He is still, and I am still. But I am no longer afraid.
Of anything.
Especially not him. Not love.
Oak watches me with lightning in his eyes, a shuddering crack of relief and hope and love all twisted together. I lift up onto my tiptoes and I press my lips to his, careful at first, like I will break him. I trace the shape of his mouth, slowly, and his hands find my waist. I sink into his arms, fingers through his dark hair, the scent of the river laced across his flesh. His hands scrape over my skin, but theneedis different this time; this is desire that takes a lifetime to unravel. A thousand years will never be enough. We will need longer to etch each other’s bodies and bones to memory. Lips like paintbrushes, fingertips the only way to chart a course.
Flames snap and hiss in the fireplace, heating our pinked skin, and I kiss the soft place beside his ear, drawing him to me, closer,closer, but it’s never enough.
I want this moment to last.
Today and every day after. Until there are no days left.
He moans against my flesh, his hands pressing me to the floor beside the fireplace, as if we could sink into the soil beneath the cottage, until I am a girl made of dirt. Until we are both tangled up in the earth and the crashing sea.
I love him.
And I say it against his ear. I confess it, and I’ll never take it back.
The night is starry and rain-soaked, and we lie awake, my head against the slope of his chest.
“I won’t say goodbye to you ever again,” he whispers into the night, a promise, an incantation made of the truest kind of magic. His arm stirs, and he pulls me closer, eyes fluttering closed. I breathe him in, listening to his heart.
But after the night has deepened around us, I rise from the floor, slowly, gently, so I won’t wake him. I wait for the old kettle on the stove to heat, then place tea leaves into a mug, and I watch him sleep. My insides hum.
I pull my sweater back over my head and step into my shorts. I want to walk out into the rain, I want to feel the cold drops against my burning flesh, I want to make sure it’s real: Oak, the storm, all of it.
But I feel something in the pocket of my shorts.
A thing I forgot about.
It was so long ago now, the start of tulip season. Oak pulled me away from the mob at school, then plucked a tulip petal from my hair. I pressed it into the pocket of my favorite shorts, forgotten, folded away.
But now I extract the single tulip petal.
It’s flattened and dried, preserved. Kept safe and untouched. It didn’t die with the others in the garden when the flood carried them away. A petal that’s been tucked in my pocket all this time.
My eyes flash to Oak, his skin coppery in the firelight, breathing softly while he sleeps. I hold the petal in my palm, the last of a destroyed crop. Perhaps the last of the Goode family magic.
I cross the small living room to the fireplace and look down at the flames, considering.
With the garden gone, I started to believe, to hope, that the curse had been carried away too. But I’ve had a tulip all along. Hidden.Even when Oak stood before me in the greenhouse and spoke about love and fear and forgetting the past.
I should burn it, drop it into the fire and watch it turn to ash.
But…I don’t.
Because I love him so much that it hurts. And now I wonder, I fear… that this single tulip might be the only thing keeping him here.
I didn’t want love this way—like this—a lie. But maybe it’s all I will ever have.
All I deserve.
I’m bound to these tulips, whether I like it or not.
Because the pain I’d feel if I lost him again is more than I can bear.
So, with the rain pattering against the roof, I slide the tulip petal back into my pocket, and I sink to the floor, curling myself up against his chest, pressing my mouth to his sleeping lips. This boy I won’t lose again.
