“You want one last confession. But you already know the answer.”
I shake my head. Water runs down my temple. “No, I don’t.”
Ever tips his head up to the clouds. When he looks at me again, his eyes have changed. The flecks of light are dancing. “Of courseyou know.” Thunder booms. “You’re too-smart, too-good Ruth Cornier. The girl who watches everyone and reads every book and thinks she’s keeping it a secret. So kind she gives people the things she wants for herself. Hair you can see coming a mile away, bright as the sunset.” His voice growsthick. “Daughter of the man I hate almost as much my own father.” Ever presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I should’ve stayed away from you after the swamp.”
“Maybe you should’ve,” I yell, furious at him for even suggesting it.
He strides to me without warning. I suck in a breath, resisting the urge to back up. He pushes his fingers through my hair. Grips the strands so I have to look up at him.
“Ruth.”
“But you didn’t,” I say softly. “You didn’t stay away.”
A moment of stillness, my hair taut in his hand. Then, roughly, Ever shakes his head.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whisper.
His hand slides from my hair to my cheek, his palm icy against my skin. “I told you so many times.”
I swallow thickly. My heart beats too fast. “Other people’s poems don’t count.”
He looks me in the eyes. “I love you, Ruth. Of course I love you. It’s the only thing that’s ever redeemed me.”
This—standing in the howling wind and driving rain, the whole world turned upside down—is the place I’ve been searching for, the place for which I’d had no map. Everything between us is bared—we are new and raw and standing on a cliff’s edge.Thisis what I’d hoped love would be.Thisis what I’ve waited for. Something unlocks in my heart. Wheels turn; transcendence floods my veins, transforming me from the inside out, turning me into something different, something more, than I was only a moment ago. Everett Duncan loves me.
His voice is tortured. “That’s why I have to leave before the sheriff gets his evidence and catches up to me. If he does, I’ll fry. And I can’t have you going down with me.”
I shake my head.
“Ruth—”
“I love you, too, Ever. I always have.”
He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, as if looking at me is too much. Drops of rain hit his forehead and fall down his cheeks. “I can’t tell you—how that makes me…” His voice falters. “I’m not a good man, Ruth.”
“I love you anyway.” With his eyes closed, I trace a finger over his cheekbones, his nose, his brow—this profile I’ve marveled at. “We’re the same.”
“You’re not a monster,” he says roughly.
“No,” I agree. “We’re not monsters. We’re the sane ones.”
I think of the poor frightened child I’d been in church, searching for love and acceptance, doing my best to repeatYou will be saved. You must be good. Be good and be spared the lake of fire. How deep the wound must’ve been for me to carry it for so long.
But Everett loves me. And I’m no longer a child. I will not be afraid. “The truth is,” I say, “I love you more for having killed them. Let the sheriff come. We’ll fry together.”
Like a perfect moment in a dream, Ever seizes my face and kisses me. Lightning flashes—real or imagined, I can’t tell. His warm, insistent mouth is all I’m aware of. The pulsing feeling from years ago when I lay in the grass and he put his mouth on my wound comes back tenfold, making me shudder, making me feel like every part of my body is meant to be touched. He pulls me flush against him, his thumb on the pulse pumping at the hollow of my throat, and I’ve never known such need, such hunger. I’ve never known how good it could feel to be in my body. What one human being could do to another.
Ever picks me up, clutching me to his chest, and takes off for the tree line. “Better in here,” he murmurs, right before we slip into the darkness. He lays me on the forest floor and kneels beside me, eyes dark andreverent. Pulls my damp gown down my shoulders so my chest is bare. Goose bumps flood my skin. My heart races, chest rising and falling quickly, nervously. But when I look up, I see nothing but his beautiful face bent over me, and above it a shield of trees, and above that the endless roiling sky.
He sinks down, captures my breast in his mouth, and skims it with his tongue. Slowly, he sinks his teeth in.
I gasp and arch up off the ground, like I’m possessed, like he’s bewitched me. He grips my hips and skims his sharp teeth lower. Torture, pleasure, need.
Maybe I was destined for this: self-immolation in the rain. Our story is darker, messier, than the love stories I read as a kid. It began messy and I know, down here in the leaves with Everett’s mouth sending me, that it will end messy. But this is what I wanted before I even had the language for it: the kind of love that can look at ugliness, complexity, the unvarnished truth, and not flinch. A love that peels back the layers. Forget God. This is the love that will save me.
As the storm rages, as the trees shake, I learn, over and over, what my beastly body can do.
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