I feel his breath against my hair, his sun-warmed forehead and lips so close, I could kiss the features of his face, let my lips trail over his skin so he never slips away. “I knew it was the name of a star,” he says softly, each word gliding over my flesh. “August taught me a few of the constellations. And when you said your name, I knew you were her.”
He lifts his hand and touches my temple, brushing the hair away—the girl he had been looking for, waiting for, in every town he visited. And now I am folded in his arms. He touches my lips and I close my eyes, wanting to keep this moment, grab it and pull it down from the sky, making it mine. But I know it won’t last. It will be taken from me just like everything else.
His dark eyelashes blink, watching me, and I hate the space between us. The treacherous air, the divide. I don’t take another breath, I don’t bother—I let my mouth hover over his, running my fingers across his collarbone, pressing into the black ink that spirals over muscle and bone. He is a boy who wears the ring of the Architect around his neck, a boy I was worried I’d never find. But now that I have, I want him more than ever. He exhales deeply and looks at me with more emotion than I’m able to understand. “Vega—” he says in a rush, and then he crushes his mouth to mine.
He feels like a dream that has split and bled into the real world. He is warm, faraway nights; he is a story knitted into the stars. He makes me feel shattered and put back together; he is more than I have words to describe. Heat climbs up behind my eyes, and tears break over my eyelids, because I’m afraid. Afraid I’ll lose him, afraidof what will happen inthe end. Afraid this might be the last night I will feel his mouth on my skin, kissing my chin, my neck, like I’m the last and only thing he will ever need.
It’s a feeling I never understood until now. A thing I don’t want to lose.
A feeling that’s so dangerous—it might destroy me.
Noah breathes into my hair, and I kiss his neck below his ear. Now I know what it feels like to want something so bad that it’s a blade inside you, digging deeper, until someone comes along and pulls it out. “I’m afraid,” I admit, whispering against his skin.
“Of what?” His voice is low, careful, like he already knows the answer.
I dig my fingers into his chest, trying to draw him closer. “Of tomorrow.”
He runs his mouth along my neck, back to my lips. “I know.” He kisses me again, harder, like he could imprint himself onto my flesh and our tattoos will become one. Like he could protect me from everything that hunts me outside these walls. Like he will never let me go.
But he doesn’t know the hurt that awaits us. And I hate the secret I keep inside me, that I keep from him.
I trace a finger along the small scar on his chin, mapping it, trying to blot out my own thoughts, crush them into the background. Noah pulls his mouth away, eyes staring into mine, sensing the fear that pumps inside me. In both of us.
“I won’t let them hurt you,” he says, a promise, a devotion. An oath. His hands glide along my back, my spine, along the geometry of my flesh, a tremble in his fingertips, shaking slightly. But thenthere is pressure in his touch, pulling the white nightgown upward, over my thighs, my waist, my head, until I am bare beneath him. Only my tattoos covering my skin.
He kisses me, lets his mouth flutter against mine, reshaping itself, and I make a small sound against his lips, the need heavy in me now. I need him closer. I need him to drown out everything else. His muscled shoulders are tensed above me, the ring suspended from his neck grazing my chest, breath against my mouth. I kiss him again.Again. Again. Bringing him to me. Pressing his body against mine.
I need his hands against my flesh, and they find me, tracing every line, every star where it curves along my abdomen, down my thigh. A map beneath his fingertips. I kiss his throat, where his breath quivers. I touch the starburst brand on his forearm, kissing it too, this boy who was once a Theorist. A traitor. Who protects me now, who I know will stay with me until the end.Until I leave him. And he won’t understand. My fingers find his lips, tracing their perfect shape, and I kiss him, needing all of him. Begging him not to let go, not ever. Not for anything.
His heart is beating through his chest, harder than when we ran from the schoolhouse, and he touches parts of me that no one ever has. He kisses me, and I feel myself shivering beneath him, shattering, digging my fingers into his flesh, into his tattoos—his past woven across his body. Both of us marked. Both of us still alive. And when my breath gusts against his ear, sweat and heat and tears, I feel like a girl broken apart and put back together.
I feel like starlight splintered into dust.
I close my eyes, feeling tangled up in him, stilled, and he settles onto his back, pulling me to him, as close as I can get—like this closewill never be close enough. He places a soft kiss on my forehead, his fingers brushing away my hair, straying across my temple.
I rest my head against his chest, his heartbeat pulsing beneath his ribs, feeling the dreamy lull of sleep tugging at me. But I don’t close my eyes. I think of the promise I made to Cricket, to keep Noah safe. We have each made promises to protect the other. To keep each other alive. But what’s worse: death, or leaving this boy I might love?
Love.
Because lying to him might break me worse than anything so far.
I press my fingers against his warm chest, along the silver chain around his neck, touching the Architect’s ring, tracing the constellation Circinus etched into the metal, while he drifts into his dreams. I peer across the room to the window where the moon is rising against the horizon, the sky severed into two sections, two halves. One filled with stars. The other without.
I hate the sight of it. What it means.
That this, here with Noah, won’t last.
I want to close my eyes and make it untrue—I want all the stories that Mom told me to be a lie. But her words find me, cutting through my daydream. “It’s the dead part of the sky,” she said, a grim slant, a lump in her throat. “Where no light can survive.”
She’d been studying it for years, swiveling her telescope into the deepest center of the shadow, charting it, trying to understand what her mother before her never did. Until the night, late in autumn, a hint of snow blowing down from the valley walls, when she called me down to the river, her eyes intent, wild like the fox who sometimeschased crickets up near the toolshed. She adjusted the rings of the telescope, then nodded. “Look,” she said, and when I peered through the layered glass, cut at just the right angle, I saw the very edge of the shadow in the sky, where it nudged against a star. And there, in that brief place where they met, the star was erupting in ribbons of light.
“What is it?” I asked, pulling my face away.
“It’s swallowing up the star,” she told me, a light in her eyes, in her voice, the excitement of discovery.
“Why?”
She craned her head up to the sky, looking at the shadow with her bare eyes, her expression changing, tugging together into a frown. “Because it’s a black hole.”
