But he’s shown me what’s inside, the darkness that frightens him even as he holds it like the precious thing that it is. He thinks of the driver who killed his wife and the quiet rage that never stops turning in his heart. If I’m meant to murder him for love, he would murder for vengeance.
Soon he’ll be gone, and I have to know if we’re more alike than he may realize. If his darkness is a mirror match for mine. If he thinks of me at all the way I think of him.
“If you had to kill me, how would you do it?” I ask the question in a whisper with my eyes still closed from our last kiss.
He stills. His hand stops toying with a piece of hair that’s fallen over my shoulder. The whole world goes silent, and I can’t hear our breathing or even the rain anymore.
I wake from my lust, too late to have stopped myself from asking such a stupid thing. I’ve just ruined everything.He loves Jade, not you. Never you.And now I’ve lost even that. When he looks at me, he sees the darkness that’s been churning behind my eyes as long as he’sknown me. Longer than that. He sees the ugliness that Dara saw the night I cleaned her mess with that practical efficiency. He sees the monster that only my sisters could love.
I open my mouth to—what? Apologize? It’s too late for that.
He eases back, and my body feels cold where he’s left me. I close my eyes to the sound of him zipping his jeans, buckling his belt. I’ve done it. I’ve lost him. He’s going to step out into the rain and leave me here.
I flinch when his fingers weave through mine, and for an unguarded second I meet him with surprise. His expression is unreadable, and he raises our picnic blanket over my head like a shawl. It was supposed to be a clear, mellow night. We were going to lie out under the stars. Spending the night out here was my idea. I wanted a peaceful memory of us all alone. I wanted to forget the feel of Dara’s body in my hands. The sight of her arm falling slack over the edge of the gurney before they wrapped her in the sheet.
“Come on,” he says. “I want to show you something.”
Confused, I follow him down the hiking trail. We move at a brisk pace, and he doesn’t seem to mind that he’s getting drenched. He stops at a ledge that overlooks the desert wilderness. Brush and boulders stretch out into the horizon. In the gloom it’s especially beautiful, like we’re standing in the heart of the storm itself. We’re part of the intrinsic beating pulse of the universe itself.
Edison lifts the blanket so that it’s wrapped around both of us. I feel the warmth of his skin as he moves his face close to mine. “See that lake out there?” he says. In the storm, it’s black as ink, faintly gray around the edges as though it’s alight.
“Yes,” I say.
“Here’s how I’ll kill you.” The timbre of his voice shudders throughme. “I’ll bring you someplace like that, where there’s no one around. I’ll hold you under until I feel you go still.”
The rain patters against the dirt. It falls in the hollow spaces between the branches, and it splashes in the puddles that it makes in the hollows of the rocks.
When I look at him, there’s a playful gleam in his brown eyes. The light in them winks when he looks at me. “Then I’d reel you out,” he says. “Breathe air into your lungs. Bring you back to me. I don’t want you to die—only to know that I’m the one in control.”
I picture it. The power struggle. I wouldn’t make it easy for him. I’d claw at him and bite. I’d pinch the soft flesh behind his knees so that he would let me go, and then I’d climb onto his shoulders and pin him down.
For the second time today, an irrepressible smile rises on my lips. He’s had this thought before. Saving me the way that he did that night I ran my car off the road. I felt it in his arms then, a need to protect me, to be the reason that I’m breathing. This lake wasn’t visible from where we stood when I asked my question. He saw it and already had the thought. How many times has he rescued me in that imagination of his? How many times has he brought me to the edge only to reel me back?
I take his face in my hands and rise on tiptoe to kiss him, and I say, “You really think you’re the one in control?”
I am not Jade in this moment. I’m me. Really me, all my darkness and ugliness laid bare, and he loves me.
“No,” he confesses. His fingers dig into my hips, coaxing a gasp out of me. “You have me. I’d burn this whole world down if you asked me to.”
Oh fuck. The things he can do to my heart. I grab his collar andpull him into a kiss. “I don’t want the whole world to burn,” I murmur against his lips. “Only us.”
His phone rings. The loud chime pierces through the sound of the rain, but we ignore it, and eventually it stops. It starts again only a second later, and Edison’s brows draw with the early makings of concern. It’s a Saturday and his entire job site is closed. Nobody would be calling him to pick up a shift. His father has only called once in the time I’ve known him, and he would have just left a voicemail.
Edison fumbles in his pocket, and I don’t get a chance to see the name on the screen before he answers. “Hello? No—I—all right, calm down.”
I adjust the blanket to protect his phone from getting wet. Edison presses his finger into his ear to block out the sound of the rain.
“I can be home in twenty minutes. Sadie knows where I keep the spare key. I’m sure—yes—” He pauses, and I catch a note of the worried voice in the speaker. “I’m sure that she’s fine.”
When he hangs up, I already know that our little moment together is ended. “Sadie got into a fight with her dad this morning and stormed off.”
“Are you sure she’d go to your house?”
“She’s done it before,” he says. He looks pensive, but not alarmed. “Come on.” He takes my hand and we sprint down the hiking trail, getting drenched in the process.
Lightning bolt has proven to be an apt nickname for Edison’s stepdaughter. She’ll disappear for long stretches of time, but when she returns it’s with brightness and theatrics. The quintessential thirteen-year-old.
We drive in silence as the sunset melts, and the approaching evening is made darker by the clouds.
