His hands are in my hair, and my heart feels like it’s going to explode. Break clean through my flesh, kill me instantly.
But it’s something else… that destroys me.
Something else.
His voice against the soft flesh of my ear, vibrating against my eardrums, delicate and small. But with the weight of a hammer.“You smell like flowers,” he murmurs. The words sound far away, as if uttered beneath water, whispered against a cold wind whipping down from a mountaintop.
I pull my head away, and he blinks, looking briefly confused, like he never intended to say the words. As if they’d been spoken by someone else.
“What did you say?”
He shakes his head, eyebrows crinkling together. “I—I didn’t mean…”
“You said I smell like flowers.”
“I just meant that… I shouldn’t have said it….”
I shake my head and slip free from his hands.Fuck.I smell like flowers because I am a Goode. Because the scent of tulips is laced like poison along my skin: it lives in my hair, pollen dotting my eyelashes, the perfume of love and desire inescapable. And with only a few words from his lips, I know the truth. His hands trace my flesh only because of the flowers that grow wild and dangerous beside a cursed creek.
Even if he doesn’t believe it, even if he convinced me for a brief, dreamlike moment that the tulips are only a story told to make sense of the past. His voice has shattered the illusion.
I can never escape the lie the tulips tell on my behalf.
He desires me because I am a Goode. Nothing more.
“Lark…,” he begins.
But I stagger back from him. And it feels like being dropped from a cliff.
“It’s not real…,” I hear myself say, but my thoughts are already breaking apart, coming undone.
“Itisreal…,” he insists. “I’m sorry I said that, about the flowers, it was stupid. I didn’t mean anything by it. I don’t even know why I said it—it just came out.”
I allow my eyes to scrape up to his. “You said it because your thoughts aren’t your own. Your mind isn’t your own. This is all…” I shake my head. “I shouldn’t have come here.”
“Lark, no.” He tries to step toward me, but I take another step back, then another.
I can’t believe I let myself trust this feeling, trust him, trust this moment.
Love is a lie.And it always will be.
But it’s not his fault…. It’s mine.
I am a Goode. I am the monster.
“I’m sorry,” I say to him. “I understand why you lied, about your dad and my mom. But I should have known better. I should have stayed away.”
My legs carry me back, and Oak stands frozen, the firelight making ribbons of light and dark across his chest. The hurt in his eyes is so heavy, I can’t bear to look directly at them.
“Please, Lark, don’t go. Don’t walk away.”
I risk a glance at him, feeling my own tears welling against my eyes. “It’s not your fault, how you feel,” I say. Words that burn. That cut me apart. “But you should try to forget about me. About this summer. And by winter you won’t even remember why you spent a single day with me; it’ll all seem like wasted time.”
“No,” he mutters.
But I force my eyes away from him, yanking open the door, and I duck out into the storm.
Raindrops explode against the asphalt. The air fills with its warm, atmospheric scent. And my heart is ash.
