Colin’s semilifeless body is blue and mostly naked, laid out on the foil blanket. He looks skinnier than she remembers; his muscles spasm sharply. As soon as Colin has coughed all of the water he inhaled out on the foil, Jay sits back and just watches him shiver.
Jay seems calm. He’s totally onboard with this insanity, no nerves, no hesitation.
Just as she’s on the verge of screaming her panic into the dull gray sky, she hears, “Luce. Turn around.”
She swivels toward Colin’s voice and her heart melts.
CHAPTER 26 HIM
LUCY LAUNCHES HERSELF AT HIM, HEAVY AND warm and full; her lips find his neck, his jaw, his mouth. He could consume this girl, he thinks. He could bury himself in her and never come up for air. With her neck exposed and her smile so big it reflects the sky above, Colin realizes he’d expected they would run off into the powdery snow and strip and just get down to it. But when she raises her head and looks at him, her eyes full of relief and excitement and fear and desire, the only thing he wants is to be here, like this. The world around him is so bright and full of detail, he finds it hard to even blink. It’s exactly like he remembers.
She’s taking his lead, her fingers wrapped around his arms, waiting for him to decide where he wants to go. All he knows is he doesn’t want to watch Jay when he starts resuscitating him. Colin tugs her arm and leads her to a bench a few hundred feet down the trail.
Colin remembers his tenth-grade photography class and how exposure is measured in lux seconds—brightness over time. The sweet spot was always that point where everything was visible, but before the light bled through, erasing the details. Here, in this world, it seems that the amount of light that can exist is limitless, and all it does is show him more. More color, more detail. Each rare leaf has a tiny skeleton, visible from even ten feet away. The clouds are gone. The sky is blue, yes, but also green and yellow and even red. When he inhales, he thinks he can feel each molecule colliding inside his lungs.
They sit. They smile. This is the strangest thing that has ever happened in this universe; he’s convinced of it. His body could be dying on the lake and whatever it is that makes him live—his spirit or soul—is beyond elated to just be here.
Lucy wraps a blanket around his shoulders. She climbs into his lap, facing him, wrapping them up so only their heads peek out the top.
“I’m not cold,” he says.
“I know. But it’s weird to see you like this, without a blanket.” She smiles, bending to kiss his jaw. He lets his head fall back, feeling.
Her hands slip up his front, solid solid solid touches. His skin rises to meet her fingertips. She talks softly as she kisses around his neck, his face, his ears. “You okay?” He nods. This place is the most intense thing he’s ever seen, and Lucy feels better than anything, than everything, even than warm water running down cold skin or the first bloom of sugar on his tongue. Better than fast sex or a faster downhill ride.
“You’re humming.” She laughs.
“I’m in heaven.”
She stills, fingers paused, splayed across his ribs. “You’re not.”
“I didn’t mean that. Settle down, Trigger. I meant meta phorically.”
She leans back and watches him.
“You think I’m insane, don’t you? You think this is insane,” he says, suddenly made uneasy by the intensity in her swirling gray-green eyes.
“Yes,” she says, leaning back in. She sucks his ear. Tugs at his hair. “No.” She moves closer, squirming over him.
“There’s very little about us that isn’t absurd.”
“Most of it’s not absurd,” he says, for some reason prickling at this. “We aren’t absurd. It’s that . . .” He searches for the right ending and gives up, laughing. “You’re dead and I’m kind of in between right now.”
“Oh, that,” she says into his neck. “Not absurd at all.” His hands find waist, ribs, breasts. They grow wild and impatient, itching to feel every inch.
Although part of him realizes that Lucy simply feels like girl—soft curves and skin that responds to his fingers and her half-word exhales—most of him thinks that Lucy feels like no other girl ever. She’s softer; her sounds are the best sounds. He grabs her hips, squeezes. An embarrassing groan escapes his lips at the shape of her.
But it makes her smile. “You like to squeeze.”
“What?” He lifts his head, trying to understand her meaning through her eyes. They’re honey, hungry brown. “In the picture with your ex-girlfriend?”
“The picture with Trinity from the winter formal?” She nods. “You’re gripping her hips. You’re gripping them like you knew them.”
He grins down at her. “That is such a chick thing to notice.
‘Like I knew them.’ What does that even mean?”
“Like you gripped them a lot.”
“Let’s not talk about my ex-girlfriend right now, please.” “I’m serious. Do you miss being with a girl you can grip?” “No.”
She’s skeptical.
“I want that with you, it’s true. But I don’t want sex so much that it’s worth getting it elsewhere.”
She fights a smile, though Colin doesn’t know why. “Let that smile out,” he tells her. “I’m so crazy about you and your hips that I can’t grip.”
Lucy gives him a smile that could power a small town. “You’re so hot,” he whispers.
To prove him wrong, she grabs a small handful of snow off the back of the bench and presses it to her chest. It stays there, crystalline and twinkling in the unearthly blue light.
Slowly, her skin takes it in. He imagines their bodies like this must be such scavengers, needing to steal anything solid to take form. Now his girl is made of snow and beauty. “Tell me a story,” she says.