Sublime(11)
Author: Christina Lauren

She smiles up at him, but her eyes are a provocative, sympathetic indigo. He drags his frantic gaze across her face, cataloging every expression. This kind of longing makes him want to roar, to hurl logs and stones, to claim her somehow.

“So, were you always the Kid Whose Parents Died?” she asks.

He laughs at her instinctive recollection of how everyone in this small town has an unofficial title. “I think I used to be. Now I’m the Kid Who Jumped Fifteen Feet to Flat in the Quarry and Didn’t Die. Even Dot heard about that one.”

Shaking her head, she says, “You were crazy to do that,” but her eyes have gone metallic brown, swirling.

“Not you too!”

“Colin. Objectively, that was an insane move.”

“It’s not insane,” he says. “It’s about fear. Everyone has the same abilities physically, at least they can. The difference is I’m not afraid to try.” Colin can remember that stunt better than almost anything: He pulled his bike to the ledge, took a deep breath, and balanced—eyes focused and muscles taut— before jerking the frame up in a hop over the lip. The bike cut a razor path straight down to the boulder, slicing cleanly through the air. Both wheels glanced off the stone in unison before rolling a rocky path down to the base of the quarry. I landed at the bottom next to it. Body: bruised. Arm: broken. “I met you the next day,” he adds. He’d still felt nearly high from the jump, and then she was there: the most gorgeous thing he’d ever seen. This second memory, just as clear.

She hums, brushes her fingers against his, and the tickling current travels up his arm before evaporating. He wants more. He practically aches for her touch. It’s more than hormones. It’s like he’s physically drawn into her space, has to force himself to keep any sort of acceptable distance. He pulls away slowly, forming a fist.

“Wonder what your title was,” he says, distracting himself from the sudden urge he has to drag her down on the trail and cover her body with his. “The Girl with the Snorting Laugh?”

She snorts, and then smacks his arm as if it were his fault. “Maybe.”

“The Girl with the Wicked Eyes?”

“Only to you.” Her dimple makes a cameo appearance.

“Right,” he says, laughing. “The Girl Who Kicked All the Boys’ Asses in Chemistry?”

She starts to answer, grinning, her jaw already pushed out in pride, but she looks at his hands, formed into tight fists at his hips, and her expression straightens. “What’s wrong?”

He shakes out his hands, laughs nervously. “Nothing.”

“Are you upset?”

Colin begins walking again, tilting his head for her to join him. He doesn’t know how to do this, how he’ll ever do this. He likes her. He wants Lucy to be his girlfriend in every way that matters, including the ways that mean he can touch her. The urge to kiss her is becoming suffocating.

“Colin?”

Stopping, he turns back to face her. “What?”

She laughs at his stalling, walking toward him. “What’s wrong?”

“I like you,” he blurts. “A lot.” His heart clenches and then begins pounding manically, and he half wants to turn and run down the trail. Instead, he stands and watches her expression shift from surprise to elation.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And it’s hard to be so close all the time and not touching,” he admits quietly.

“For me too.” Stretching onto her tiptoes, she whispers, “But I want to try.”

His tongue slips out, sliding over his piercing.

“I think about it,” she says, her breath smelling like rain and petals. “I want to kiss you until you’re dizzy with wanting, too.”

It takes Colin four tries to get a sound past his lips. “You mean you’re dizzy with wanting me?”

She lifts herself up again, and he feels a sensation like lips against his cheek. He turns to her and is met not with her mouth but with her quickly ducked head. Just before he can step back, a little embarrassed and a lot confused, her hand presses against the front of his shirt.

“Wait,” she says. “Just go slow.”

First with his cheek, then with his nose barely touching her lips, he moves closer, hoping that the way she shakes is from anticipation and not something far less pleasant. She tilts her head just enough for him brush his mouth over hers, and his fists curl in restraint at his sides. It’s different; her skin there feels different. Still buzzing energy and the sense that if he pressed too hard she would evaporate, but lips nonetheless: full and smiling and now wet from his. When he comes back again and tastes her, she makes a tiny sound of relief. It’s a sound of lust, of air and fire, and Colin nearly loses himself: grasping, fingers digging. But instead, he pulls back, breaths choppy as he looks down at her.

“Okay, that was a good start.”

“A good start?” she says with a small laugh. “My mind is a giant sieve, but I’m pretty sure that was the best first kiss in the history of this town.”

He gently touches her elbow, carefully urging her to start walking again. The kiss was an enormous step in the right direction and still only a fraction of what he needed from her. Inside his chest, a rope coils tightly, fraying at the knots.

Colin’s cast came off two days ago, and he doesn’t think he’s ever been so grateful to be able to wash dishes. He and Dane finished cleaning the kitchen, and Colin lingers around to keep Dot company. She’s been quiet tonight. No whistling while she cooks, no smacking them with the spatula. Just thoughtful, quiet Dot, and it weirds him out.

“Long day?” he asks. She shrugs. “You know how it is when a storm is on its way.”

“Your barometric knees acting up?”

She scowls at him over her shoulder. “Very funny, smart guy.” When she turns back to the sink, he can see her reflection as she looks out the wide window overlooking the back side of the quad. She looks worried. “It’s sort of like that,” she begins, searching for words. “Something feels off. I’m not sure what.”

Colin swallows hard and busies himself by stacking plates. “Hey, Dot, do you remember a girl named Lucy Gray?”

She pauses as she unties her apron. “Of course. Everyone around here remembers that name.”

“Yeah.” Colin struggles for breath. “So you were here when . . . when it all happened to her?”

“Why’re you asking about something like that?”

He shrugs, taking a heavy sack of flour from her arms and placing it on the counter. “No reason. Some kids were down at the lake, started talking about it at lunch.”

She pins him with a serious expression. “I better not catch you down there.”

“Of course not,” he says. It’s a lie, and as a general rule, he doesn’t lie to Dot. But Colin is always at the lake and figures since it’s the same lie he’s told over and over throughout his life, it counts as only one.

“She was killed,” Dot says finally, watching as he begins sorting clean silverware. Out of the corner of his eye, he can tell she’s got her fist planted on her hip and he can almost hear the ticking sound as her brain works something out. “Do you remember any of it?” she finally asks.

He points a handful of forks at his chest. “Me?”

She nods.

“What? No.”

“She was killed when you were six.”

He lived on campus and had just lost his parents. He remembers so little about that time other than the strange, constant desire to dissolve and float away. “I don’t remember anything about it.”

She nods and turns back around, bracing her hands and looking back out the window. “No, I guess you wouldn’t. You had so much going on around then. It was brutal, Col. Just . . .” Her head drops and she shakes it. “Just awful.”

He doesn’t want to hear her version of the story, but a sick part of him wants to know everything.

“Your parents had died, and you were living at Joe’s. I don’t think you could sleep that night, and Joe was at a meeting with the dorm heads. You were out on the porch playing alone with your little army men.” She turns to look at him and smiles sadly. “You saw him carrying a girl into the woods. You ran and found me. It didn’t save her, but because of you this guy was caught. We had no idea that monster was living right alongside us. And he had killed . . . God, I think he had killed seven other kids.”

Colin stands and bolts from the kitchen, feeling his dinner coming back up.

Chapter 13 HIM

EXCEPT FOR THE BLURRED-EDGE MEMORIES OF their funeral, Colin has few solid recollections of his parents or the car crash that left them dead on impact and Colin strangely unharmed. Their caskets had been positioned side by side at the front of the church, and the smell of lilies was so strong, it turned his stomach. His dad’s chest had been crushed by the dashboard and the funeral home was forced to reconstruct it: replacing muscle and bone with metal rods and wax. Colin remembers only an angry purple bruise peeking out from beneath the cuff of his dad’s starched white shirt. His mother’s arm had been torn from her body by the seat belt—something he didn’t learn about until years later— and the sleeve of her favorite pink dress was just empty. Like they thought nobody would even notice.

He wondered why anyone would want to see someone they loved like that, skin the wrong color and eyes that would never open again.

That’s not how he wants to remember.

He wants to open his brain, to tear out the ugly pages and replace them with new, happier ones. Ones where moms and dads don’t die and monsters don’t carry girls into the woods in the middle of the night.

He hadn’t felt sick like that again until Lucy. He thought knowing more of her story would be a relief, another missing piece of the puzzle fit perfectly into place. Instead, knowing he was the last person to see her alive has taken blank pages and inked them with horror and gore.

But she’s here now, alive or not, standing across the threshold when he opens his door. Her smile makes the other stuff easier to forget. At least for a few hours. It’s been three days since Dot revealed his role in the events surrounding Lucy’s murder. Each night, whenever he started to tell her, his throat felt like it was closing shut.

Like always, Lucy pulls off her boots and heads straight for his window, reaching out to push back the curtains. It’s been trying to snow all day, and a few small flakes flutter beneath the lamppost to fall slowly to the ground. Even though it’s dark out, the sky is bright, practically glowing, and full of clouds that seem lit from behind.

“No stars tonight.”

“It’s a snow sky,” Lucy says, her nose pressed to the glass. There’s no smudge from where her skin touches the window, no cloud of condensation. “My grandma used to say it looks like someone left the TV on in heaven.” She laughs and then pauses, turning to him. “How did I remember that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s like amnesia victims. Certain things trigger specific memories.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

She turns back to the sky, and he closes his eyes, trying to shut out the pictures that are burned there forever. He wants to tell her more about her death and about his role in it all. But there’s something else, a voice inside his head that repeats itself over and over, telling him it’s a bad idea.

Dot said ghosts come here because they have unfinished business. Maybe that’s why Lucy is here. He knows that should mean something to him, a warning to take this more seriously. He doubts anyone would come back from the dead because they lost a library book or missed sitting in school all day. It would have to be big. To settle a score? Revenge? He shakes that off; Lucy would never hurt him. He knows that. But if anyone has unfinished business, it’s definitely Lucy. What could be more unfinished than having your heart carved out of your chest by a man your parents trusted to keep you safe?

He shivers as Lucy turns to face him.

“Cold?” she asks.

“Nah, just twitchy.”

Lucy closes the distance between them, stopping only when the toes of her socks touch the toes of his. He struggles against what feels like every element in his body conspiring to shift him closer to her. He wants to kiss her again.

It’s so quiet, so hard to believe that there are rooms full of people on the floors both above and below them, on the other sides of these walls. And Lucy is so silent. She doesn’t fidget or cough or seem to constantly be adjusting things the way other girls do. He thinks he can almost hear the snow beginning to fall outside.

But in the absence of all those distractions, there’s something else, something that hangs in the air between them and makes every single one of his senses somehow supernatural. When she reaches up to touch his bottom lip, tracing along the silver ring, it’s as if all the air around them moves with her.

He’s frantic with what he wants from her. Her eyes melt into deep amber. “Kiss me,” she says. “It’s okay.”