I smoothed the front of the dress; the skirt tickled and teased my legs. I could just see the curve of my breasts. Suddenly it seemed very urgent to go back to the room so that Sam could see me. It seemed very urgent to make him look at me and touch me.
But when I made it back to the room and slid in the doorway, I was abruptly self-conscious. Sam was sitting on the floor, leaning against his bed with his eyes closed, listening to the music, far away from this room, but he opened his eyes when I shut the door behind me. I made a face, twisted my hands behind my back.
“What do you think?” I asked.
He scrambled to his feet.
“Oh,” he said.
I said, “The only thing is that I couldn’t do the tie in the back myself.”
Sam took a breath and stepped to me. I could feel my heart pounding, though I couldn’t understand why it was. He picked up the ties where they attached to the side of the dress and put his arms behind me. But instead of tying them, he dropped the ties and pressed his hands up against my back, his hands hot through the thin cotton of the dress. It felt like there was nothing between his fingertips and my skin. His face rested on my neck. I could hear him breathing; each breath sounded measured, restrained.
I whispered, “You like it, then?”
Then, all of a sudden, we were kissing. It felt like such a long time since we’d kissed like this, like it was deadly serious — for a second, all I thought was, I just ate pizza, until I realized that Sam had, too. Sam slid his hands around to rest on my hips, wrinkling the fabric, erasing my doubt, his fingers tight with wanting. Just that, just the heat of his palms through the dress, holding my hips, was enough to make my insides twist fiercely. I was wound so tightly it hurt. A little sigh escaped from me.
“I can stop,” he said, “if you’re not ready.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t stop.”
So, kneeling on the bed, we kept kissing, and he kept touching, careful, like he had never touched me before. It was like he couldn’t remember what shape I’d had before, and he was rediscovering it. He felt where my shoulder blades pressed against the fabric of the dress. Skimmed his palm along my shoulders. His fingers traced along the swell of my breast at the edge of the dress.
I closed my eyes. There were other things in the world that demanded our attention, but right now, all I could think of were my thighs and Sam’s hands running up them under my skirt, pushing the fabric up like summer clouds around me. When I opened my eyes, my hands pressed on top of Sam’s hands, there were a hundred shadows beneath us. Every one of them was Sam or me, but it was impossible to tell which was which.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
• COLE •
This new concoction felt like poison.
Sometime after midnight, I stepped outside. It was black as death on the other side of the back door, but I listened to make certain I was alone. My stomach was tight with hunger, a sensation at once painful and productive. Concrete proof that I was working. The fasting had made me jittery and watchful, a cruel sort of high. I lay my notebook with the details of my experiments on the step so that Sam would know where I’d gone if I didn’t come back. The woods hissed at me. They didn’t sleep even if everyone else did.
I rested the needle against the inside of my wrist and closed my eyes.
My heart was already kicking like a rabbit.
In the syringe, the liquid was colorless as spit and thin as a lie. In my veins, it was razors and sand, fire and mercury. A knife notched every vertebrae in my spine. I had exactly twenty-three seconds to wonder if I’d killed myself this time and eleven more to realize that I was hoping I hadn’t. Three more after that to wish that I’d stayed in my bed. That left two to think holy shit.
I burst out of my human body, splitting my skin so fast that I felt it slough off my bones. My heart was exploding. Overhead, the stars wheeled and focused. I grabbed for the stair, the wall, the ground, anything that wasn’t moving. My notebook skidded off the back