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.”
He bends to kiss her, barely touching her lips with his. Each kiss is short, careful, punctuated by glances and the quiet murmurings of, “Okay?” and her reply, “Yes.” If he focuses too hard, he starts to wonder whether he’s even touching her. Physically, her kiss is so much less than every kiss he’s had before, but inside, he’s close to erupting. His hands find her waist, her hips, pull her closer.
She shivers, wincing. It’s too much. “Shit. Sorry,” he says.
But she tugs on his shirt and gives him a look of such determination that he bends, laughing a little, and just barely kisses her mouth.
He doesn’t want to be that guy, the one who pushes for more and more and more, because he knows every touch overwhelms her, but he’s dying to know how her skin feels, to see how her hips fit against his. He feels greedy. “I want you to stay.” His eyes hover on her mouth before nervously meeting her gaze.
“Can I?” she asks. “Is Jay gone for the night?”
“I think so.”
She lies back on his bed, and he bends over her, tracing an invisible line from her throat, past her collarbone, before unbuttoning the top three buttons of her shirt. No scar is visible on her skin. No heart beats beneath his fingertips, but something else seems to hum in its place.
Her short kisses melt like sugar against his tongue, and like a gust of wind, she rolls him to his back. He feels the weight of her over his thighs, how her shape pushes against his. Warm, but also somehow not. It’s the most beautiful torture: the shadow of sensation, gone before he even has a chance to process it.
It’s like he’s dreaming. All of the imagery, no actual relief from the way he aches for her.
“Colin . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Take off your shirt.”
He stares at her, seeing no trace of hesitation, and reaches behind his head. His shirt is gone in an instant. Her hands, and the illusion of her weight, press down on his chest; a teasing sensation brings goose bumps to his skin.
But every feeling is gone too fast as he sits beneath her, hesitant to touch for fear of flooding her with too much at once.
She whispers, pressing words against his neck, his ears, his jaw. “I like the taste of your skin. You smell like soap and grass and the ocean.” Her teeth tease at biting, pulling on the ring in his lip; her hands are everywhere.
His own hands grow desperate then, pulling her shirt from her shoulders, touching her stomach, her chest, grasping and wanting to memorize every curve.
“Too rough,” she says, gasping. He’s afraid she’s trying to hide that he’s hurt her.
“Sorry, sorry,” he says, pushing his hands into his hair. He closes his eyes and pulls, grateful for the solid shape of this known sensation. He hasn’t ridden his bike in days, hasn’t run, hasn’t done anything, and he suddenly feels like a bear trying to carry a crystal; his muscles are going to burst from his skin and take off with this tension. He wonders if this is what people mean when they say almost having something is worse than never having it at all.
Her palm moves along his cheek, vibrating. “Look at me.”
He looks up into eyes the colors of blood and night and sky. Deep reds and blues, streaking indigo.
“You should . . . touch yourself if . . .” She doesn’t even blink. Doesn’t do a single one of those timid-girl things, like fiddling with her hair or covering her face. She just waits, watching.
“You mean . . . ?” He can feel his eyebrows crawling to his hairline. “Myself?”
“Yeah.” And then she smiles. It’s the sweet, dimpled smile that does him in, the way she seems both vulnerable and demanding. It makes the absurdity of it, the ingrained need for covertness, disappear.
He does what she asks, roughly shoving his pants down his hips and closing his eyes only when she whispers his name. It’s quick and familiar, and heat rolls along his skin as he tries to catch his breath. But it wasn’t really what he wanted. She’s watching him, her turbulent eyes never leaving his body. And although they blaze with fascination, he can tell it’s not what she wanted, either.
Colin urges her down into the blankets with him, curling to the side and pulling her back to his front. Her weight shifts between heavy and nothing, pressing and retreating like wind against a pane of glass.
They say good night, and then again, unwilling to let go.
She breathes, he realizes. Her short breaths match the rhythm of his own, and he settles into the comforting pattern. A bittersweet ache pulses deep in his chest. And as sleep begins to drag him under, he can’t fight the fear that the more he needs her, the more impossible it will be for her to stay.
His eyes grow heavy, his muscles grow lax, and he feels himself slip away.
Colin dreams of Lucy in her flower dress and white sandals, her hands clasped on her stomach and lilies all around her.
