“There,” she said, leaning back and swiping her thumb across my bottom lip. She sucked on her finger, and I tasted copper in my mouth. “First kiss done. Now whoever comes after has no claim on us.”
We were in her bathroom, two stools drawn up to the gilded vanity mirror as we did our makeup for the evening. Outside the windows, autumn embroidered the world with gold and red, and our Otherworld was sweet with woodsmoke and fallen apples.
“It will all be over with soon,” Indigo said, her chin jutting out in defiance of some imagined enemy.
According to Indigo, we had less than a year left on this side of the world. For Tati’s sake, she had agreed to graduate high school, which we saw as finishing our mortal penance. After graduation, I’d turn eighteen. Indigo said that the moment we both came of age, moonlight would run through our veins and wings would unfurl from our shoulder blades and we would step inside the lands we were always meant to rule. But until then, there were certain mortal experiences we needed to collect.
After the trip we didn’t take, Indigo and I divided the summerbetween our Otherworld and the seashore. In the mornings, we cut out stars and pasted them on our bodies so that by the end of the evening, we could peel off the stickers and see how the sun had baked constellations onto our skin. We watched our classmates hurl themselves against the freezing waves and wondered which of them—if we had to—we might deign to kiss.
We understood that a kiss could be a key. A press of lips could wake the princess from deathlike slumber or shake off the bristling furs of a beast to reveal the prince underneath. But the one who kissed you could also claim you, and since we refused to belong to anyone but ourselves, we entrusted that first and sacred touch only to each other.
At the shore we overheard classmates talking about the warehouse wharfs and the autumn concerts, and decided one of these would be our starting point, the place where we would kiss and be kissed, where we’d press against other limbs and allow the music to shudder through our bones. We’d gather every moment to pay our passage into the Otherworld.
My hand trembled at the thought, and Indigo caught it, smiling.
“It’s okay, Azure,” she said. “There’s nothing to be scared of.”
What I felt wasn’t fear exactly. I couldn’t quite name it. I smacked my lips, thinking of Indigo’s kiss. Her mouth had been cold and smooth as a serpent. When she parted my lips with her tongue, I tasted sugar before she bit down, and pain lit up my mind.
Indigo chewed absently at her lower lip. I noticed her teeth worried the same place where she’d bitten me. She rummaged through her drawer. “What color lipstick should we wear? Coral? Red?”
“Red.”
Like war paint, I thought.
“Good choice,” said Indigo, uncapping the tube.
She swiped glitter onto our eyelids and cheekbones, smudged kohl into the roots of our lashes and added touches of mascara. We combed our hair until it fell in identical black sheets down our backs. That night, we wore matching knee-high boots, lace tights, patent-leather skirts, and blouses that opened at the neck.
As we walked downstairs and headed for the door, I saw Tati in the parlor. She sat with her feet curled under her, combing through skeins of brunette hair that rippled to the ground. Tati had grown quiet since our failed trip overseas. Sometimes, I caught her staring at me. I didn’t know what she was looking for in my face. I thought she would look up from her work when we called out our goodbyes, but she kept right on combing the hair.
The wharfs smelled of salt and carcasses. Even though it was too dark to see, I knew the water was shallow and brackish, thick with cigarette butts and bottle caps. Seagulls wheeled overhead, and a crowd—mostly students our age or college kids from the mainland—formed a tattered circle around the pleated aluminum walls of the warehouse. Indigo wrinkled her nose as someone spit on the ground next to us. She folded her arms across her chest and frowned when her eyes landed on the face of a classmate.
“Don’t choose anyone we know,” she said, under her breath. “Don’t choose anyone who would try to keep us.” Indigo shuddered. “I hate this place already. Don’t you?”
I was spared from answering by the grating metal of the doors creaking open. The crowd surged, and we were carried forward. I had never been around so many people. We had kept ourselves apart for so long that I smiled when the zipper of someone’sleather jacket caught on my hair and an elbow dug into my ribs. Whenever anyone looked at me, I felt it like a hand cupping my cheek, and heat pooled in my belly.
I understood why Indigo hated this place—it was crude and inelegant, hot, and loud—but even before we spilled onto the massive poured-concrete dance floor, I could feel the magic there. It was in the slow pulse that gathered the crowd, in the sheen of eyes blackened and primal beneath the broken fluorescent lighting.
Then came the music, and I understood the delicate layers of this magic, too, wrought of the crowd’s urgency, daylight stalking the edges of night, the bass trembling up your legs and into your teeth, the slanting light sweeping over our bodies in a benediction. I swayed, transfixed by the radiance of it all. Indigo and I blurred into the mass of people. I felt the bruises forming on my body—the jolts against my spine, knees knocking against mine, liquor splashing my hair—and suddenly I loved the warehouse in a way that made me angry that others knew it existed.
I didn’t know the band or the words to the song, but I opened my mouth anyway and they turned succulent on my tongue. I threw back my head and the song caught me around the throat and cast me out past the corrugated metal walls and the dusky wharf waters until I was so vast, I might wrap a whole universe within me.
When the band finished their first set, Indigo caught my hand and I almost recoiled. I stared at her, and for a moment her face seemed alien, unfamiliar. I had forgotten I was not alone.
Indigo clutched me to her, screaming so her voice could be heard: “Come on, I see someone I want to kiss.”
I followed Indigo as she moved through the throng and toward a bar at the back. I was distracted, still caught up in theinfinite beat of the music. It had answered something I didn’t know I could ask, and when I walked through the crowd, my feet didn’t touch the ground.
Indigo approached one of the men who had been on the stage. He had a beautifully carved face and a full mouth that twisted in delight when she spoke to him. I looked away, watching the next band set up before I suddenly tasted cigarette smoke on my tongue. My nose wrinkled and when I turned to Indigo, I saw her arms wrapped around the man, his hands in her hair. When she broke the kiss, she laughed in his face as he leaned forward to catch her.
“Once is enough for us,” she said.
The man looked heartbroken. He stared at Indigo with a terrible thirst, and heat traced a sigil in my blood. If Indigo noticed the man’s face, she didn’t acknowledge it. She grabbed my wrist. “Your turn.”
I’d barely taken a step before the man’s arms were around me. His mouth, so soft I wanted to gasp, found mine. He parted my lips, just like Indigo had done, but he didn’t bite down, only moaned as if somehow weakened by me. After a few moments of this, I drew back, admiring how his eyes were glazed. My teeth sharpened. I had won something, and even though it was too dark to see, I felt my shadow strangle his in the dark.
I leaned forward and kissed him again. I liked losing myself to the kiss. I liked the heat painting my insides. I liked hearing Indigo laughing in the dark.
