“Having fun?” he says when she returns. He can’t be imagining the pink flush to her cheeks, or the way she seems almost breathless with happiness. He can’t be imagining how substantial she feels when she presses against him, as if a solid girl is forming beneath the fog of her skin.
“The most. I have yet to see any flasks, kissing, or drama, though.”
Colin watches as Lucy bends to tie a loose shoelace on her boots. The boots are black, but tonight, under the lights and snow, they look iridescent. He wonders if everything becomes somewhat unearthly as soon as she puts it on.
“Ready to dance?” she asks.
“Not even a little.” He follows her anyway.
As Lucy dances, Colin wonders how she doesn’t stick out like a lit flare among the other, less graceful, students. Her hands move rhythmically over her head. Her feet glide, almost disconnected from the earth. She’s weightless as she playfully dances circles around him, lighting up with laughter. He’s never seen her like this, and it makes it easier for him to resist the pull he feels down the hill, toward the lake.
And then her smile fades for a beat, and her eyes move past him to edge of the overlook, the tipping point, sloping downhill. The lake feels like a throbbing beacon in the blackness. Her eyes turn the same warm amber they do when they lie side by side, and he can think about nothing but how badly he wants to kiss her. As he stares, she blinks up to him, caught.
“I was remembering what it was like,” she says, guilt draining her eyes to a soft gray, adding, “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
For whatever reason, her voice sounds fainter when she says this last part, and he knows exactly why. If she feels what he feels, she wants to walk downhill, into the shadows, if only to just look at the sharp cracks and cold, silent water beneath.
CHAPTER 23 HER
SHE’S STRADDLING HIS WAIST, BUTTONING AND unbuttoning the first half of his shirt, over and over, fascinated with how much concentration it takes.
She’s seen him do this with one hand in only a few seconds. But after he fell in the lake, it took him a week to be able to button his shirt easily.
She watches her fingers move along his chest and down across the toned lines of his stomach. Her flesh flickers between ivory and peachy opaque. She has no scars, no freckles, no bruises. Aside from the way her skin seems to glow and dim, there’s nothing that differentiates her from an airbrushed photograph. Colin’s hands are rough and damaged. He has a small birthmark on the back of his left wrist, scars across two knuckles on his right hand. He’s so obviously human, and she is so obviously not. She wonders for a flash what it’s like for him to see these differences now, after the lake and the snow, and their skin that felt the same. “What do you think I’m made of?” she asks.
“I think you’re made of awesome.”
“I mean, you’re mostly carbon. Nitrogen. Oxygen. Hydrogen. Some other stuff.”
“Probably a lot of other stuff.” He laughs. “I eat a lot of junk food.”
“But what am I?” She presses her hand to his chest again, brushes a curl off his forehead. Even when she’s trying as hard as she can to be still, she swears she can feel the collisions of thousands of molecules inside her. “I feel like my body is solid mass but . . . so different. Like I’m made up of the elements that happen to be hanging out in the air at any given moment.”
He slowly peeks up at her and smiles. “You’re definitely here, and you’re definitely different. I think I like your theory.” His eyes sparkle. “So I guess we should be glad you weren’t brought back somewhere near Chernobyl. You’d be even hotter.”
She laughs and he grins at his own cleverness, but their smiles fade as they stare at each other.
“When I kissed your cheek at the lake, before I went in, you were more solid,” he says.
She felt it, too. Felt stronger, more present. “Maybe it’s the water in the air. It’s drier here in your room with the heater on. If there’s more moisture in the air, there’s simply more content for my body to steal and use.”
He makes a sound in the back of his throat that sounds like agreement.
The question bubbles up, escapes. “What were you thinking when you found me on the trail but you were still in the lake . . . ?”
He blinks away, looking out the window. “I didn’t feel cold or hot or scared. I only wanted to find you.”
“Why don’t you seem to want to talk about this?” He pushes his hands behind his head. “Because I want to do it again.”
The sentence, finally and so plainly spoken aloud, echoes in his room, hanging like a thick, plastic curtain between them and coating the moment with a strange, leaden shadow. Her immediate reaction to his words is a paradoxical relief, so her response comes out thickly, like it’s fighting to stay on her tongue. “Colin, that is insane.”
“What do you mean?” he asks, sitting up so she’s forced to move off his lap. “I ended up on that trail, beneath your tree, Luce. There was something different about that world, something perfect. And you were there. It isn’t insane.” She tucks her legs under her and stares at him. Part of her—the part that is dark and tiny and dangerous—feels a thick, curling love for what he’s saying. He’s right; it wasn’t insane. For those few minutes, she could touch him, kiss him.
He was hers. On the trail, he was just like her.
And then she remembers that she’s supposed to be his Guardian, and a sharp spike of guilt shoots through her. “It was easy to find you,” he says. “Like we were meant to be there together.”
“Colin, I know what Henry says about me protecting you, but . . . I mean, you could have frozen to death. You could have drowned.”
He leans forward, carefully kissing her bare shoulder next to the strap of her top. He pushes it aside and kisses the spot where her heart should beat. What feels like pure white electricity shoots through her. She wants to put her hands in his hair and hold him there.