Page 42

“You understand,” said Maksim, “that if you kiss me, I will feel it. In a way you will not. I have waited eleven hundred years. I am not an easy subject for an experiment.”

“I know.”

“I would ask you to be kind.”

That got me, and it wasn’t the words. It was the tone, quiet and unguarded and completely without armor.

“Hey,” I said. “Ice prince.”

“Yes?”

“I’m not gonna break you.”

“That is not the concern.”

“Then what is?”

He pushed off the boards, and in three unhurried strides he was in front of me, close enough that I had to tilt my head back, since he was six-four against my six-one. I could see his gray eyes and a little frost of breath, though he’d told me he didn’t need to breathe. It occurred to me that he might have started doing it for my benefit.

“That you will feel nothing,” he said softly, “and I will believe you.”

My heart did a stupid thing.

“And that you will feel something,” he added, “and I will not be able to let you go.”

“You said you’d always let go.”

“I said I would let go when you asked.” A very small smile. “I did not say it would not hurt.”

I don’t remember deciding to do it. One second we were standing there. The next, my gloves were on the ice, and my hands were on his face, and his skin was cold under my palms, smooth and shockingly delicate, the skin of something very old that has never been used to being touched.

He closed his eyes.

I kissed him.

I’d planned it, I swear, as a quick one, a peck, a test, a lab result, ten seconds and a shrug.

It lasted about a second and a half before I forgot how to think.

His mouth was cool at first, and then it wasn’t. It opened under mine like a door, slow, patient, and the cold went out of it and a warmth came in, and I made a sound. I didn’t know I could make that sound. His hands were at my waist, careful, with the palms flat, not pulling, not pushing, just there, the way you’d hold a bird. I felt him tremble. All the way through, a long shiver that started in his shoulders and went down his arms into me.

“Lex,” he breathed, against my mouth.

My knees went. I grabbed his shoulders, he caught me, we swayed once on the ice, and I laughed into his mouth and he laughed too. Really laughed. A short, startled sound, rusty as an old hinge, and it went right through the middle of my chest and made a home there.

The second kiss wasn’t a test at all.

I’d love to say it was gentle. It wasn’t. I’d been holding my breath for a week and it all came out at once. I hauled him down by the front of his sweater and kissed him like I was trying to win something, and he kissed me back with a slow, terrible, devastating patience, as though he’d read the book on this and had every intention of finishing it. My back hit the boards. His hand slid up into my hair. Somewhere behind my ribs a light went on that I’d forgotten was there.

He tasted like winter. And under it, just barely, like honey.

I don’t know how long it lasted, a minute or ten. When he finally lifted his head, he did it first, not me. His breath was not steady, and his eyes had gone black at the center, ringed with a thin line of red like the edge of a coal.

“I must stop,” he said hoarsely.

“Why?”

“Because if I do not—” He turned his face away sharply. “Lex. My teeth.”