Sublime

HAVE I TOLD YOU LATELY how awesome you are, Dot?” Jay asks, his mouth full and his second plate of French toast in front of him. They’re sitting at the secret table in the kitchen, watching Dot and the other cooks prepare breakfast for hundreds of students about to pour in through the doors. Back here, they can eat in peace and steal extra bacon.

But this morning, Colin picks at his breakfast.

“If I’m so awesome, then why do I always have to take your dishes to the sink?” she asks over her shoulder.

Jay immediately changes the subject: “You going out after work?”

Dot steps up behind Colin, setting a carton of orange juice on the table before turning back to the giant range and flipping about seventeen pieces of French toast in ten seconds. “Yep. I’m going to the poker tournament in Spokane. I pulled a royal flush right out of the gate last time. First deal of the night.” She smiles and does a little dance as she begins slicing oranges.

“Dot, I’m not sure I like you driving all the way down there,” Jay says.

“Oh please,” she scoffs. “My eyesight is better than yours, kid. I’ve seen some of the girls you date.” She makes exaggerated air quotes around the word “date.”

“You wouldn’t rather hang out with us than a bunch of old ladies? I’m hurt, Dot. If I were ten years older . . .” Jay trails off, wiggling his eyebrows at her.

“Jay, you are so creepy.” Colin doesn’t need any help feeling nauseous this morning. He got zero sleep. He barely wants to look up, for fear of seeing something new that confirms he’s lost his mind.

He’s a disaster.

Dot fills Jay’s plate again and wipes her hands on her DON’T FRY BACON NAKED apron. “You know I’d go nuts if I never got away from this place.”

Everyone grows silent, and Colin can feel them both watching him, waiting for his reaction to Dot’s casual words. Colin: the orphan who has no idea what comes next and will probably never leave this tiny town.

To change the subject, he asks the first thing that comes to mind—“Dot, you ever see a Walker?”—and immediately regrets it.

She stops slicing, knife hovering in the air. Colin can hear the rhythm of footsteps through the kitchen wall as students stomp their way into the dining hall. Finally, she shrugs. “I sure hope not, but sometimes . . . I’m not so sure.”

It takes a few seconds for her words to make it from Colin’s ears to the part of his brain that makes sense of them. “You think they exist, though?”

She turns and points the spatula at him. “Is this about your mom again? You know I loved her like a daughter.”

Jay grows silent, his interest in his French toast suddenly renewed. He knows practically everything there is to know about Colin. He definitely knows the story surrounding how his family died, and more than that, he knows how much Colin hates to talk about it.

“I just want to know,” Colin mumbles.

Turning back around, she flips more French toast in lingering silence before saying, “Sometimes I think they’re with us and maybe we don’t want to see.”

Jay laughs as if Dot is joking. But Colin doesn’t.

“I’m a crazy old lady about most things, but I think I’m right about this.”

“What do you mean?” Colin begins tearing the edge of a campus newspaper into narrow strips, trying to look like this is just casual conversation. Like he’s not hanging on her every word. “You believe the stories?”

“I don’t know. We’ve all heard about the army man on the bench and the girl disappearing in the woods.” She squints, considering. “Newspapers love to talk about how this place is different. Built on land where kids were buried. The fire that first week the school opened. We all know people have seen things, and more than a few. Some a bit clearer than others,” she adds quietly. “Who even knows what’s real anymore?”

Colin pokes at his food. “So you think they’re all over, then? Ghosts and spirits and stuff? Not only here at Saint O’s?”

“Maybe not ‘all over,’ but I bet there’s always a few around. Least, that’s what people say.” Colin wonders if he’s imagining the way she looks out the window, off into the direction of the lake.

“If you haven’t seen them, how do you know?” Jay asks, joining in. “Some of the stuff I’ve heard—it’s pretty crazy. You’d have to be nu—” He stops, glancing quickly in Colin’s direction before stuffing his mouth full of French toast again.

“If you think this world isn’t full of things you don’t understand, Jay, you’re too dumb to use a fork unsupervised.” Dot’s quiet laugh softens her words.

Colin feels sort of wobbly all of a sudden, like his insides have liquefied. He’s not sure which scenario would be worse: that he’s lost his mind, or that the stories he’s dismissed his entire life could be true. That Lucy could be dead.

“Why are they here, do you think?” he asks, quieter now.

She pauses, looking over her shoulder and raising an eyebrow. “You’re taking this pretty seriously, kiddo.” Turning back, she doesn’t answer right away and begins chopping a large pile of dried cranberries. The sharp, fresh scent fills the space. “Who knows? Maybe to watch over us,” she says, shrugging a shoulder. “Or to meet us so that we’ll know someone when we’re gone.” She drops the entire pile into the mixer. “Or maybe they’re just stuck here. Maybe they need closure.”

“Closure like they want revenge?” Colin asks.

“Well, if they’re bad, I reckon it’s pretty easy to tell. I’ve always figured anyone from the other side is undiluted—good or bad. Life is all gray. Dying has to be pretty black or white.”

She pulls the dough out and begins forming rolls as Colin watches, just as he has hundreds of mornings in his lifetime. Somehow every movement she makes feels more substantial, like he never noticed how much her experience weighs until now.

“Thanks, Dot.”

“For what? Waxing poetic about dead folks?”

“I mean, when you’re not talking about the hot barista at the coffee shop or the benefits of pineapple for your sex life, you’re all right.”

“I try.” She points to the cabinet above the counter. “Grab my baking sheets.”

• • •

Even after the familiar routine of helping Dot bake, Colin doesn’t feel much better. If anything, he feels worse. He can count on one hand the number of times in the past ten years he’s felt this mopey, but the things Dot said were the same kind of things he’s heard his whole life: vague slogans about the afterlife and how Walkers probably exist and maybe his mother wasn’t insane. It’s the kind of reassurance that’s easy to give because, ultimately, it doesn’t matter anymore whether she was. She’s gone.

She’s gone, and his father is gone, and his sister, Caroline, has been gone even longer. Now Colin might be losing it too. It’s the first time since his parents died that Colin is faced so baldly with the knowledge that he’s completely alone in this world. No matter how much they care, Dot and Joe and Jay can’t help him with this one.

Dot finds him sitting on the back step, drawing in the lacy ground frost with a long stick in his good hand. She opens the door, and warm air blows against the back of his neck.

“What are you doing out here?”

“Thinking.” He wipes his face and she catches it, moving to sit by him.

“Are you upset, baby?”

“I’m good.”

“You’re not,” she says, putting a warm hand on his knee. “Don’t lie to me. You’re the boy who never stops smiling. It makes it easy to spot when something’s off.”

Colin turns to look at her, and her face softens when she sees his red-rimmed eyes. “I’m losing it, Dot. Like, I seriously wonder if I’m crazy.”

He hates the way her face falls and how guilty she looks, as if she’s responsible for the weight of his tragic life. “You’re not.”

“You don’t even know why I think that.”

“I can hazard a guess,” she says quietly. “You want to talk about it?”

“Not really.” He gives her a small smile. “But thanks.”

“I’ve seen some crazy things in my day. And Lord knows you’ve got better reasons than the rest of us to have some wrinkles in your sanity, but will it help if I tell you I know for a fact you’re as sane as they come?”

Colin laughs humorlessly. “But how could you know that?”

Her expression steadies. “Because I know.”

“Maybe I’m imagining you saying that. It’s okay, Dot. I’m okay.”

She studies him for a beat before pinching him hard on the arm. He cries out, immediately rubbing the spot. Dot has a pretty mean pinch. “What the hell, Dot?”

“See?” she says with a quiet laugh. “You didn’t imagine that. And for someone who’s survived things that would have left anyone else in the ground and lives their days like there will never be any more, sure, you sometimes give me good reason to think you’re nuts. But if you’re crazy, then I’m young and ugly, and we know I’m neither.”

• • •

Colin makes a quick trip to check in on Joe before heading to class and is relieved to see his godfather sitting up, enjoying an enormous plate of French toast and bacon.

“Dot delivery?” he asks.

Joe nods, pointing with his fork to the chair beside the bed. “You have time to sit?”

“A couple minutes.”

Colin sits, and the warm silence fills the space between them. It’s their familiar routine: quiet sitting, little conversation. Colin looks out the window, watching students trudge to class while Joe eats.

“Sleep good?” Joe asks around a bite.

“I should be asking you that.”

“I slept like the dead,” Joe says. “Maggie pumped me full of painkillers.”

Nodding, Colin says, “Yeah, you were looped.”

“Who’s the girl?”

Once he processes the question, Colin’s heart seems to freeze, and then it explodes into a gallop. “Which girl?”

“The one who came to me on the porch. The brown-haired one. Wanted to help, but said she couldn’t.”

“She said that?”

Joe sips his coffee, eyeing Colin. “You’re going to think I’m losing my mind, kid, but I’ve got to know: Is she beautiful or horrible?”

“What?” Colin moves closer.

Looking quickly up at the door to ensure they’re alone, Joe whispers, “The girl. Is she beautiful or horrible?”

Colin whispers, “Beautiful.”

“I thought . . . Her face melted right off and then she became the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.”

Colin is caught by a head rush so powerful, he needs a few seconds before he can answer. “It’s probably the pain meds,” he says, swallowing. “They make you see crazy things.”

“No, kiddo,” Joe mumbles, eyes trained on Colin. “That was before I fell.”

“I . . .” Colin feels like his entire world has closed in around him. “You must be remembering it wrong.”

Joe doesn’t respond, and Colin reluctantly continues. “Her name is Lucy.”

Joe’s eyes close, and he shakes his head. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Bile rises, thick in Colin’s throat. “Joe?”

“Lucy was . . . the name of a girl who was killed here. Ugly time for this place, must be some ten years ago now. Looks just like her. I’m sure that’s why my mind went off.” He laughs, taking a bite of orange. “Must be the pain meds after all.”

• • •

Colin ducks into a computer lab, leaving the lights off to remain hidden.

He remembers the first time he did this—high and drunk with Jay after a bonfire and ghost stories on the edge of the woods—sneaking in to see if any of the gruesome stories could actually be true. There were more hits than he would have imagined for something most people wrote off as folklore. Stories of a place where students seemed to die at a higher rate than any other boarding school in the country. But how many schools have such harsh winters and enormous, wild grounds? Colin never understood why it was a surprise that kids died or disappeared more frequently here than other places from things like exposure, pneumonia, and suicide. Even stoned he didn’t believe any of the legends.

He has a vague memory of seeing the one Joe mentioned, about the girl who died. Most websites have information about the murderer and his subsequent trials and execution; because the murder happened a decade ago, there are only two news stories online from the time of the killing. Colin clicks a link with a photo, and covers his mouth with a cupped hand to keep from crying out when he sees her face.

Her hair is brown, her features less glasslike, but it’s her. Beneath the photo is a story from the Coeur D’Alene Press.

Monday’s arraignment of accused serial murderer Herb August Miller, who is being held for the killing of seventeen-year-old Lucia Rain Gray as well as seven other teens over the past eight years has been continued to June 1.

Prosecutors allege the 42-year-old former headmaster of Saint Osanna’s boarding school outside of Coeur D’Alene stalked Lucia for several weeks prior to the murder. The murder of a teen at his school indicates Miller, who previously only selected victims far from his home state, was growing increasingly confident in his ability to evade law enforcement. Miller allegedly invited her to his cabin, drugged her, and took her to the woods, where he slit her throat before cutting open her chest. In what is now believed to be his gruesome trademark, Miller then removed her heart.

Police found Miller attempting to bury the body on a trail beside the school after a young boy saw him carrying a struggling girl into the woods. The boy alerted a staff member, who called 911.

“This is a killer we’ve been hunting for eight years and who has caused unspeakable heartache to many families across the country. It’s possible he would have simply carried on at the school if it hadn’t been for the bravery of the young boy in finding help,” Coeur D’Alene sheriff Mo Rockford said at a press conference early Friday. “The capture of Herb Miller is a huge weight off the minds of national law enforcement, and this community owes a debt of gratitude to the boy and the staff for making the prompt call.”

Miller has been indicted on seven counts of first-degree murder. The state is seeking the death penalty in light of the gruesome aggravating torture and mutilation factors. Seventeen-year-old Gray was the youngest victim of Miller’s killing spree.

This isn’t the first round of tragedy for the school, which was built on a burial site for settlers moving west and which lost two young children in a fire two days after the school opened in 1814. Saint Osanna’s has been struck by tragedy regularly over the years, with its proximity to the woods, glacial lakes, and harsh elements resulting in a number of student and visitor deaths.

Colin stops, closing the window on the screen before anyone sees what he’s reading. “Lucia Rain Gray,” he says aloud. He lets his heart take over every sensation in his body, pounding relentlessly in his chest and throat and ears. Lucy was telling the truth.

• • •

Colin doesn’t see her all day. She doesn’t show up for history, and she’s not outside at lunch. He doesn’t find her anywhere on campus, and he grows more frantic as he circles buildings and checks every classroom. He tells himself he’ll stop looking after this preliminary search but gives that up after gym, dressing quickly so he can scout the woods bordering school before seventh period.

Days go by, and Jay tells him that she’s stopped coming to his English class, too. The desk she sat in that first day stays empty. Colin doesn’t understand why that feels like a punch to the stomach. If this situation is as crazy as he keeps telling himself, then why does he even care? Why does he keep rubbing his palm, trying to remember what it felt like to touch her? Why does he want to do it again?

He wants to remember: Her skin was warmer than air, but not by much. Her eyes change, like ripples in a pond. She’s never cold, even with the strongest wind outside. Except for a pencil on that first day, he’s never really seen her touch anything. And even that looked hard, like she had to work at keeping it between her fingers. Her eyes, when she asked about Joe, changed colors as he watched, from deep gray to an aching, honest blue.

He considers leaving campus to try and find her but has no idea where she even goes when she isn’t here. Does she vanish into thin air?

By Friday night, Colin has the same feeling he gets when he doesn’t ride his bike for a long stretch—antsy and like something is growing inside him and pushing his vital organs into a tiny corner in his chest. He’s worried that Lucy has left, but he’s even more worried that she’s simply evaporated. That she reached out to him and his rejection somehow sent her away. He takes his bike to the woods, riding the narrow trails along the rickety boards he and Jay propped there years ago. He hops boulders and streams, crashes down hills. He beats himself up until he’s bruised and sore. He does everything he can to clear his mind, but nothing works. He eats dinner and tastes nothing. The heat in his dorm room feels claustrophobic, oppressive.

Sitting on his bed, he thumbs through a bike magazine before tossing it to the floor and flopping backward, fists to his eyes.

Across the room, Jay pauses his repetitive bouncing of a tennis ball against the wall. “Do you have any idea where she is?”

“No. The last place I saw her was . . .” His words fade away as he registers that maybe it doesn’t matter where he saw her last. Maybe what matters is where this started for her.

“Colin?”

“I think I might know. I’ll catch you later.”

Jay glances out the darkening window, concerned, but keeps any objections to himself. “Just be careful, man.”

Colin takes off down the path toward the park, headed for the strip of chain-link fence that he and Jay busted when they were freshmen, which probably hasn’t even been discovered by the groundskeepers. It leads directly to where he thinks Lucy awoke by the lake.

The trail is only about a mile long, but he’s practically frozen by the time he gets there. Now that he knows at least some of the legends might be true, Colin feels an instinctive shudder of fear as he nears the water. Once the sound of his sneakers on the gravel quiets, it’s eerily silent. The idea that Lucy could be sitting out here alone makes his hands shake in a way that has nothing to do with the cold. Or maybe it’s because he’s afraid she’s not here at all.

He looks around, hunching forward against the wind. The sky looms heavy and dull overhead, the clouds so thick it’s impossible to tell where one stops and the next begins.

There’s an old dock not far from where the trail ends. It’s missing a lot of planks, and the wood that remains is waterlogged and decomposing, but despite this whole area being off-limits, the most daring kids still occasionally horse around on it in the summer. Now, though, it’s covered in a light dusting of snow, and for some reason, Colin isn’t surprised when he sees Lucy sitting at the end of it, perched on an uneven outcropping of broken and rotting boards. Long, blond strands fall almost to her waist, and the wind lifts them, tangling them in the breeze that whips across the lake.

The wood creaks beneath the weight of his careful steps. She’s changed her clothes, though her signature boots sit unlaced on the dock just behind her. The hoodie he left for her rests in her lap.

Now that he’s here, he realizes he’s spent more time trying to figure out how to find her than how to talk to her. Staring at her back, he files through appropriate openers. He needs to say that he’s sorry, that he’s a clueless boy who has no idea what to do with a living girl, never mind one who isn’t. Maybe he should tell her that he’s an orphan and probably needs an anchor as badly as she does.

Slowly, he walks toward her. “Lucy?” he says, and hesitates, taking in the scene in front of him. Her skirt is pulled up above her knees and her skin is pale and perfect in the retreating light, not a scar or a freckle anywhere.

“It’s not cold,” she says, looking down to where her legs dangle in the water below. It has to be thirty degrees out, and the lake has that syrupy look, where the algae is gone and the water looks like it’s hovering between liquid and solid. Colin’s limbs ache watching the icy water lap against her skin. “I mean, intellectually, I know it’s cold,” she continues, “but it doesn’t feel that way. I can feel the sensation of the cold water, but the temperature doesn’t bother me like it should. Isn’t that strange?”

The wind seems to have stolen his words, and he’s not sure how to respond. So instead, he reaches out, placing a hand on her shoulder. Her eyes widen at the contact, but she doesn’t say anything.

“I didn’t know where you were,” he says finally. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” she whispers.

He looks at his hands in amazement. He can feel the weight of her hair as it moves over his fingers, the texture of the skin on her neck, but where there should be warmth, there’s only the tingling sensation of movement, a stirring breeze. It’s as if whatever is keeping her here—keeping her body upright, her limbs moving forward—is pulsing beneath his fingertips.

They stare at each other for a long stretch, and he finally whispers, “I’m sorry.”

A smile twitches at the corners of her lips, dimple poking sweetly into her cheek, before the grin spreads across her face. Her eyes morph from dark to pale yellow in the light of the bright, full moon. “Don’t be.”

He’s not sure how to reply because whether she needs an apology or not, he feels like a jerk for disappearing that night.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” she asks.

He smiles and moves back as she pulls her feet from the water, and he uses the hoodie to dry her legs. They feel like ice against his fingertips. Her eyes drop, and holy shit, he thinks she’s looking at his mouth. Suddenly, his head is full of other possibilities: What would it be like to kiss her? Does her skin feel the same everywhere? What does it taste like?

“When did you do that?” she asks, pulling on her boots.

He struggles to rein in his thoughts. Reflexively, he licks his lips and realizes she means his piercing. “My lip?”

“Yeah.”

“Last summer.”

She pauses, and it gives him a minute to watch the breeze whip her hair all over the place, like it weighs less than the air. She takes a while to say anything else, though, so he watches her lace up her boots while she thinks. “The school doesn’t have rules about that?”

“The rules are so old that piercings never made it into the book, but I dare you to try and wear short pantaloons to class. Dot and Joe say I can look like a ‘no-good punk’ as long as I act like a gentleman. You don’t like it?”

“No, I do. It’s just—”

“You sound surprised that you do.” He laughs, watching her stand.

“I don’t think many boys did that when I was in high school. At least not boys like you.”

“ ‘Boys like me?’ ”

“Nice boys. Burnout boys would be inked and pierced and rowdy.”

“Oh, I’m definitely rowdy.”

Her lips curve in a half smile. “I don’t doubt that.”

“And how do you know I’m nice? Maybe I’m a burnout with a ghost fetish.”

She gapes at him, surprised, and he wants to grab a rock and crack himself over the head with it. But then she throws her head back and laughs this ridiculous loud, snorting laugh.

Colin exhales a shaky breath. Apparently ghost jokes are okay.

She grins up at him. “You are nice. I can see it all over your face. You can’t hide a thing.”

He watches her eyes shift from green to silver in the light, and her lips skew into his favorite playful smile. He considers her hair, her eyes, the way she fades into the background for everyone but him. “Neither can you.”

“Really?”

“At least, not from me.”

Her smile leaves her lips but stays in her eyes, even when she blinks away. “Good.”

Something flaps in a cluster of reeds next to the trail, and the last forgotten leaves crunch beneath their shoes as they walk deeper into the woods. Their steps are evenly paced, but Lucy’s seem lighter than his, quieter somehow.

And now that he’s starting to let himself believe, he sees other differences: Her cheeks aren’t flushed from the cold. While each of his breaths seems to float like small puffs of smoke in the air in front of him, the space in front of Lucy’s lips is noticeably empty.

Beside him, she looks around as if she can see every detail in the light of the moon, and it makes him wonder, is she like a cat? Does she have amazing night vision? Although it seems strange that there would be any off-limit topics now that they’ve both acknowledged that she is dead and he isn’t, he feels like it would be strange to ask her what it’s like.

“So you believe me?” she asks.

He considers telling her what Joe said, but opts instead for the simpler answer: “I looked up your story. Saw your picture. You were killed by the former headmaster, out by this lake.”

She nods, staring out at the water, and seems largely uninterested in what he’s told her. “I wonder why I like being out here, then. That’s sort of morbid.”

“Is it weird to not remember everything?”

She picks up a leaf and examines it. “I guess. The weird thing is it’s all or nothing, and about the strangest things. I remember with crazy detail a bouquet of flowers my dad bought me for a holiday, but I can’t remember his face.”

“Wow.” Colin feels lame but, really, what can he say to that?

“The other night I was thinking about it. You know those game shows where someone stands in a phone booth and money shoots up from the floor and the person gets to grab as much as they can in a minute?”

He has no idea what she’s talking about but goes with it. “Sure.”

“Well, some of the bills are twenties, maybe a few hundreds but most of them are ones. So it looks like it’s a ton of money blowing around, but it’s not. And no matter what you end up with, you’re happy because you have money in your hands.”

She glides around a boulder in the middle of the trail, and he hops on it and then leapfrogs onto a long, rotting log. He can feel her watching him out of the corner of her eye.

“Anyway, I feel like at some point after I died, I must have had a minute in a booth with my memories and I grabbed a couple of fives, but mostly ones.”

“So, in other words, you’re happy to have something—”

“But what I ended up remembering was pretty useless,” she finishes, smiling wryly.

“Not enough green to buy much, eh? Like who you were or why you’re here?”

She laughs, her eyes glowing with relief. “Exactly.”

It’s the relief that kills him because he’s starting to believe that if one person was supposed to understand her from the start, it was him. “I’m sorry I was a dick.”

“You weren’t a dick.” She snorts. “God, I forgot how much I love that word used like that. And ‘douche.’ ”

“That one applies too. You were all, ‘Hey, I died,’ and I was like, ‘Wow, that sucks. I gotta jet.’ ”

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 is a burnout with 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.