Neither of us has trusted love.
Neither of us knows how.
So I do what I shouldn’t: I reach out for him.
My cold fingertips find the warmth of his collarbones, feeling the pulse at his neck. He is the river and the midnight air that soaks into his skin when he reads beneath the stars.
I want to believe he’s right.
I need to.
He lifts his arm, the muscles of his chest tensing, and he touchesa strand of my wet hair—as if it’s as close as he dares to get. But it’s not enough—he’s never close enough—and I don’t care that a part of me is still shouting that I need to leave, I don’t care that I’ve made promises to myself, because my heart is now a piston, firing out of control, about to break my rib cage into a thousand jagged pieces of bone.
I stare up into his impossible eyes, pleading for something I’m certain only he can give me:relief, hope. Meaning in the torment of his hands on my skin.
I want so bad to hate him… but instead I am breathless and desperate, and I want only one thing.
This feeling will break me. I’m certain of it.
“It’s not just you,” I admit.
His thumb slides down my cheek, across my chin, my bottom lip, and he looks at me like he’s forgotten everything that came before this moment, all the words spoken between us, all the near misses when we pulled away from each other.
Maybe we don’t have to make amends for the mistakes our parents made. Maybe we don’t have to punish ourselves; maybe we don’t have to resist what we feel because we’re afraid of ending up like them. We have to make our own mistakes.
We have to risk everything so that we feelsomething.
So that we live.
I lift onto my tiptoes, and I graze my lips gently across his—air and rain and a thousand hours that I’ve spent tracing the outline of his mouth, that I’ve imagined the softness of his breath against mine. And now…
Now…
He sucks in a breath, and I dig my fingers into the back of his neck, feeling the heat of his skin. Feeling myself tremble at the same moment his lips sink in, tracing the delicate, never-before-touched curve of my mouth. Rainwater falls from our flesh, dries up, evaporates just like my heart. My fingertips graze his wet hair, while his hands slide beneath the towel, finding my waist, my hips, and it feels like we’re tumbling backward, heat and breath and all the lies between us. But none of it matters. He lifts his mouth and kisses my throat, the soft place beneath my earlobe.
I feel weightless again, lost in the warmth of his fingertips as they trace the landscape of my flesh that no one has ever touched. I kiss him back, tasting the rainwater on his skin; I kiss him so desperately, I worry we’ll both break. His hand slides along my ribs, beneath my soaked tank top, and I swear it feels as if my heart is pounding so loud that it’ll rattle the walls of his house.
His mouth is on my throat again, tracing every freckle, his hand now against my belly. He takes a deep breath, stalls, and I close my eyes, falling,falling, tipping recklessly into something I never want to wake from. His mouth is on mine again, desperate, both of us losing ourselves in whatever this is: lust or love or a madness.
“Lark,”he whispers against my flesh, and I feel a deep, dangerous unspooling inside me. A rupturing behind my eyelids, a feeling like I want to cry and laugh all at once. A feeling in the very center of my being, a thing I’ve always feared, a thing I’ve been warned about.
Love.
It tiptoes up the base of my spine, careful and quiet, as if I might miss it, as if it’s only a whisper. Hardly there at all. A thief. A pickpocket.
But once it lands in my chest, it thunders through every muscle and bone, splitting apart every cell… and there’s no denying it.
This is what I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid.
But when it settles behind my eyes, I feel tipsy and inside out, like I’m drifting away. I feel inhuman, a speck of stardust. A riddle and a blade of grass. Nowhere and everywhere.
I feel like a girl who is having her first kiss.
Who fell for a boy one perilous summer and never looked back.
Iletmyself feel it all. I draw in a ragged breath, my skin alight, and I stare into his eyes, trembling. Maybe Oak is right: It was never real,the curse. It was only ever a story, a thing told to Archer and me, a fable my mother believed in, a tall,talltale.
I lay my lips on his and he kisses me back. The chill that tunneled across my skin when we ran through the rain is now gone; only warmth is left. His hands slide back down my ribs, and I kiss him, knowing I’ll never lose him again. I kiss him for all the times I wanted to but never could. I kiss him without fear, and I pull him to me, scraping my fingers across his collarbones. I want to know every feeling I’ve denied myself. I want to make up for lost time. I want to know what it feels like to wake up in his arms, the morning sun shivering across our bare skin. I want to lose every part of who I used to be.
