His touch was featherlight, making my center ache with his gentleness. It wasn’t lost on me how hard he was himself, his trousers giving a valiant fight that must have been painful. I went to the buttons of his pants, but he seized my hands in his large one and kissed the side of my mouth.
“Not yet,” he murmured, planting a kiss against my cheek, and then another on my neck. “We have time.” And his hand not holding mine shifted down, gliding over my breasts, cupping one. “We have plenty of it. I can go slow,” and as he said it, his fingers trailed back up my body, snagging my chin between his first finger and thumb. “As slow as you want, sunshine.” There was a wicked gleam in his eyes, the look of a man who knew how to cause trouble and seldom let himself delight in it.
But I was trouble, too, and shifted my head just enough to capture his thumb in my mouth. I sucked on it. His eyes turned dark and feverish. He slid his thumb out of my mouth, and grabbed my face, and crushed his mouth against mine, as if he wanted to commit the taste of me to memory.
The way his mouth felt, the way his tongue slid along my lip, teasing.
He pushed his knee between my legs and anchored himself against the wall so that he could tilt my head back and kiss medeeper. His thumb gently traced from my chin down the length of my throat, so slowly and deliberately, down to my chest.
“Rus,” I whispered, face flushed, “I—I think—”
He nibbled my neck and then ran his tongue over the indentations he left.
“I think I like you, too,” I finally said, and the hunger in his face grew tender, and he kissed me again on the mouth just to taste the words.
33
dapjeongneo
After I left the garden that evening, I found Juliette sitting on the front porch of my cottage. She jumped to her feet when I let myself in through the gate, feeling more than a little exposed. Did she notice that my lips were red, or that my hair was a little too wild? If she did, she didn’t say anything—or maybe she was too caught up in her own self to notice at the moment.
“Is everything all right?” I asked, coming up to the veranda.
“Fine,” she said, her voice tight. “I just—I needed to hide to finish making the final list of guests somewhere Oliverwasn’t.”
“Ah. He’s still on you?”
“I appreciate his help,” she said with a sigh, “but hereallyneeds to get back to his own job. I hate having a shadow.”
“Have you told him that?”
She scrunched her nose. “No.”
“Ah.” I let myself into the cottage, and she followed. As I went to get her a soda from the refrigerator, I heard her gasp and turned around just as she picked up the Magic 8 Ball on the kitchen table. I froze. “I used to have one of these when I
was little!” she said happily. “I haven’t played with one in, like,decades. Do you still use it?”
“Sometimes,” I admitted hesitantly.
She frowned, hefting it. “It’s heavier than I remember.”
“It’s, um—it’s special,” I said, bringing over two sodas. I took a deep breath, steadying myself with conviction. “Don’t freak out, but my best friend’s ashes are inside.”
Harriett never told me herself what she ended up deciding to do with her remains, and I figured she hadn’t decided on anything, but a few months after her death, a UPS guy dropped off a package at my apartment. It had the Magic 8 Ball inside, and my roommate had been in the kitchen when I unboxed it.
“What’s that for?” he’d asked as I opened the box and pulled out the toy. With it was Harrie’s last note she would ever write me.
It read,
I’m here when you need me.
Since then, I’d asked the Magic 8 Ball questions I’d only ever ask Harrie, and I liked to think that somewhere inside, her ashes pulled the correct answer out, but I knew it was silly. It was the exact kind of silly thing that Harrie believed in, something magical and slightly off-kilter. Things like kissing her hand to the roof of the car when going through a yellow light, and never stepping on sidewalk cracks, and making a wish when she lost an eyelash—
Things that weren’t real, but she wanted to believe in them anyway.
And through her, I guess I believed, too.
“When I’m lost, I ask her what to do. I like to think that the die is her communicating from wherever she is now,” I admitted.
