“Mia’s real,” I hear myself say. “It’s short for something else.”
He waits, ever so patient, eyeing me over his glass.
“Erasmia,” I go on, the name feeling foreign in my mouth. I haven’t said it out loud in a very long time. “Erasmia Reeves.”
“Erasmia.” He turns it over on his tongue like he’s tasting the scotch. “That’s unusual. Pretty, though.”
“It’s Greek. It meansbeloved, if you can believe that.” I let out a caustic laugh. “And there’s a moth.Erasmia pulchella.”
I set my whiskey down, my hands shaking too badly to hold it. The glass clinks against the table, loud in the silence.
“Also pretty,” I continue. “For a moth, anyway. Turquoise with iridescent patterns and splashes of orange and black. Seem harmless. At first.” I stare at the chipped nail polish on my fingers, at my hands, so small and ordinary, and yet capable of terrible things. “But they carry poison within them, cyanide. One taste, and predators learn not to make that mistake again.”
He puts his glass down and I feel him staring intently, listening.
“That’s what I am.” The truth feels like it’s being pulled out of me, word by word, against every instinct I have. “What I was made into. I’m poison. Literally. My body produces a compound that’s lethal to humans. It’s in my tears. My saliva. Everything that’s…wet.”
I glance up at him and meet his eyes.
“My kiss kills, Nate. I’m poison. I’m…a monster.”
The admission seems to float between us in the air. I watch his face for some sort of reaction, disgust or horror, but he’s not giving me much. Just that careful stillness, that patient waiting.
“You kissed me,” he says carefully. “You’ve kissed me a lot.”
“Yes.”
“We’ve had sex…a lot.”
“We have.”
“I’m not dead…”
“No.”
“So either you’re lying, or?—”
“I’m not lying.”
He stands. The movement is abrupt and uncontrolled, the first crack in his composure. He walks to the window, whiskeysloshing in his glass, and stares out at the city like it will help any of this make sense.
I watch his shoulders. The tension in them. The way his free hand keeps flexing at his side. I know how it all must sound, how crazy and fantastical, but he must know somehow, deep down, that I’m telling the truth.
“I’ve thought about it constantly,” I say to his back. “Believe me. Since that first night. Since you kissed me and you just…kept breathing. You’re the only person I’ve ever kissed who didn’t die.”
He doesn’t turn around.
“The only person,” I repeat, swallowing hard, feelings bubbling up and out of those locked boxes inside me. “I’ve never…”
I stop. The words are getting tangled up with memories I can’t afford to access right now. A face I try not to picture. A name I never say.
“I learned not to try,” I manage. “Not to want. Not to let anyone close enough. To be okay with being a ghost for the rest of my life.”
The silence stretches. The fridge kicks on.
“The first time we kissed.” His voice is quiet as he speaks, though he still hasn’t turned around. “On the rooftop after the gala. At first you looked scared, youwerescared, and I thought I did something really wrong, like I hurt you.”
My throat constricts.
