Lips Touch: Three Times(6)
Author: Laini Taylor

They reached the thrift store and he opened the door for her.

This was where Kizzy always shopped instead of the mall, partly because her parents barely gave her any money, and partly because it had a trifold changing screen of embossed, moth-eaten velvet that looked like a remnant from Marie Antoinette’s boudoir. She loved to sling an armful of cheap dresses over it and try them on one by one, with mismatched gossamer scarves, platform boots, and cat glasses. Sometimes she even bought that stuff, though she only ever wore jeans where anyone would see her.

She steered Jack Husk away from jeans, though, and dressed him like the sleepy poet she’d first imagined him to be, in a black velvet jacket with threadbare elbows, a white shirt with a little bit of red embroidery to look like a drop of blood, and pinstriped pants the proper length for his long legs. They picked up a broken pocket watch from a mosaic bowl full of junk jewelry, and Kizzy had him put on some old leather aviator goggles for fun, and he liked them and bought them too.

"This stuff’s even weirder than what I was already wearing," he said, looking at himself in the mirror. "I look like I live in an attic."

"That is exactly the look I was going for," Kizzy said, pleased. "What about you?" he asked. He held up an emerald silk scarf with fringe.

"Nah." She waved it away.

"Nah? You’ve got me in goggles. You can at least try on a scarf. Here." He threaded it under her hair and tied it into a floppy bow on top of her head. Her whole scalp tingled from the gentle probing of his fingers in the thicket of her hair.

She looked in the mirror. "I look like a drunk cleaning lady," she said flatly.

"Try it like a gypsy."

She did, and kind of liked it.

"I’m going to buy it for you," said Jack Husk.

"No," Kizzy protested. "It’s way overpriced. And I won’t wear it."

"Why not?"

"You don’t understand. There are girls at school whose only purpose in life is to make up nasty nicknames when anyone does something the slightest bit out of the ordinary."

"Come on, Kizzy. It’d have to be a step up from Butterfly Rape."

Kizzy laughed and it came out as a throaty chuckle, almost a purr, the closest she had yet come to the sultry voice she would grow into as she grew up and learned how to wear her skin. If she grew up. She relented on the green scarf. "Okay, then. Thank you."

Jack Husk paid the woman behind the counter, who’d been unable to take her eyes off him since they entered. Turning back to Kizzy, he pulled out his new broken pocket watch and pretended to consult it. "Time to prepare the feast?" he asked.

"Feast!" she scoffed. "Try elk burgers. With my secret ingredient, of course."

"Oh yeah? What’s that?"

"Well, the secret ingredient is supposed to be love. But I substitute scorn. Just a pinch. A little goes a long way."

"Sounds delicious," he said. "Come on. I’ll walk with you." "Okay."

It was much easier than Kizzy would have thought, walking across town with a beautiful boy, talking about things like the fat content of elk meat and the aerodynamic quality of pizza, and about the jocks of Saint Pock’s, and superstition, and marshmallows, and death.

"My grandmother died last summer," Kizzy told him, surprised as the words tumbled out of her mouth.

"Yeah? Sorry to hear it. She buried in there?" He hooked a thumb at the cemetery as they passed it.

"Nah. We plant our bones in our own soil."

"Really? Why?"

Kizzy shrugged. "My family’s weird." She wasn’t about to tell Jack Husk about the swans’ wings and the singing, and the ghosts slipping from their graves to begin their next adventure. "Your uncle buried there?" she asked.

"Uh-uh. Cremated."

"Oh." Kizzy shivered. "God." Her people believed cremation trapped the soul in the body and then shattered it into millions of tiny flakes of ash. "Did you know him well?"

"Hardly at all." Jack Husk was still wearing his aviator goggles and they disguised some of his beauty, but not the most distracting part: his red lips. Kizzy could barely look at them without thinking of kissing. Of being tasted.

Too quickly, they arrived at the Christmas tree farm. Neat rows of trees stretched back toward the misty hills where Kizzy’s uncles hunted. "Home sweet home," said Jack Husk, motioning to the little trailer.

Kizzy eyed it. She’d never thought much about it when the old man lived here. He was always outside working, planting trees or digging them up or cutting them down. He’d hitched at his suspenders and waved sometimes when she walked by, and she’d waved back, probably without much enthusiasm, and she’d never imagined him inside the trailer, living in it. But she couldn’t help imagining Jack Husk sleeping in a dead man’s narrow little bed. "Cozy," she said unconvincingly.

"As a coffin," he replied.

The fat dog lifted his head up slowly and looked at them. "You inherit him too?" Kizzy asked. 1 guess so.

"Laziest dog I’ve ever seen," she said. But then the lazy dog, the dog that Kizzy walked past every single day and who couldn’t even be bothered to bark, curled his snout into a snarl.

"He’s not crazy about me," Jack Husk said as the snarl grew louder.

I guess not.

The fat old dog actually rose to his feet, something Kizzy had rarely witnessed, and with his head lowered and his teeth bared in a vicious growl, he looked much more menacing than she’d have thought possible. Jack Husk frowned and pushed back his goggles onto his forehead, making his hair stick out in tufts. Anyone else might have looked silly, but he looked like he was posing for one of those fashion spreads in Rolling Stone magazine where bored, beautiful people loll around like they’re waiting for the bus in Purgatory, usually with some nipple showing. "Well," he said, "I’d better deal with him."

"What are you going to do?"

"Honestly? Give him a wide berth and slip around the back. But I’ll wait until you’re gone so you can’t see me scramble if he comes after me."

Kizzy laughed. "Maybe I’d better watch, you know, just in case."

Smiling the crooked smile, he said, "No. Go. Please. It’s unspeakably uncool to be seen dodging fat dogs."

"Okay, then. See you around, Jack Husk. Be careful."

"See you in the morning, Kizzy," he said, and Kizzy felt, for an instant, as if her blood fizzed inside her like champagne.

Three Ripe as a Plum

After dinner had been cooked and eaten — scorn and all — Kizzy went to her room and closed the door. She sat on the end of her bed and looked at herself in the mirror. Really