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“We’re alive,” she says. “We made it.”
I feel like I’m about to shake apart. “I’ve screwed up everything, haven’t I?”
Now it’s her turn not to meet my gaze. “I wouldn’t let Daneca work me,” she says, slowly and carefully, putting every word together as if having one out of place will make everything fall apart. “But I didn’t stop loving you. Because I always have, Cassel. Since we were kids. You have to remember: I paraded around in my underwear at my own birthday party.”
That startles a laugh out of me. I touch the ear she pierced that night, the hole closed now, and try to imagine a world where I wasn’t the only one who felt something. “I didn’t think that meant—”
“Because you’re an idiot,” she says. “An idiot. When the curse wore off, I couldn’t let you see that I still had feelings. I thought I was the only one who’d ever had them.”
She has woven her fingers together and is clenching them tight, the leather taut over her knuckles. “You were kind. You’re always kind. I figured you pretended to love me until you couldn’t pretend anymore. And I couldn’t let you think you still had to. So I’d jab myself in the hand with scissors, or pens—with anything sharp in reach—whenever I thought of you. Until when I saw you I could concentrate on that moment of pain.… And despite that, I still wanted to see you.”
“I haven’t been pretending, Lila,” I say. “I never was. I know how it looked, me asking Daneca to make you not feel anything. But I kissed you before I knew what my mother had done, remember? I kissed you because I had wanted to for a very long time.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
“That night, in your dorm room— Lila, you were cursed,” I say. “And I almost didn’t care. It was awful, because you acted like you really felt all these things, and I had to constantly remind myself that it wasn’t real—and sometimes I was overwhelmed by the awfulness. I wanted to blot out how bad I felt. I knew it wasn’t right and I still didn’t stop myself.”
“Okay,” she says. “It’s okay.”
“But I would never want—”
“I know that, Cassel,” she says. “You could have explained.”
“And said what? That I did want to be with you?” I demand. “That I just couldn’t trust myself enough? That I—”
She leans forward and brings her mouth to mine. I have never been so profoundly glad to be forced to shut up.
I close my eyes, because even seeing her is too much right now.
I feel like a man who’s been living on bread and water and is now overwhelmed by a feast. I feel like someone chained in the dark for so long that the light has become terrifying.
Her lips are soft, sliding against mine. I am lost in kiss after drowning kiss. My gloved fingers trace the skin of her cheek and the hollow of her throat until she moans into my mouth. My blood is boiling, pooling low in my gut.
She unknots my tie with quick fingers. When I pull back to look at her, she grins and tugs the cloth free from my collar in a single motion.
I raise both eyebrows.
With a laugh Lila pushes herself off the floor and reaches out her gloved hand to haul me to my feet. “Come on,” she says.
I stand up. Somehow my shirt has gotten untucked. Then we’re kissing again, staggering up the stairs. She stops to kick off her boots, bracing herself against me and the wall. I shrug out of my jacket.
“Lila,” I say, but that’s all I can manage as she begins to unbutton my white dress shirt.
It falls to the floor of the hallway.
We lurch into my bedroom, where I imagined her a thousand times, where I thought I had lost her forever. Those memories seem blurred now, hard to count as important beside the vividness of her cool leather-clad hand brushing over the hard, tensed planes of my stomach and the corded muscles of my arms. I suck in my breath.
She steps away to bite the end of her glove, pulling it off her hand that way. When she drops it, my gaze tracks its fall.
I catch her bare hand and kiss her fingers, which makes her stare at me, wide-eyed. I bite down on the heel of her hand, and she groans.
When I pull off my own gloves, my hands are shaking. The taste of her skin is on my tongue. I feel feverish.
If I have to die tomorrow when the Feds come for me, then this is the last request of my heart. This. The sight of lashes brushing her cheek as her eyes flutter closed. The pulse in her throat. Her breath in my mouth. This.
I have been with girls I cared about and girls I didn’t. But I have never been with a girl I loved more than anything else in all the world. I am staggered by it, overwhelmed with the desire to get everything right.
My mouth dips low to trace the scar on her neck. Her nails dig into my back.
