I don’t stay to find out.
I release my burning fingertips from his chest and push myself back, wading through the shallows up to the shore. My feet reach the grass, almost to our pile of clothes, when his hand grazes mine, and I whip around to face him.
“Lark,” he says, breathless, water spilling from the hard lines of his face. “I’m sorry.” As if this were allhisfault. As if he brought me here and led me into the pond. As if he were the one who was cursed.
But now he’stooclose, his breath heavy with each exhale, eyes pouring into mine.
And I want…a thing I shouldn’t.
AwantI can’t seem to shake. To know the feeling of his mouth against mine, to know the relief it will bring and the heat of his skin and the feeling of the ground being ripped away.
“I never meant to…” His words break off, lost, and what’s left is only the dark between us. The night swollen in our lungs.
“You didn’t do anything wrong.” I clench my jaw. I need to walk away.
I’m leaving tomorrow,I repeat to myself. This is stupid, pointless.
Meaningless.
But his eyes fall to my lips, and I can almost breathe him in: salt and warm skin and pond water. I try to see what’s in his eyes—the curse pumping through his bones? A dangerous need taking shape inside him that he can no longer ignore. Or is it simpler than that? The kind of summer longing stirred up between any small-town boy and girl. Fingertips and sun-kissed skin and trembling heartbeats—wild and nocturnal and left wanting more.
In the quiet his mouth is the only thing I see.
“Kissing Lark Goode is a bad idea…,” I whisper.
He breathes, and I swear he shifts closer—this boy who was only a sketch in my notebook days ago but now stands inches away, the night air buzzing around us, the sky tilting above. “I know you want me to be afraid of you… but I’m not. I don’t believe any of the rumors about you.” He swallows, doesn’t look away. “I only believe what I see in front of me.”
Every warning inside me spins out of control.
His eyelashes blink, and I’m so close that I could press my lips to his and forget all the ways this will ruin me.Ruin us both.
But I feel something cracking wide inside me, the throat-closing sensation of falling into something I’m not prepared for. A tangled-up-in-knots feeling.
And I feel myself tipping toward an edge….
I glimpse what everyone else feels when they stray too close to Archer or me, when they grasp a tulip in their hands.
It’s the beginning of something….
A word I won’t let myself say aloud.
I pull myself back from him, sudden and quick, severing the moment.
I can’t let this happen. This lie. I won’t feel the pain I watched my mother endure—knowing that our father never really loved her.
I will run from it.Always.
Because it’s not real. What he feels in this moment, his heart racing in his chest, is only the tulips.
What I feel… will wreck me.
It will be the start of my unraveling. Of this boy breaking right in front of me.
I turn away, my lungs heaving, hating the feeling of separationfrom him, but I scoop up my pile of clothes. “I have to go,” I say in a rush, sliding my eyes back to him, a twitch at my upper lip.I love the way he looks in the moonlight,I think painfully, achingly.
“Good night,” I manage, instead ofI can never see you again.
I catch the flicker of a smile against his lips—like he knows this isn’t goodbye,not really, not in any permanent way, because this thing between us feels more unshakable than that—but still, I command my legs to carry me away, up through the meadow, before I can change my mind, leaving a trail of water behind me.
