“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. Colin talks Jay into skipping school the next day. They throw the bikes in the back of his truck and head out to the lake, hiking their way to where a few daring sledders have packed down the snow.
For a few hours, he’s almost able to forget. They ride through the cold until he’s sweating beneath layers of clothing, pushing himself harder than he has in ages. They tackle the trails, jump off ramps, and each wipe out at least a dozen times on an impromptu ramp they cut into the snow.
Colin is balancing on the back of the bench near the lake when Jay finally asks the question Colin knows has been gnawing at him.
“She’s gone again, isn’t she?”
Colin’s tires land with a soft crunch, and he looks up at Jay, squinting against the brightness of the sky. “Yeah.”
“Shit. Dude, do you think she’s off using somewhere?”
“She isn’t into drugs.” Colin glares at Jay before looking down and flicking a leaf off his handlebar. The hills are silent, but the wind howls around them, catching the snow and spinning it before letting it fall back to the ground. “I think I need to tell you something.”
Jay kicks the snow from his boots and waits.
“So, Lucy . . . Man, I don’t even know how to say this.” Colin laughs at the absurdity of this and feels a wave of sympathy for Lucy in hindsight, for his reaction the night she told him the truth. But, God, he needs to tell someone. He’s not sure he can go another day shouldering the weight of her absence alone. “She’s dead,” he says simply, after all.