“There’s a hot spring deep underground.” My chin dips below the surface. “It never freezes, even in winter.”
His eyelashes are dotted with beads of water, like a million tiny worlds. “How did you know this was here?”
“I’ve lived here my whole life. You know things about a place when you’ve never left.”
The wind slides across the water, gooseflesh pricks my arms, and I stretch my legs deeper into the warm pond.
“If I knew about this place…,” he murmurs, his voice endlessly cool, controlled, like he’s careful of every word that leaves his lips. His eyes flash to the meadow, the shadowy hills spilling out into the distance like great sleeping giants. “I’d come here every night.” His eyes scrape back to me, as if they could peel me open, and my heart starts battering against my ribs, drawn to him in ways that don’t make sense.
With effort, I drag my gaze toward the abandoned farmhouse—anchoring myself to something other than him. “The bank owns that house,” I say, my breath tight, my skin too warm. “You could buy it cheap after you graduate, then this pond and the meadow would all be yours. You could spend your days out here, until the end of time.”
His mouth plays at the corners, almost a smile, almost a shape that makes me want to drift even closer.Makes me want…
But he shakes his head, the rising moon reflected back in his eyes, the pale light making dreams of the water’s surface. “I’ll be long gone after graduation.”
“So youdowant to escape this place?”
“Not an escape, a vanishing act. I want to get so far away, it will be as if I were never here at all.”
I can tell there’s more meaning beneath these words, but his chin lifts above the water, drops lingering against his lips, and the unfamiliar need inside me thumps in time with my heartbeat. I’m losing myself in the rhythm of his words, the shape of his mouth that I feel so drawn to that I almost forget how to breathe, how to be a girl cursed by love.
I turn and drift onto my back, my worthless body suspended on the calm surface of the pond, staring up at a cloak of summer stars. Trying to break the thread pulling me toward him. “Or we could just stay here,” I muse, pulling the night air into my lungs, swallowing down the stars, reminding myself to breathe. “Let the years drift by, and soon they’ll forget we ever existed.”
“They’d forget me,” Oak replies, his voice swept up in the moonlight. “But I doubt they’d ever forget you.”
I look at him.I’m losing this battle,I think.Reckless, reckless, reckless.I can’t let myself feel whatever this is: the torment of wanting something I know I can never have. Drifting in a pond beside someone who should be falling in love with me… but isn’t.Why?And wanting, strangely,impulsively, to reach out toward him, to lay my fingertips against a boy named after a tree.
No.Why are my thoughts so unruly, like they’re forming in someone else’s mind? I feel dizzy, drunk, dreamlike.
But he doesn’t pull his eyes away. And neither do I.
“You’re not what I was expecting….” His mouth rests half-open, the muscles of his shoulders settling, finding relief in the weight of my eyes on him.
I try to sever the tightness in my throat. But everything inside me is humming. “What were you expecting?”
“You’re just…” His voice trails away, and he runs a hand through his dark hair, water falling down his neck, across his shoulders. “I thought the Goodes would be more terrifying.”
I almost laugh, but there is a seriousness in his eyes. “So you’ve heard that we’re the undead who only come out at night?” I raise an eyebrow. “Or witches who turn our victims into a boiling stew or bury them below our house beside a cursed creek?”
His lips curl into a careful smile. “I actually heard that you’re all vampires, drinking the blood of anyone who gets too close.”
“Then you’re taking a risk coming way out here with me. In the dark. With no one around. No one to save you.”
The smile sinks from his mouth. “If you were going to kill me, I think you’d have done it by now.”
“The night’s still young,” I tease, my voice not sounding like my own. I’m fooling even myself: pretending to be a girl who can swim this close to a boy I hardly know—a boy who watches me, unafraid, as if he doesn’t know that his heart is in danger.
But so is mine.
The moon makes watery shapes across the pond, and he seems even closer now, like we are two madcap stars drawn together in thenight sky by a gravity beyond our control. Unaware that each will obliterate the other when we collide. “How do you know I’m not descended from vampire hunters?” he says darkly. “And it’s notmewho’s lured you here?”
His green eyes level with mine, only a breath between us. And there’s something desperate in his stare, unguarded, a perilous glint that might destroy us both if we’re not careful. Every nerve in my body feels like fire. “If that’s true…,” I say, my chest now only inches from his, breathing,breathing, gasping for air as if my lungs have forgotten how to stay alive. “Then I’ll have to turn you into a vampire first… before you kill me.” The warm, traitorous wind seems to push us together, and in an instant my fingertips are against his chest, against his collarbones, his throat,so close I can breathe him in, and my face is inches from his, close enough I could sink my vampire canines into his soft flesh, warmth and blood and desire. My body feels electrified—a pulsing in my eardrums, in the deepest cavern of my belly—and I know I’m breaking every rule my mother taught me. Every rule our family lives by.
Don’t get too close. Don’t let yourself fall.
I fight my own thoughts, my own mutinous need, and I clench my eyes closed, trying to push the feeling away. But when I open them again, our eyes meet, and I catch a flicker of something in his: a tension forming along his jawline, every muscle in his chest overwrought and tight. Like he feels what I do. But I can’t tell if it’s lovesickness in his gaze—the tulips finally winding their way around his heart, tightening like a fist—or something else.
Fear.
