Lips Touch: Three Times(8)
Author: Laini Taylor

Jack Husk was waiting for her in front of the Christmas tree farm, and he whistled low when he saw her. "Great dress," he said, his eyes sliding all the way down the row of buttons.

"Thanks," Kizzy said, blushing just as deeply as she had the day before, at school. She’d have to get used to him all over again, taking small sips of his beauty as if it was too hot a drink to swallow all at once. One shy glance revealed to her that Jack Husk wasn’t carrying his new school books but a picnic basket. "What’s that?" she asked.

He held it up and smiled, mischievous as an imp. "Breakfast picnic," he said. There was a checked blanket folded carelessly under the basket’s handles. "Care to join me?"

"What, now! What about school?"

Jack Husk shrugged. "I’m not such a huge fan."

"Yeah, me either."

"Good. Then you’ll come with me." He held out his arm for her in an old-fashioned, courtly gesture, and there was no question in Kizzy’s mind how she would be spending her morning. She hooked her arm through Jack Husk’s, laying her fingers lightly on the velvet nap of his sleeve, and walked beside him, noticing as she turned that the old man’s dog was not in his place on the porch.

"Everything go okay with the dog yesterday?" she asked.

"Sure," he answered. "No problem. So, is there a park around here somewhere?"

Kizzy shook her head. "Just the cemetery."

"Oh, well, that’ll work. Yeah?"

It was just ahead, behind a neat fence. Kizzy walked past it every day, but she hadn’t been in it for years, not since she was a child and snuck there to listen to the snatches of ghost conversation that blew in on an icy wind from the next world. It wasn’t a Gothic cemetery; there were no mossy angels weeping miraculous tears of blood, no crypts or curses or crumble. No poets or courtesans were buried here; no vampires slumbered belowground. It was only a collection of stone rectangles standing straight and ordinary. Even the dead loitering here spoke of dull things, like the one who worried she’d left the stove burning when she died.

But it didn’t have to be some fabulous Parisian cemetery for the idea of a picnic in it to bloom in Kizzy’s imagination into something daring. She imagined herself telling Evie and Cactus. A breakfast picnic in the cemetery with Jack Husk! Their eyes would bulge with glee and envy and they’d want to know everything. They’d want to know if he’d kissed her. She stole a glance at him and caught him looking at her lips, and she looked away, blushing hotly, and found the voice to say, "Yeah, okay," in what she hoped was a casual way.

They went through the cemetery gate, arm in arm in their antique clothing, and it was then that the ghosts, all of a sudden and with only a flitter of grass blades for a warning, hit Kizzy like a maelstrom.

Her skirt flared and twisted itself tight to her legs as a rush of cold wind swept around her. It circled deasil, thrice, just like her grandmother’s ghost had done the day of her burial. But Kizzy felt a whole swelling of ghosts around her this time, a tide; her grandmother might have been there, but she wasn’t alone. Kizzy froze in mid-step, chilled and startled, and looked up at Jack Husk. For a second some look passed through his sly eyes, some intelligence … a hint of a sneer? And Kizzy almost thought he knew the sudden wind for what it was: an onslaught of ghosts. Had they swept around her only, she wondered now, or around them both? Had they included Jack Husk in their circle of protection? Or had they wound up Kizzy alone? Had that wind tried to slide between them, like a wall?

"Brrr …" he said, shivering slightly. To Kizzy’s dismay, he unhooked his arm from hers, but then he settled it around her shoulder, drawing her neatly against his side, and her dismay evaporated, along with any question she’d had about his awareness of rampant ghosts. "Cold wind," he said simply.

"Mm hm," Kizzy agreed. The velvet of his jacket was now snug against her cheek, and there was very little room to think of anything else but the feel of it, and of the way she’d caught him looking at her lips, and what that might mean.

As they walked through the cemetery, tucked together, she heard words as she used to when she came here as a child, snippets of speech as murky as gutter water draining through a clog of leaves. "The wintermen are gleaning," said one, and another intoned "butterfly," and "hungry." "Stove burning," said a flat voice, and then suddenly, a familiar voice hissed, "– knife, Sunshine –"

Kizzy’s eyes went wide and she looked around and over her shoulder, inadvertently nuzzling Jack Husk’s hand with her chin. Despite that smooth jolt of a touch, she had the wherewithal to realize she’d left her grandmother’s knife in her jeans pocket. All the years of wanting it and she’d left it behind! She wanted to ask her grandmother what she was doing here. She should be far away by now, navigating labyrinths, fending off shadows, lapping water from stalactite tips with her ghostly tongue, and answering riddles to win passage through gates made of bones. She should be singing beasts to sleep with lullabies and bribing otherworldly coyotes to smuggle her deeper into her new world. She shouldn’t be here, among these fainthearted cemetery ghosts! This eternal loitering wasn’t for Kizzy’s folk, least of all her grandmother, her strong, untemptable grandmother. Kizzy wanted to ask her — but she was warm against Jack Husk’s side and didn’t want to step away from him to whisper her question to the dead.

"Did you hear something?" Jack Husk asked suddenly.

"What?" Kizzy asked, startled and strangely guilty, as if he’d caught her hoarding the whispers of the ghosts to herself.

"I don’t know. Sounded like a twig snapping. I wonder if anyone else is here."

But there didn’t seem to be anyone else in the cemetery, or even any sign of recent visitors. It was a lonesome place, and Kizzy wasn’t surprised the ghosts came to her messy yard to while away their days among the cats and chickens.

Jack Husk’s fingers began idly stroking Kizzy’s shoulder as they walked between the rows of graves. It happened slowly, imperceptibly, but she realized he was pulling her little by little closer to him, the stroking deepening into rubbing, so his whole hand was cupped over her shoulder, his thumb making little circles. She could smell boy spice beneath the thrift-store aroma of his jacket, and the rubbing and the smell began to work to soften her — like butter before you add sugar, in the first step of making something sweet. It was her first experience of how bodies could meld together, how breath could slip naturally into rhythm. It was hypnotic. Heady.

And she wanted more.

"They have teeth," whispered a ghost. Kizzy ignored it.