They kiss, pulling away the last remnants of clothing, and then he’s moving into her, moving over her and talking, and she doesn’t care that it’s going to end because this feeling— this feeling—is what they’ve been missing. The connection and touch, the communication that words can never reach. Colin whispers his love into her neck as he shakes above her.
She clutches him, pressing her face against his skin and listening to the rustle of the blankets near her head as he releases them from his fists. Lucy doesn’t want to move from this spot, maybe ever.
“Are you okay?” he asks quietly, his open mouth kissing a path across her throat to her ear. When she nods, he whispers, “Not sure how I feel that our first time was in a dirty shed.”
She laughs. “I don’t care about the setting.”
He pulls back and looks at her, playfully bereft but obviously giddy, and then he blinks, languid, just for her. “I don’t either.”
The moment stretches. Colin hovers over her, kissing, eyes open, with an intensity that makes every muscle in her body tighten, makes her chest ache with how much he consumes her.
He doesn’t need to say he loves her, but he does.
Then he’s pulled from her body, flying backward again as if a band pulls at his chest, his mouth wide in an anguished cry in the shape of her name. He passes through the dancing bands of light and dust, he filters easily through the cracked walls and damp wood planks, and then Colin is gone.
Hours. It feels like it takes hours to get dressed and tear back down the trail, to where Jay pulled him out early, to where Colin will be awake. Lucy trips over roots and sticks in the snowy mud of the shore. She doesn’t know how to manage these new, strangely heavy limbs.
And then she’s there, falling on top of his blue-gray body and apologizing and kissing his unconscious face. “What happened? Why did you bring him back early?”
“I didn’t, Lucy. I waited exactly an hour.” Jay pushes her away, forcing air into Colin’s lungs and smacking his chest. “Wake the fuck up, C.”
Lucy’s hands curl into fists, a wave of anger flashing along her skin, and she shoves Jay’s arm away, causing him to cry out, stare at her for a beat in horror.
“What happened to you?” Jay asks, voice shaking. He squeezes his eyes shut and looks at her again before he reaches for another hand warmer to shove into the mittens covering Colin’s fingers. “What happened to your face?”
“My face?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing. I must have . . .” Lucy ignores Jay’s rambling and bends over Colin, hugging him through the heavy layer of blankets. “I’m here. You’re going to be okay. I’m here.”
CHAPTER 28 HIM
IT’S SO STRANGE TO BE IN THIS PLACE AGAIN, caught between life and life unraveling. Colin feels the faint burn of ice and snow against his skin, but he’s not cold. Flashes of light pulse beyond his closed lids, and the echo of his name rings through the air in panicked voices, but he can’t gather the strength to open his eyes. Despite the noise in his head, his chest is strangely silent. It’s taking too long, and the instinct to return grows fainter and fainter.
He feels a mild tickle of fear, but it’s gone quickly, the urge to slip back into darkness wrapping around him like a blanket. In a thick, creeping realization, Colin understands that his inclination to curl back into the lake is because it’s Lucy’s lake. He’s less surprised to feel positive that Lucy is the ghost at the lake than he is to feel in his frigid bones that she’s been waiting for him. For so long there hasn’t been anything for him here, and there is everything for him in the lake. It would be so easy to go back in and walk down the trail to Lucy.
That’s all he’s ever had to do.
CHAPTER 29 HER
HIS EYES OPEN AT ONCE. NOT THE CALM, fluttering awakening she expected, but one moment he’s blue and unconscious, the next he’s staring at her, gulping for air, his face burning red.
“Luce,” he gasps. He inhales roughly, as if he’s sucking oxygen through a straw.
She presses on his neck to feel his pulse.
“Colin.” She has a million questions. Can you feel me? Do you remember? Do you hurt? Can you move?
“I think I know where you go,” he mumbles thickly into her neck. His entire body has begun to shiver violently, and it takes him a moment to get the words out. “I think you live in the lake.”
Her veins run cold at the thought that her home is in that deep, isolated world. That she is the one haunting this school. But something about it rings true; she’s more peaceful at the lake than she is anywhere else on campus. And there are no waters entering or leaving it; it’s as landlocked as she is.
Sunlight steals the darkness from Colin’s bedroom inch by inch and finally shines a spotlight on his warm, breathing body. For the hundredth time she memorizes his face, his neck, the way his hair curls and falls over his forehead.
“Wake up. Talk to me,” she says. It’s been one of the longest nights she’s spent with him, waiting for him to come to and show that he’s not hurt. Or sick. Or brain damaged.
He makes some groggy waking-up noises, turning to face her. “Your skin feels so different lately.” He pauses, and Lucy hopes he’s realizing that this conversation seems familiar. “Do you think it has to do with me?” he says instead.
She pulls back to look at him. Really look at him, as in try to see if his pupils are reacting to light and his skin has taken on his normal color. Does he not remember that they’ve had this conversation before, twice now? “Maybe.”
“Do you think me being close to you, or even like you in the lake somehow makes you more . . . ?” He shakes his head, rubbing his face. “Like, more real?”
She smiles, trying to shake off the strange tickle in her spine she feels looking at his innocently wide-eyed expression. “I want to be a real girl, Geppetto.”