, well, I want to hear colors. Pretty sure I already heard some from how hard your hot, tight ass made me come.” I bent back down, nipping at the edge of his bottom lip. “But I digress.”
The flush that took over his face had my heart pounding. He was so elegantly gorgeous, I was tempted to pinch myself to make sure he wasn’t a dream.
“Blue. If you want to get specific, though”—he twisted further onto his back, one of his hands reaching up to touch my cheek—“I’d say a nice light blue. It reminds me of the Arctic Ocean.”
I pushed my face into his hand, reveling in the chill of his fingertips against my heated skin. “Why the Arctic Ocean?”
The lightning crackling in his eyes threatened to strike. I watched as he looked away, pulling his hand down from my cheek. “What do you think of when you think of a glacier?”
“Um, I don’t know.” I tried to think back on the last time I’d seen a picture of one. “I guess super big, white sheets of ice.”
“Ever seen a blue one?”
Shaking my head, I shifted until I was lying on my side, facing his. Crew was looking towards the ceiling; his eyes focused on something I couldn’t see.
“There aren’t a lot of them.” He glanced at me from the side,quickly averting his gaze back to the ceiling. “Over time, snow gets compressed really tightly. All the air bubbles get squeezed out, making this super dense ice that looks blue. The denser the ice, the more light it absorbs. The more light it absorbs, the less color we can see, leaving only blue. Pure ice takes a long time to form, so some of the glaciers are millions of years old.”
Crew turned his head, looking directly at me. We shared a moment, a gaze that went on for far too long. He was telling me something that belonged to a trivia game, but his face had fallen, his frown lines collecting dust along the crevices. I didn’t want him to frown anymore.
“Your eyes are kind of an ice blue. Do they remind you of glaciers, too?”
He shrugged, his shoulders catching on the sheet beneath us. “I guess so. I’ve always thought I had a lot in common with glaciers. They stay stuck for hundreds of years. All the air inside them is squeezed out, leaving them with nothing but ice crystals. They’re cold and out of reach. Parts of them break off, floating into the unknown, lost forever, while they stay stagnant. The existence of a blue glacier is long. Lonely. And in the end, they lose so many parts of themselves that it’s hard to understand where they begin and where they end.”
While he spoke, Crew had turned his head back to the ceiling. I was left staring at his side profile, his face hard set as he thought. I took it for what it was. Crew was giving me a part of his truth, explaining a deep, dark part of him that not many—if any—had seen.
It both reassured me and saddened me. My truth could walk hand in hand with his, and not a single light would shine. We both had demons, his in the delicate form of a blue glacier and mine in the form of blithering fire.
The inner part of my arm began to vibrate, an itch stirring there that crawled to my wrist. I reached out, pressing my palm to his cheek.
I turned his face, forcing him to look at me. Softly, whispering as if he’d run from anything louder, I spoke a piece of truth neither of us could deny. “I bet they’re breathtaking.”
He found my gaze, and his lips parted in a gasp. “The glaciers?”
“The glaciers, the Arctic Ocean as a whole, and every single part of you that you’ve lost or gained. Every part you show me. Every part you don’t.”
His response was breathless. “What if they’re small? What if so much of the glacier has broken off, all that’s left is a single crystal?”
I pressed closer until our noses were touching. “I know for a fact that single crystal will shine brighter than any sun, and that one day, it’ll build and build until a new glacier will take form.”
“Even if it takes a million years?”
“Even if it takes five.”
We weren’t talking about glaciers in the Arctic Ocean. No, when I pressed my lips to his, I made sure he could feel I meant it all. With every shift of our mouths, I gave another piece of myself to him.
I could have gone all night kissing Crew. My body demanded it, craving the chill of his skin that I knew would slowly heat from lust.
