Sublime(9)
Author: Christina Lauren

She laughs again, and this time it’s loud enough to echo off the tree trunks around them. He loves hearing it, loves how someone so finespun could make such a big sound. “Well, how were you supposed to react? Actually, I think I’d have been more worried if you’d been totally calm about it. I would have probably thought, ‘Maybe this guy has a ghost fetish.’”

It’s Colin’s turn to laugh, but it quickly fades away. “My mom started seeing things. It’s how she . . .” He pauses, stopping to face her. “See, a few weeks after we moved here . . . my older sister, Caroline, was hit by a delivery truck heading into school. She was on her bike. Never saw it coming, I guess. Mom kind of lost it, went off the deep end. Then, after about a month, she started saying she saw Caroline on the road a few times. One night, she got us in the car, told us we were going out for ice cream in town, and then drove the car off a bridge.”

“Colin,” Lucy whispers, horrified, “that’s awful.”

“My parents died. I survived. So, when you told me you thought you were dead, I guess you understand why I flipped out.”

“God, yeah.” She pulls her hair off her face, exposing every inch of smooth, pale skin. She’s so beautiful; he wants to feel his cheek against hers. “I’m so sorry.”

He waves her off, hating to linger on this. “Where did you go the last few days?”

“I don’t really remember what I did, but I’m sure I was around. Here, or in the field. I can’t leave campus grounds.”

“You mean, at all?”

She shakes her head and watches him a minute longer before dropping her leaf on the path. It disappears almost immediately into the mud. It’s his turn to stare, watching her profile as she looks out across the water.

“Lucy?”

She turns to him with a smile. “I like it when you say my name.”

Colin smiles back, but it turns down at the corners after a beat. “Do you know why you’re back here?”

She shakes her head. “Are you scared of me?”

“No.” He should be, absolutely. And he wants to say more, to talk about the school and the stories that surround it, about the Walkers and how maybe that’s what she is, and are they all trapped by the gate? He definitely should be scared. But now that he’s with her, close enough to touch, he can feel only relief and that strange, intoxicating longing.

Suddenly walking side by side isn’t enough anymore.

“Hold my hand?” he asks.

She coils her long fingers around his, both cool and warm, solid but retreating. He can feel points of contact against his skin, but never in the same place for very long. When he squeezes, a current runs through his fingers, making his muscles relax. She’s like a constellation, alive against his hand.

When he looks up, her eyes are closed, her teeth biting down on her lower lip.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. “Does this hurt you?”

Her eyes open, and hunger and joy swirl green and auburn inside. “Have you ever been in a pool and you hop out and jump right into a hot tub?”

He laughs. He knows exactly the feeling she means, flushing hot and amazing, but also such an intense change it feels like every nerve ending is firing. “Yeah. And how it settles into soothing hot instead of that intense oh-my-god-yes hot.”

She nods. “I keep waiting for the settling.” Her eyes fall closed again. “It never comes. When you’re touching me, it’s like the first moment of submersion, always. It’s a relief so overwhelming it almost takes my breath away.”

Colin’s heart beats heavily inside his chest. Tentatively, she reaches up and brushes a trembling finger along the ring in his lip. “Did it hurt?”

“A little.”

“The metal must be cold,” she whispers, and he feels himself leaning toward her. “What does it feel like?”

“For me or for you?” he asks, grinning.

Chapter 11 HER

"FOR ME," SHE ANSWERS, REACHING TO PRESS A fingertip against the cool metal.

“Wrap your hand around the pipes,” the teacher said. “The cold and the warm together feel scorching.” Lucy released the pipes with a surprised hiss, looking up at the teacher in shock.

“Some skin receptors sense cold, some heat. Both are sent to the brain, but the brain hears these mixed signals as powerful heat. It’s a form of perception we call paradoxical warmth.”

Lucy gasps at the perfect memory and the intensity of the touch, pulling her finger back in surprise.

Colin’s lip ring was cold from the wind and his skin was warm with blood, and like the pipes, the feeling of his lip pressed to her fingertip was scorching. And although she understands the science behind the pipes experiment, there can’t be any explanation in the world for what happened between them just now. For the brief contact—a few seconds—the air incinerated.

Colin swallows, his eyes never leaving her mouth. He blinks a few times. Is he going to kiss her? Her skin warms at the thought, and the closer he leans, the more flooded she becomes with a strange, intoxicating relief. It overwhelms her like a head rush.

Lucy knows now that she’s been kissed before—even that she’s not innocent—but it felt nothing like this. Memories of those monochromatic touches pale next to the vibrancy of Colin’s skin. But this reaction turns sour in her thoughts, unsettling her. If the simple touch of his lip on her fingertip felt so intense, what would it feel like to actually kiss him? She’s afraid she’d be unable to process so much sensation. And so she turns back to the trail, eyes closed for a moment as she savors the feel of the cold metal ring, the heat of his breath as he exhaled against her fingertip.

She’s taken a few steps before she hears Colin move to catch up with her. If he’s surprised by her reaction, he doesn’t show it, and they continue to walk in silence. Every few steps, Colin’s hand brushes against hers. Eventually, he gives up pretense and wraps his fingers around hers again. So carefully, just like the first time.

He bends to meet her eyes. “Still okay?” he asks adorably, somehow managing to look both confident and completely unsure of himself. She can only nod, overwhelmed by his simple touch. His skin feels hot and alive, as if with each of his heartbeats she can sense the surge of blood in his veins.

He smiles widely. “So, if you can’t ever leave campus, where do you live?”

Lucy takes him to her little home and is impressed when he doesn’t look shocked to find her living in an abandoned shed beside the school. She lights the small gas lamp in the corner before stretching out her arms, almost touching the wall on either side. “This is home sweet home.”

He folds his long frame on an old crate and she sits on another and tells him everything she remembers. The fragmented pieces from her human life are random and meaningless, but he listens like each piece is a part of a larger, greater story. When she starts to tell him everything she remembers since waking on the trail, she sees a shadow flicker on his face for a brief moment, as if he’s sad that the story of her first life adds up to so little. But her memories from this life are so numerous in comparison, she treats them like gems. He watches and listens as he leans back against the dilapidated wall of the shed.

She tells him about sitting outside the school and watching students in their everyday routine and how she didn’t feel even a single moment of envy; she simply felt as if she was waiting. She tells him that she didn’t feel the need to find her parents even though they might still be alive and how that lack of compulsion worries her somehow. Wouldn’t a girl want to join her peers? Wouldn’t she go straight to her family?

She brings him up to the present moment with a simple, “I told you I died. You freaked. I wandered around and forced myself to stay away from the school and then . . . you came and found me. The end.”

He laughs. “I had no idea you could talk so much.” “I haven’t wanted to talk to anyone else.”

His smile fades, and he looks around, like he’s seeing the

shed for the first time since he arrived. “Don’t you want to be in a more comfortable place?” he asks. “It’s kind of weird that you’re alone out here.”

“I like it. It feels like mine now, and it’s clean and quiet and no one has ever come over here.”

He hesitates and then glances down at his phone. “I should go.” She watches him brush the leaves and pine needles from his pants. When he looks up, he tilts his head, wincing. “I can’t leave you here.”

“I’ve been here for almost three weeks now.”

“Come with me, just tonight.” He senses her hesitation and pushes on. “Just until we scare up some blankets and make this whole place less . . .”

“Rustic?” she offers.

“I was going to say creepy. We should aim for rustic.” We.

She follows him down the trail, unable even in her weightlessness to match his grace over logs and through the marshy bits. All of their talking seems to have emptied them of words, and they move through the moonlight in an easy silence until the hulking gray buildings of Saint Osanna’s appear above the tips of the trees. The idea of a dorm room, of a comforter, a rug, and walls that keep the elements at bay seem almost decadent.

Colin’s room screams “boy.” Muted earth tones, bike magazines, dirty laundry. Greasy bolts on his desk, a soda can, a row of trophies. She can see, beneath the layers, strong architectural bones: dark wood windowpanes, polished hardwood. The shelves built deep into the walls are now cluttered with papers and bike parts and small stacks of photographs.

“Quite a man lair,” she says. Colin flops down on his bed and groans a relaxed-happy noise, but Lucy doesn’t want to sit down. She wants to go through his stuff. She has two school uniforms, a pair of boots, and a shed. She’s fascinated with all of his things.

“A brown comforter? How understated.” She smiles and runs her hand along the edge of his mattress.

“I like to imagine I’m sleeping in the dirt,” he jokes. She feels him watching her while she studies a pile of clothing near the closet door. He throws an arm over his face and mumbles beneath it, “Jay and I . . . we’re not so skilled with the cleaning.”

“Yeah . . .” She pushes aside a pair of socks on a shelf so she can read what books he has stacked there.

“At least my sheets are clean.” He immediately clears his throat, and she continues to stare at his books. Awkward settles like a thick gel into the room. “I didn’t mean that. Yes, I mean, my sheets are clean but . . . for sleeping. Oh my God, never mind.”

Lucy is already laughing. “I don’t sleep.”

“Right. Right.” He’s quiet for several beats before asking, “Won’t you get bored?”

“It’s nice to be near someone. I promise I won’t draw a mustache on you in your sleep.”

He yawns suddenly, widely. “Well, if you do, give me a Fu Manchu. Go big or go home.” He stretches as he stands, and a strip of bare stomach is exposed beneath his shirt. Heat pulses through her, and she wonders if it’s possible for him to notice the way her entire body seemed to ripple. Hooking a thumb over his shoulder, he says he’s going to go brush his teeth.

Without Colin’s eyes on her, she feels free to look around a little. Not to dig in his drawers or look under his mattress, but to take a closer look at the pictures on his desk, the trophies on his shelves.

He’s won races and stunt contests. He snowboards, and from the looks of it, he used to play hockey. Ribbons and plaques line two shelves, and there are so many, she quickly stops trying to read each one.

On his desk there’s a picture of a small boy with a man who looks like she imagines Colin will in his thirties— thick, wild, dark hair and bright eyes. Scattered on his desk are papers and Post-its and a few pay stubs from what she assumes is the dining hall. Tucked under his keyboard and sticky with spilled soda is a picture of Colin at a school dance with a short brunette. His hands are on her hips. She’s leaning back into him, and they’re not just smiling tight, staged smiles. They’re laughing together.

A tight ball forms in her chest and expands into her throat. The way his hands rest on her h*ps is mesmerizing, as if she is firm and his and there. Lucy doesn’t know how his touch will ever feel normal to her and whether she’ll ever be able to be close to him the way she imagines this girl was.

The skin on the back of her neck burns warm when she feels him return to the room, and she quickly puts the picture back where it was. She thinks he notices, but he doesn’t say anything and neither does she. It’s too soon for the conversation of what they are, let alone who that girl was. Even so, Lucy can’t quite stop the jealous fire that licks at her insides at the image of Colin with someone else.

“I realize this is lame,” he says, “but I’m actually really tired.”