“I…” Oak’s voice is a whisper, a rainstorm. A weight of words gathers in his eyes. “You don’t know…” He breathes, and breathes, and breathes. “How hard it is to look away from you.” He swallows and looks briefly startled by his own words, like he knows how treacherous they are. But he doesn’t take them back.
“It’s just the tulips…,” I begin, dissolving the meaning from his statement.
But he shakes his head. “No… it’s not.” His mouth settles into a line, eyes clear and sharp, and when he looks at me like this, I don’t trust myself.
The firefly lifts from my hand, wings thrumming, and disappears into the crush of all the others. Oak takes a step closer, and I forget how to breathe. His hand strays across mine, his fingers tracing my palm. Circling my wrist. His face is a poem that hasn’t yet been written, his lips are a question that only I can answer. He’s inches away, and I want nothing more in this whole awful world than to sink into him, let his eyes drift down into my bones, and rip me apart.
“I told you before, kissing Lark Goode is a bad idea,” I whisper,remembering back to the pond when I uttered these same words.
He drifts even closer,too close, his mouth hovering just over mine. Only a few centimeters separate us now—only air and wings and a heartbeat that’s slamming against my ribs. He does something to me that feels beyond all logic.All magic.“Do you want me to kiss you?” he asks, out of breath, out of thoughts, out of any reasons why he shouldn’t.
“I…” Only air comes out, because Iknowwhat I want—what I feel coiling tight in the lowest part of my stomach. But I also know I shouldn’t want it, shouldn’t wanthim.
I can’t trust this feeling, this moment.
None of it.
His mouth hovers over mine, and I feel the soft, barely there graze of his lips. He smells like wildflowers and a hundred years of quiet, unspoken words. Ancient and alive. Like oak trees and sweat on summer-heated skin. He looks like fate. Like the very thing that might save me. Destroy me. Put me back together.
My lips part, the word “yes” suspended so delicately on my tongue that it feels like the thinnest shaving of glass. Cold and perfect and dangerous. But before the word can slip free, a fraction of a second before I can crush my mouth to his and tell him all the ways I shouldn’t want this but I do… a voice echoes through the air.
Loud and booming.
A voice that isn’t Oak’s.
I snap my head toward the sound, and across the meadow I can just make out a figure at the far tree line. A silhouette. And it’s shouting at us. “Who…?” I start to ask, but Oak’s hand is already clenching mine, yanking me away from the meadow.
We run through the flickering haze of lightning bugs, and they part around us, a sea of sunshine-gleaming orbs. At the border of trees, I glance back and see the figure moving toward us, still shouting, but I can’t make out the words over the thrum of flapping wings. “What’s he saying?” I ask.
“I can’t tell,” Oak says, darting a look over his shoulder. “But I understand his meaning.”
“Are we trespassing?”
His mouth tugs at the corner, a wild, windless smile, and he pulls me down the hillside toward the river.
“Shit, Oak,” I say as we run, the warm night air rushing around me. But when he flashes me a look, still smiling, I can’t help but laugh. I wonder if this is what others feel when they clench a tulip for the first time. A delirious thrill, drunk on something that almost feels like love. Wasted on it. Soon enough the hangover will come, but right now, running hand in hand with Oak at my side, I feel more alive than I ever have.
At the river’s edge, he shoves the boat back into the water in one push, and I splash into the shallows, clambering over the side. The man has reached the top of the hill, and he yells down at us, something about “keeping off his property,” but Oak is already rowing us back upstream.
A grin spreads across his face, while my eyes water from reckless, giddy laughter.
Rowing upstream is much harder than rowing downstream, and Oak’s arms tense with each stroke, his shoulders contracting. Myhead is whirling from the rush of sprinting down from the meadow, vibrating from the starry haze of thousands of fireflies, teetering from the feel of Oak’s lips nearly touching mine. I feel untethered and windswept, a little madcap.
“You do that a lot?” I ask, still breathless. “Sneak onto other people’s property?”
“Only every spring.” A smile touches his eyes, and I tilt my head back, the night air streaming against my face, wishing I could feel this way every second of every day: heedless and wide open. Not a single thing in my way. He makes me feel like I could be someone else.Like I already am.
I tip my eyes, watching Oak dig the oars into the water, and a question rises inside me, one I’ve been curious about since I first saw him in the school parking lot. The last detail of my sketch that I never finished.
“What book are you always reading?” Even now, I know the book is there: I noticed it tucked into the back pocket of his jeans when we walked down to the river, and when we fled the meadow.
Without a word, he stops rowing, releasing one of the oars to reach into his back pocket, pulls out the paperback, and hands it over to me. I’m caught off guard—I didn’t expect he would so easily let me see it—but I run my hand over the bent cover while he grips the oars again and resumes rowing us upstream. The book is clearly not from his dad’s rare collection. It looks like it probably came from a cheap used bookstore—I know there’s one or two in Favorville, shops where dusty, fifty-cent titles sit in stacks from floor to ceiling. Most of the books sit forgotten, left to molder for decades; not even the shop owners know what titles lie hidden among the crowded rows.
This one is no different—a piece of the corner has been torn away, the pages bent, like the book was rolled up at one point to swat a fly. But I can still read the title:Lonesome Traveler, Jack Kerouac. The illustration on the cover is an unusual watercolor, depicting a man holding a walking stick, I think. It’s hard to tell exactly. The cover is so worn, nearly breaking apart in my hands.
I glance up at Oak, but his focus is out on the water, keeping a steady rhythm as he rows, not wanting to lose any ground with the current always pushing against us. The book might seem cliché in the hands of anyone else: mysterious boy who reads Kerouac while walkinglonesomeroads across a county line. But it doesn’t feel that way. There is a genuineness to it, a boy who’s searching for something and hoping he’ll find it in the yellowing pages of this book.
“Is it good?” I ask.
