Lips Touch: Three Times(9)
Author: Laini Taylor

"They have nectar," said another, very faint and filled with longing. Kizzy felt a small chill, but ignored that too.

"Hungry?" Jack Husk asked, as they pivoted to walk another cemetery row.

Kizzy shrugged. She had little interest in eating just now. But spreading out the checked blanket someplace quiet and sitting down, leaning back on her elbows beside Jack Husk, that did interest her. She couldn’t stop glancing at his lips, and she kept pressing her own together, hyperaware of them. She remembered babysitting an infant cousin on the day he’d discovered his tongue; he’d kept wagging it and touching it, making a whole repertoire of new sounds and trying to stick it out far enough to see it, obsessed by the discovery of this new appendage. Kizzy felt like that about her lips today, like she was just now finding out what they were for, but she hoped she was more discreet than her baby cousin had been.

"Let’s go over there," Jack Husk said, nodding his head toward a distant corner of the cemetery where there looked to be a sort of overgrown garden. They made their way slowly, Kizzy scarcely noticing the graves they passed, so wrapped up was she in this newness of strolling like lovers, slow and fused. But at the end of the row of graves, she did notice something.

She walked on past it; it took a moment to register, but a few steps later her head swung around and she looked again, recognition tingling in her.

The frowsy green of the unkempt cemetery lawn was disturbed by a patch of brown, stark as a wound. It seemed to describe a radius around one particular grave, and Kizzy squinted to see what the tombstone said. She couldn’t read it, and Jack Husk was tugging her gently in the other direction. She surprised herself by reaching for his velvet lapel and tugging him back. "Over here," she said. "I want to see something."

"What?" he asked, coming easily along with her.

"This." She stopped before it. A grave where nothing grew, not even grass. She read the name on the headstone. Amy Ingersoll. "I knew her," Kizzy said, surprised.

"You did?" asked Jack Husk.

Kizzy nodded. "I was a freshman. I think she was a junior, but I barely saw her because she got taken out of school. She was sick. She …" Kizzy’s voice trailed off. She had almost said, She starved herself to death. But seeing this dead brown grave, other words came to her mind. She wasted away.

"Sad," said Jack Husk. "She was your age when she died."

"Yeah," said Kizzy, thinking of the picture of gaunt Amy Ingersoll she’d seen in the paper, her eyes seeming huge and haunted in her pinched face. There had been a special assembly in school about eating disorders. A doctor had talked about anorexia and bulimia. After, Kizzy and Evie had pinched the generous skin of their h*ps and joked crassly that they could use a little anorexia themselves, and Cactus had said they could start by switching to Diet Coke.

"I wonder why the grass is all dead here," Kizzy said, wanting there to be some other explanation than the one buzzing in her thoughts. Surely in this dull town the wild things her family believed in were just stories. Such things happened far from here, on cobblestones, and in the haunted dooryards of ancient churches.

"Damned" said a ghost right in Kizzy’s ear. She shivered.

Jack Husk felt it and let go of her shoulder to shrug off his velvet jacket. "You’re cold," he said. "Here." He draped it over her shoulders and drew her back against him. Her brow rested against his jaw briefly, skin against skin. "Come on," he urged.

She went with him to the little garden in the corner, and Jack Husk laid out his checked blanket behind some stone urns overflowing with ivy and scant alyssum blossoms left over from summer. They settled down and he opened his picnic basket and produced from it a loaf of golden bread and a round cheese with an artisan’s stamp in its thick rind. Things like that, cheeses signed like artworks, were unknown in Kizzy’s house, where they had either salty lumpish cheese her mother made or an army-feeding slab of impossibly orange stuff from the superstore.

Tucking her dress around her knees, Kizzy watched Jack Husk lay out purple linen napkins and a real silver knife with just a hint of tarnish on it, and then a footed silver bowl of chocolates wrapped in foil, and she was wide-eyed with the elegance of it. If she had ever thought to dream up a cemetery picnic, the cemetery would have been a different, better one — in Paris or New Orleans, somewhere " with moss and broken statues — but the picnic would have been just like this.

"Nice," she murmured inadequately. Jack Husk smiled at her, and he was so beautiful it almost hurt. A wave of skepticism swept over her, not for the first time. Why, she wondered. Why me?

"Silly girl –" she heard or imagined her grandmother hissing in her ear.

"Chocolate first," said Jack Husk, the raspy edge of his voice erasing the faint, ghostly one. "That’s my only picnic rule."

"Well, okay," Kizzy said, feigning reluctance and unwrapping one of the chocolates. It was so dark it was almost black and it melted on her tongue into an ancient flavor of seed pod, earth, shade, and sunlight, its bitterness casting just a shadow of sweet. It tasted … fine, so subtle and strange it made her feel like a novitiate into some arcanum of spice.

The cheese was the same, so different from anything she’d tasted she could scarcely tell if it was wonderful or terrible. They nibbled it with the bread, and Jack Husk asked Kizzy if she thought it was too early in the day for wine, which he produced from his basket and poured into dainty etched glasses no bigger than Dixie cups.

It was as earthy and dark as the chocolate and Kizzy sipped it slowly, softening and softening, stretched out on one elbow, her hip full as an odalisque’s hip, a lush hummock of apple green for Jack Husk to lay his head on, and he did, and closed his eyes while Kizzy lightly teased the ends of his unruly hair.

After a little while he sat up and reached one more time into his basket. He took out an apricot, which he cupped in his hand, and a peach, which he handed to Kizzy. She took it and held it. Its skin was as soft as the velvet of Jack Husk’s jacket and the scent… she could smell the honey sweetness of it even through the skin, and she lifted it and took a deeper breath. Nectar, she thought dreamily. But she didn’t take a bite. She didn’t want the juices dribbling down her chin. She just smelled it again and watched Jack Husk eat his apricot and toss the pit. Then he leaned back against one of the stone urns, arranging the billow of ivy and blossoms around his head to look like a wig.

Kizzy laughed. "It’s a good look for you," she said.