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Once, a year ago, I would never have believed how easy it was to just walk out of one building and into another. The front doors of the dorms aren’t even locked. Each floor door is locked, but not with anything challenging. No bolt. Just a quick twist and swipe, and I’m walking across her floor and into her room, like getting caught is the last thing on my mind.
“You,” I say, my voice low but not low enough. She’s huddled in blankets and peering up at me owlishly.
“I can’t keep having these dreams,” I whisper. “You have to stop giving them to me.”
“Are you crazy?” She rolls onto her back, kicking off the blanket and sitting up. She’s only got on a tank top and underwear. “You’re going to get us both thrown out of school.”
I open my mouth to bargain with her, but I feel suddenly undone by despair. I am like a clockwork automaton whose gears just locked.
She touches my arm, bare skin on bare skin. “I’m not giving you any dreams. I’m not working you. Can’t you believe there’s one person in your life who’s not out to get you?”
“No,” I say, too honest by half. I sit down on the bed and put my head in my hands.
She puts her hand on my cheek. “There’s something really wrong, isn’t there?”
I shake my head. “It’s just dreams.”
I don’t want Lila to see that I hoped the dreams were from her, wanted them to be clues that added up to something, wished for them to be something that could just stop. I didn’t want more evidence that the inside of my head is an ugly place.
She drops her hand and looks at me, head tilted to one side. For a moment I am flooded with nostalgia for us being kids, for my own uncomplicated and completely impossible yearning.
“Tell me,” she says.
“I can’t,” I say, shaking my head again.
There is a sound in the hallway, a door shutting and then footsteps. Lila looks toward her closet, and I start to pad my way toward it. Then I hear the flush of a toilet.
I sigh and lean against the wall.
“Come here,” she whispers recklessly, opening the covers. “Get under. You’ll be hidden if someone comes in.”
“I don’t know if that’s such a—,” I begin.
“Shhhh.” She cuts me off, smiling in a way that suggests that she’s mocking her own motivations before I get the chance. “Come on. Quick.”
It’s not that I don’t know that it’s a bad idea. It’s that, lately, bad ideas have a particular hold over me. I get under the covers. They’re warm from being against her skin, and they carry her smell—soap and the faint trace of ash. When she throws an arm over my torso, urging me to press against her, I do.
Her skin is soft and scorchingly hot after the cool night air. Her leg twines around mine. It feels so good, I have to choke back a gasp.
It’s so easy. Wrong, but easy. There are so many things I want to say to her, and they’re all unfair. I kiss her instead, smothering the unutterable I love you. I have always loved you against her tongue. Her mouth opens under mine with a whimper.
When she pulls her tank top over her head and throws it onto the floor, I am hollowed out, empty of everything but gnawing self-hate. When her bare fingers thread through my hair, even that fades away. There is nothing but her.
“I’m a good pretend girlfriend,” she says, like she’s telling a joke that’s just between us.
We should really stop.
Everything slows to her skin, the swell of her lip between my teeth, the arch of her bare back. My hands slide to her hip bones and the edge of her cotton underpants.
“The best,” I say. My voice sounds unfamiliar, like I’ve been screaming.
Lila’s mouth moves against my shoulder. I can feel her smile.
I push her hair gently back from her cheek. I can feel her heartbeat throbbing in the pulse at her throat, measuring out the moments before she’s gone.
The moment she was cursed, I lost her. Once it wears off—soon—she will be embarrassed to remember things that she said, things she did, things like this. No matter how solid she feels in my arms, she is made of smoke.
I should stop, but there’s no point in stopping. Because I’m not strong enough—eventually, I won’t stop.
