Lips Touch: Three Times(10)
Author: Laini Taylor

"Like it? Here." He lifted a heavy cluster of ivy beside his head to make a wig for her too, and he motioned her to sit close. She scooted into the space at his side and held still as he arranged the flowers over her forehead, pausing to gently tuck one stray curl of her real hair back under her scarf.

His face was so near hers. She couldn’t keep her eyes from straying to his lips; she could smell the sweetness of apricot on his breath, see a trace of moisture on his red lips. He was looking at her lips too. She was suddenly very nervous. He leaned closer. Kizzy froze, not knowing whether to close her eyes or leave them open. She had a horror of being one of those girls in movies who closes her eyes and puckers up while the boy sits back and smirks.

And seconds later she was glad she hadn’t closed her eyes, because Jack Husk didn’t kiss her. He took the peach from her hand, lifted it to his lips, and took a bite. So close, the perfume it released was like a drug, and Kizzy had a powerful urge to lean in and taste it too, to taste the nectar on his lips. She couldn’t take her eyes off his lips. She moved forward ever so slightly. Jack Husk saw, and leaned closer.

This time it was real; it was really going to happen. Kizzy was going to kiss a beautiful boy. Why then was she thinking about the peach, of how his lips would taste of it?

Why was she imagining how delicious Jack Husk’s kiss would be?

She stared at him, and at the periphery of her vision something glinted. It was the little silver knife, still impaled in the rind of the cheese. Knife, she thought. Her fingers twitched, wanting to reach for it, as some kind of knowing skimmed the glassy surface of her mind. All the omens of the day, the swirl of swan feathers, the grave of dead grass, her grandmother’s blade still rimed with the frost of the underworld, all her memories of warnings, they coalesced into a simple understanding: Deep in her veins ran the admonition never to eat fruit out of season. It was late autumn; all orchards were bare, and no peach trafficked in from a far hemisphere could smell so sweet. Surely only one orchard could have ripened it.

With that, Kizzy knew. A goblin had her soul on the end of his fishing line, ready to reel it in. She knew. But now, in the fugue of wanting, of almost having, filled with the musk and the spice of that wine and that chocolate, her hip still warm from Jack Husk’s head, the knowing was as insubstantial as words written on water. Every trace of it vanished as soon as it was written, leaving only the reflection of Jack Husk’s too-perfect beauty. It was an imaginary beauty dreamed up just to please her, and it did. It did. It pleased and drugged her. Her eyelids were heavy but her soul was light as gossamer, a spiders web in a wind, anchored only by a single thread.

Kizzy knew, but she willfully unknew it, and the plangent voices of the dead were lost to the drum of her hot blood and the tingle of her ready lips. She wanted to taste and be tasted.

She didn’t reach for the knife. Heavily and hypnotically, with her soul flattening itself back like the ears of a hissing cat, Kizzy leaned in and drank of Jack Husk’s full, moist mouth, and his red, red lips were hungry against hers, drinking her in return. Their eyes closed. Fingers clutched at collars and hair, at the picnic blanket, at the grass. And as they sank down, pinning their shadows beneath them, the horizon tipped on its side, and slowly, thickly, hour by hour, the day spilled out and ebbed away.

It was Kizzy’s first kiss, and maybe it was her last, and it was delicious.

[ILLUSTRATION: The knife in the woman’s hands.]

[ILLUSTRATION: A woman and a man.]

SPICY LITTLE CURSES SUCH AS THESE

[ILLUSTRATION: Three men walking.]

[ILLUSTRATION: A woman and a man walking.]

[ILLUSTRATION: Birds flying.]

[ILLUSTRATION: A woman in a cemetery.]

[ILLUSTRATION: A tree and a woman going down stairs.

[ILLUSTRATION: The woman holding a bottle.]

[ILLUSTRATION: The woman holding a baby and other kids walking.]

[ILLUSTRATION: A old woman holding a baby.]

[ILLUSTRATION: A teapot and cups.]

SPICY LITTLE CURSES SUCH AS THESE

Kissing can ruin lives. Lips touch, sometimes teeth clash.

New hunger is born with a throb and caution falls away. A cursed girl with lips still moist from her first kiss might feel suddenly wild, like a little monsoon. She might forget her curse just long enough to get careless and let it come true. She might kill everyone she loves.

She might, and she might not.

A particular demon in India rather hoped that she would.

This is the story of the curse and the kiss, the demon and the girl. It’s a love story with dancing and death in it, and singing and souls and shadows reeled out on kite strings. It begins underneath India, on the cusp of the last century when the British were still riding elephants with maharajas and skirmishing on the arid frontiers of the empire.

The story begins in Hell.

ONE The Demon & the Old Bitch

Down in Hell, the Englishwoman known around Jaipur as "the old bitch" was taking tea with a demon. She was silver-haired, straight-backed, and thin-lipped, with a stare that could shoot laughter from the air like game birds. She was not at all liked by her countrymen, but even they would have been shocked to see her here.

"Come to the point," she told the demon impatiently.

If he looked faintly human, it was because once upon a time he had been. He was little and ancient, with a moon-round face as withered as old apple peel, half of it colored red like a wine stain. "Remember, my dear," he replied with a genial smile, "a handful may survive naturally. Earthquakes are full of surprises. Children still alive, like buried treasure? It makes the spirit soar to see them pulled out into the sunlight."

"Indeed," she said.

There had been an earthquake in Kashmir. She had sent her shadow out to see it, and it had slipped among the ruins of villages, relaying the devastation back to her through its dulled senses. Shadows have no ears, so she couldn’t hear the lamentations of the survivors, which was as she preferred. She said, "You will give me the children, Vasudev. You know there’s no arguing with me on this matter."

"Estella, you wouldn’t deprive me of the pleasure of our negotiations, would you? They’re what I live for."

"You haven’t been alive for a thousand years. If you were, you might take less pleasure in bartering for children’s souls."

"Do you think so? I scarcely remember what it was like, being alive. I recall certain … appetites. The sight of a woman’s navel could drive me mad. Children, though? I have absolutely no memory of caring anything about them." He poured tea out into chipped cups and added sugar and cream to his own.

Estella took hers and sipped it black, replying bitterly, "I well believe that." It was Vasudev’s particular way with children that accounted for her being here at all, a lone living human descending each day into Hell.