• • •
A long path of battery-operated lights line the way to the overlook, and thousands more hang from every possible tree branch, illuminating the dozens of bodies that wave in swarms to the music blaring from four speakers flanking the area. The overlook is outlined with propped-up wreaths of holly, and everything in the surrounding area looks icy blue in the moonlight.
It’s hard to believe how close he is to where it happened, and Colin finds himself looking off into the distance, down the hill to the other side of the lake, where the ice opens up to the blackness below. There’s no way he’ll be able to see it from here, but he imagines the jagged hole surrounded by warning tape, the signs telling everyone to stay away. He wonders what it says about him that he’s not afraid, and rather than fear or dread at the memory of being plunged into the darkness, he feels longing and anticipation, the tease of adrenaline trickling through his veins.
Jay walks up beside them and stretches. “The lake looks so much smaller from up here.”
It feels like the world around them falls silent for a beat before Jay coughs, breaking the tension. Colin turns his attention back to the other students.
“Kiss me, Lucy. We’re under the mistletoe.” Jay makes exaggerated smooching sounds at her, pointing over his head to one of the many branches laden with plastic mistletoe.
Lucy pretends to stretch to kiss Jay’s face, but then runs away, feigning disgust. Colin watches, fascinated, as Jay chases her off down a small hill and she ducks behind a tree, laughing and shrieking when he tries to touch her. Colin has no idea how Jay would react if he felt Lucy’s skin against his, and even more, has no idea how she would react if he managed to actually grab her, but for the moment, she doesn’t seem concerned about it. It’s the first time Colin has ever seen Lucy act her age.
“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 the 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.
“I don’t think so,” he says. Lucy opens her mouth to argue the obvious, but when no words come out right away, Colin shakes his head. “Just listen. Okay?”
She nods, unable to
protest convincingly. She has no idea how much time she has with him. It lends a certain urgency to every minute. She wants him in the water, on the trail, in the underwater starry sky, with her.
“What if I could go into the lake again and have an hour with you every now and then? Just us, curled up together in the snow. Luce, the world was crazy there. It was silver and light and, like, alive.” When he pauses, she can’t find words, and in her silence he barrels on, encouraged. “I have to see it again. Jay could come with us and pull me out fast. . . .”
She remembers feeling his skin and his lips and his laughter. She remembers tasting his sounds and feeling how they fit. He kissed her like he was discovering a new vibrant color. And while she remembers other kisses, smiles pressed tightly to hers, she knows it was never like this. Still, the temptation tastes wrong somehow, a vinegar-dipped sugar cube.
“I don’t know if he would be up for that. . . .” She trails off shakily.
“After you walked away in the hall, this girl Liz came up. She said her cousin fell into this lake in Newfoundland. He got out, but was unconscious on the ice for four hours.”
Her eyes snap to his. “What?”
“Four,” he confirms, grinning at her reaction, as if she’s already signed on to this.
She stands, moving to fiddle with a cup full of pens on his desk. She lifts it easily, as if it weighs nothing. Before she has a chance to marvel at the achievement, he stands and walks over to her, buttoning his shirt.
“I read about the story, Luce. It’s true. It was all over the local news. And it’s happened before. Apparently, there’s at least one story about it every winter. The reporter is one of the guys on the forums now. He’s totally obsessed with it.” He puts a hot hand on her shoulder and squeezes gently, but this time she barely registers it. She wants more information. “I think if we’re careful, we can make it work. Plus,” he says, quieter now, “that kid didn’t even have a Guardian.”
“If I let you do this, I’m not a Guardian,” she says, stepping out of his grip. “I’m something bad.” She tries to keep her voice light, but the truth keeps the words stark, blown bare like a smooth tree trunk.
“You’re definitely not bad,” he says with the kind of conviction that she’s certain she’ll never have. “Do you know how I know?”
She looks up and melts. In the dark room, his eyes are deep amber, his lashes long and his blink so slow and patient. “How?”
“Because I’ve lost everyone I loved. Instead, I got you. The universe might have taken the others away, but it sent you back.”
“But don’t you ever wonder why you need a Guardian, and why it’s me?”
“I used to.” He glances out the window and then down at his shoes, kicking at something on the floor.
She watches him closely. With a small tug of anxiety beneath her ribs, she realizes he’s kept something from her. “What changed?”
He looks up again and meets her eyes. “I think we’re connected because I was the kid who saw your murderer take you into the woods. I told Dot, and she called the police.”
Lucy stills, her hands bracing on the desk chair behind her. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”
Colin speaks over her, apologizing immediately. “I was afraid that if you had closure, if you knew all the details, that you’d go away.” He reaches out, touches her arm as if to convince himself that she is, indeed, still here.
“So they caught this guy because of you?”
He shrugs. “I think so. That’s what the article said, anyway.”
She feels her smile form on her face and spread down into her chest, where she never feels hollow when she’s with him. “I may have only a pocketful of memories about anything useful, but I do know one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“You were my Guardian first, then.”
His grin matches hers, but it has a distinctly cocky twist to it. “I like to think so.”
Chapter 24 • HIM
COLIN IS POSITIVE THAT LUCY is into the idea of returning to the lake. Her eyes are this crazy orange, as if her entire brain is on fire with the possibilities, and the light passes back through her irises like a telegraph to him: Do this. Do it.
“This can only end badly.” But her voice wavers a bit, and he wonders if it’s something she’s thought about before today too.
• • •
Days turn into weeks, and the snow keeps falling, blanketing everything that doesn’t move. Colin doesn’t push, doesn’t talk to Lucy about going into the lake anymore. Instead, their conversations slowly grow heavy with everything left unsaid.
One morning she asks him what he’s thinking about and his starkly honest answer, “How you felt on the trail,” makes her turn and walk away, arms crossed over her middle as if holding herself together.
But she finds him later, after class, a small apology in her eyes and in her smile.
He says his aloud. “Sorry. I know you don’t like the idea.” And holds her face between his palms, repeating it against her lips.
They walk together, hands entwined, back to his dorm. She reads on his bed while he does homework, lying on her stomach, her legs bent, feet slowly kicking back and forth. Colin gives up pretending to read for outright staring at her, remembering the trail, her hungry kisses, her solid weight. There was nothing insubstantial or unsatisfying about the kiss on the trail. He felt her laughter.
“Lucy.”
She hesitates before looking up, as if sensing something particular in his tone. “Mmm?”
He watches her fingertips stroking her collarbone while she stares at his hands. Her eyes flash warm and deep amber when she catches him looking at her throat, at the spot he first parted his lips and tasted her skin. It was sweet and the tiniest bit salty. She tasted of girl and rain and relief. He doesn’t say anything else, only looks at her, thinking, Please. Please.
“I can’t,” she says. “You can’t.”
“Why?”
“I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if we did that.”
He can’t help it. He smiles when she says this, and her mouth twitches at the corners.
“Colin, I’m serious.”
But he can’t stand the thought that it won’t happen again. His curiosity feels like an itch across every inch of his skin. “I need to know if what I saw was real.”
Her eyes melt to the color of warm honey before she turns back to her book, her fingers making a tight fist around his comforter.
“There’s nothing in the world as good as what happened on the trail,” he says.
When she looks up, she looks so miserable. “I know.”
“But we don’t have that here,” he whispers. “It isn’t the same.”
She squirms, pulling her hair over her shoulder and squinting at the words on the page in front of her. He ignores her feigned distraction, crawling toward her in a way that makes him feel like a predatory cat hunting prey.
“Lucy.”
Her eyes remain trained on the page. “What?”
“Let me try this.”
“Try what?”
He reaches for her, gently urging her to twist and lie on her back, easing her down onto his pillow.
It takes nothing to undress her. The slip of a button, a tug of a zipper. Soft fabric pulled over her head. He pinches a simple clasp and exposes a world of smooth, bare skin.
“I have an idea,” he assures her, his hands slipping her pants down her legs. “Just trust me, okay?”
“Okay.” She nods, watching him with eyes that churn a deep, coffee brown.
“I’ve given this some thought.”
She laughs, and it’s husky and low. “I bet you have.”
He tastes the skin of her ankle, her knee. Thigh. He blows a breath across where leg meets hip. “Is this okay?”
She nods, eyes wider than he’s ever seen them, and he simply exhales right where her legs are parted.
He doesn’t even have to pretend to breathe fast. He�
�s practically out of his mind with wanting this girl, watching her writhe below him. Her fingers find his hair and pull. Her back bows, and with one last puff of air across her skin, he hears a sound he’s never heard a girl make before, something between a sob and a plea. But still, he sits up and kisses her afterward, and apologizes.
Curling into him, she apologizes too.
“I want to actually touch you next time,” he says into the sweetness of her neck.
She presses her face into his shoulder, her second apology coming out only as air.
• • •
He does what she asks and stays away from the lake and the misty trails and the ice. It feels like the snow swallows him too. A heavy weight settles into his bones, like blocks of cement anchoring his feet to the ground. But his insides rage. Colin and Lucy go to school, he works when he’s scheduled, and they spend long nights cocooned in his blankets and wrapped around each other so close that he can’t tell where he ends and she begins. But it’s not the same.
He tells her she’s more than he ever hoped for.
He tells her that he’s in love.
He asks her to never leave.
But she does.
• • •
When he opens his eyes in the blue-gray light of dawn, the air is unmoving. There’s no soft hum next to him, no phantom weight pressed against his chest. He sits up slowly, runs his hand through his hair, and stands, dressing in the first clean clothes that he finds. He doesn’t look back at the empty bed.
Eight hours of school stretch in front him, and he wonders how he’ll make it through, carrying around the restless need to look for her, wrapped up in the knowledge that it’s useless. He can’t even think about how long she might be gone this time. Days? Weeks? Longer? Thinking of her is like pressing on a bruise: fascination, sick pleasure, and lingering pain.
On the walk to work, he remembers what he said as they fell asleep. Stay. He thinks he felt her slipping through his fingers even then, felt her grow lighter in his arms as she arched against his body like a feather caught in a breeze.
He’s done everything she’s asked, but it wasn’t enough.
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