Never (Never, #1) (39)

It’s slow and gentle and sweet. There aren’t fireworks, no big bang—just my kite-shaped heart floating up, up and away into a Botticelli sky.

“Whoa!” He pulls back a bit. “You’re good at that.”

I sniff a laugh. “Thank you.”

He frowns a little. “Now you say I’m good too.”

I roll my eyes, amused. “You’re good too.”

He cracks a smile, and I think the sun climbs back a bit higher into the sky again.

And this was the night he stopped building the pillow wall between us.





* * *



* Do you know what I mean? The kind that can feel almost too warm at times, yet it is the most beautiful, intoxicating summer’s day so you’ll never leave it.

* Though admittedly increasingly less so as the days trickle on.

? Haven’t I?

? I clean my teeth with sand and chew on mint leaves afterwards.

* Rye.

? Calla.

? Peter.





CHAPTER

SIX


It doesn’t take long for Peter’s kisses to get more and better and longer and braver. Their occurrences become more frequent, and the placement of his hands gets bolder as the days breeze by us. It is funny though, no matter what he does or how he kisses me, he still can’t quite seem to catch my kiss.

It maddens him. It could actually be why we do it so often?

Sometimes it feels as though it’s a game that he can’t stop playing; the prize is the kiss, and I’m merely the field on which the game is played.

That sounds worse than I mean it to. It’s not bad at all… His kisses are as you’d imagine they’d be: they run through your whole body like the warmth of a rising sun, taste like waterfalls and springtime and rainbows and Milky Ways and all the good stars. I do like kissing him very much. Though there’s nothing particularly affirming in his eyes that makes me sure of what I am to him.

If I sit next to him, his arm goes around my shoulders, especially if there’s another person in the room—he’s not a good sharer. He’s innately more suspicious of all the boys now, particularly Brodie because he’s the biggest and thus to Peter, I am learning, the most threatening.

Now, I don’t want you to think I’m complaining about it. I’m not horribly difficult to please, and I am happy here. The kisses are good, verging on great even. I just don’t know so much that it’s indicative of something we are as much as it’s just something we do because why wouldn’t we?

It’s proving somewhat difficult to know him more though, particularly in the ways that I’d like to know him—do you know what I mean?—to know him in a way that feels similar to how I now know his body and he mine.

But getting to know Peter is like trying to study water as it runs over a fall. Always moving, always rushing, somehow constant, and never the same all at once.

To make matters worse and harder, there are the obvious complications in that he nearly forgets absolutely everything.

He’ll disappear for chunks of time in the day, and he could be with Calla, or he might be out fishing or playing with the mermaids, or he could be soaring treetops with the boys, or actually, he might be doing none of that.

And I don’t think he’s being evasive, though it’s impossible to ever be entirely sure. It’s easier to presume he’s actually just as forgetful as he says he is.

He’s not home at dinnertime. It’s just me and the boys, and that’s fine. I don’t need to be around Peter all the time, though I see why it might sound like I think I do. I don’t. It’s just a strange feeling to be in a foreign place, almost entirely dependent on an undependable person. It feels like you’re playing a game of chess for the first time in your life against a master, in the dark, and only his pieces glow. That’s what it feels like to be with him.

“So how long have you been a Lost Boy, Brodie?” I ask as I have a big sip of water from a coconut shell. The water here, how it tastes, you wouldn’t believe it. Somehow sweet like nectar but not remotely overbearing, just perfectly balanced to nothing.

“I don’t know.” Brodie squints to remember. “A bit of time now.”

“Were you always bigger than the others?”

He shakes his head. “I think I was small once.”

“Does everyone get old here?”

He nods. “Except for Peter.”

“Were you very young then, when he found you?”

Brodie puts his chin in his hand, thinking back. “We were on a boat, I think?” He blinks a few times. “I can remember it only a bit. I can hear seagulls in my mind when I think of it.”

“We?” I tilt my head at him. “Your brother, you mean?”

He nods, straining at the thought. “I think so.”

“Did he not come with you?”

“No, Peter took us both.” He nods.

“Took?” I blink, confused, and Brodie shakes his head.

“No. Saved.” He shakes his head, looking past me to the memory. “He saved us. Our parents, my mum, she wasn’t”—he pauses, breathes out—“paying attention, and I went overboard. Maybe we both did?”

“And Peter saved you?” I smile at Brodie, feeling a rush of pride for Peter. How good of him.