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He shelters me with his body, with the scant edge of the roof, and buries his fingers in my hair, bringing my face up so I’ll stop huddling from the cold. I relent, letting him carry me away, sweep me back out to sea. What does it matter if I get lost in his kiss again? It’s just a kiss.
So we kiss.
We kiss until the strands of his soft black hair grow heavy and cold between my fingers, tangling like wet seaweed trapping me on the ocean floor. We kiss until I can feel his body quaking with shivers, and I know I am too, but they’re hot and cold shivers at the same time, and I can’t make sense of them. We kiss until he lifts me off my feet, and my legs circle his hips, and he pushes me up against the wall harder, his hot mouth growing more frantic, more urgent, more hungry. I can feel it too, this achy, needy hunger that’s consuming me too, gnawing and gnashing and clawing like a caged animal with her next meal dangling just out of reach.
It’s not me, because it can’t be me. Nice girls from the suburbs in Connecticut don’t have snarling beasts in their chests, at their cores. It’s not even a little part of me. It’s something he did to me, something he put in me with his bruising grip on my thigh and the clench of his fingers in my hair, making my scalp burn. And when I finally feel that animal thing tear from its bonds and break loose I want to warn him, but I don’t have time. It rushes over me, from my center outwards, like a star exploding, and I can feel the volley of popping, sizzling electricity shoot along my limbs, curling my toes and racing along the soles of my feet, prickling in my scalp like the crackling cascade of sparks raining down after the streaks of golden-white light of a firework.
For a minute I’m spinning and I don’t know up from down, and Oliver is still kissing me, and somehow he doesn’t know. How can he not know?
I push him back at last, shoving at his chest, trying to catch my breath. It’s too much, and he’s too close, and I want to run away and hide. He would be disgusted and horrified if he knew.
He eases back, releasing my thigh and letting me back to my feet. “Sorry,” he mumbles, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. I can see a faint streak of red on his skin before the rain streams over it, taking it away. Did I bite him?
“You alright?” he asks.
I nod, relieved that he looks as disconcerted as I feel. “I’m cold,” I say, wrapping my arms around my chest. “We should go in.”
His gaze slips to follow the movement, and then he looks away. “Give me a minute.”
I nod and turn away, swallowing hard as I slide the door open, grateful for an escape. My eyes instantly go to the door, sure my mother will be standing there, her arms crossed and lips white with anger. I shake the thought away and grab some dry pajamas. We would have heard them pull up.
I quickly change in the bathroom and come back to find Oliver hovering inside the door to the balcony. “I’ll walk home,” he says. “They might be gone all night.”
“I can give you some dry clothes if you want to wait,” I say, gesturing toward the other rooms, where I’m sure my uncles have plenty of dry clothes. “At least wait until the rain dies down. You can warm up before you leave.”
“Not a problem,” he mutters, avoiding my gaze.
I realize I sound like my mother, fussing over him getting cold, when he obviously doesn’t care. He stood out in the rain with me for close to an hour.
“I’ll get you a towel,” I say, escaping to the bathroom. The temporary cease in awkwardness seems to be over, and we’re back to barely being able to speak to each other. I bring him a couple towels, then slide under the blankets, shivering too much to play it cool.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I was just freezing.”
“No, I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have come. It was a bad idea from the start.”
“If it makes you feel any better, if you hadn’t come, I would’ve sat here reading an assignment for school like a loser while Meghan ran off with your brother.”
“That sounds nice, actually.”
I snort. “Reading on New Year’s Eve?”
He shrugs. “I like to read.”
“Yeah, me too, but not the musty old books they make us read for school.”
“What’s the book?”
I pick it up from the bedside table and turn the cover toward him.“Tess of the D’Urbervilles.”
“Fitting topic,” he says with a rueful smile, slipping off his shoes and coming to the bed.
“You’ve read it?”
“Once or twice.” He lays down one of the towels on top of the blanket and sits down on it. “Want to read it to me?”
“Um, no,” I say, giving him a look that hopefully conveys how insane he is for asking. “Reading aloud in class is my nightmare.”
“Oh come on, it can’t be all that bad.”
