Stone inched closer with caution, and he pressed his lips to the center of my forehead. The same way I had done to him.
I released a broken sigh. My heart collapsed.
Stone cares for me, too.
He didn’t pull back. Not right away. Stone let his mouth linger, and I squeezed my eyes closed to keep my breath from coming out in a shudder.
When he edged back, his lashes swept across my forehead as he peered down at me. He was so close that I felt his breath on my cheekbones. The song looped on the record player, the fire crackled, and the snow from the snowstormpitter-pattered. But it all fell into the background of this moment where a tangled heap of silence hardened between us as we looked at each other.
Then I lifted my chin and nudged my lips against his, suddenly craving to kiss the stranger who’d never smiled, never frowned. The one who never gave more than necessary, until now. Just once to know what it was like.
Stone curled his hand into a fist, bunching the seams of my dress between his long legs, one of them bent at the knee. At the nape of my neck, his other hand relaxed but never left.
I moved my lips to the corner of his mouth, and his jaw went lax.
My eyes closed when I kissed him there for a handful of soft seconds.
A gentle and merciful kiss, like I was trying to catch time and trap it in a glass bottle.
He remained still, skin flushed, eyes intense and squinting like he’d come from another world—a look that was eternal on him.
I didn’t know why I wasn’t pulling away.
Something had to have been possessing me, keeping me rooted here.
My mouth moved across his bottom lip.
His cool breath shuddered, and I looked up to catch his eyes close.
Every second passing had my heart slamming against my bones, and I heard it in my ears, turning the song coasting in the room into fog.
I’d never made an advance on a man before, but everything about Stone was new and exciting. I couldn’t stop myself in fear of never finding out what it would be like, in fear of never having this chance again.
Here, on Bone Island, we were two people from two different worlds who found ourselves across the ocean in a lighthouse where secrets screamed to be kept, new stories to be collected like dust.
Stone lifted his chin, seeking more of me, and I imagined myself forty years from this moment, should I survive that long, finally telling Fable about the stranger I shared a kiss with on Bone Island. A man she’d known nothing about. How one kiss with the traveler made my heart untether and flee from my wicked soul, wanting to take flight. And how could she ever believe me, anyway? I would be an old lady with a faulty mind.
Plus, nothing could truly leave this place. Not even my heart.
With his lips slightly parted, I kissed the top one, then the bottom one, then pushed a slow tongue into his mouth and dragged it across his. Warmth piled inside me, my lips catching his, holding our kiss that I felt slide through my body.
At first, Stone just sat there, frozen, as if shocked, but when I pulled back, his fingers pierced my skin at the nape of my neck, pulling me closer and wanting more. His seductive tongue curled into my mouth, tangling with mine. My body tripped at the gentle thirst in his kiss, and I melted into him. Imelted.
His taste transported me back to my earlier years when I’d lay upon the sand during autumn under an afternoon shower, with the sea sweeping across my toes. Kissing him was much like kissing the cold rain in the fall, with my head underwater and dewdrops skipping in my ribcage.
And just before I sank into him, Stone turned rigid, like terror flashing through him, as if he detested it or was in pain, and he turned away.
When I opened my eyes, I saw his eyes tightly pressed together.
Then he pulled back.
It all happened in an instant: him kissing me, then the moment being ripped away.
My gut twisted, and I couldn’t catch my breath.
For the first time, insecurity crept in.
It was a foreign feeling. And I absolutely hated it.
