Never (Never, #1) (76)
Peter gives me a big grin. “Welcome to La Vie En Grande.”
“This place is amazing,” I tell him as I stare up at the sky. He’s lying next to me; we’re on a huge lily pad, the size of a pontoon.
“Do you think?” Peter asks, rolling onto his stomach, looking down at me.
I give him a look. “Are you crazy?”
Underneath us swim koi fish the size of orcas and blue whales their regular size, because Peter said the ones on Earth are the giant kind; they just escaped one day to our world, and we shouldn’t like them to be any bigger or else who knows what might happen.
“I love it,” I tell him sincerely.
And then all the fish beneath us scatter, and a shadow spreads in the water about the size of a lorry.
“Peter,” I say as I sit up slowly, tucking my legs under myself. “Something’s here.”
He looks around, unaffected. “Oh!” He sits up. “That’s just my kraken.”
I stare over at him. “Your what?”
He shrugs, dangling his feet in the water. “My kraken,” he says, looking back over his shoulder at me before he slips into the water, and I let out a little scream as I scramble after him.
“Peter!” I call for him, reaching into the water. Nothing for a long few seconds, then he pops up on the other side of the lily pad, elbows resting up on it.
“I’d stay away from the edge if I were you.” He gives me a look. “The kraken likes me, but he doesn’t like you.”
I scurry back into the centre, and Peter lets out a little laugh as he climbs back onto the leaf, lying back down on his stomach, warm under the sun.
He has a beautiful back. So brown, so broad, sprinkled freckles on it from all the suns here, a gift of a tiny constellation all mapped out on him.
I lie down on my side and blink over at him.
He watches me. He smiles a small bit before he rolls on his side, head resting in his hand.
And then he leans in towards me, eyes dashingly sure, and his mouth falls open as his eyes drop to my mouth. We’re close enough now that I can feel his breath on me, and it feels heavy. It hits me like that tired wave you get late at night to carry you off to the place where the dream lives. It makes me dizzy. Peter is like that though; he’s a free fall. Being with him can be scary and uncomfortable, but god, the view on the way down, the rush you get when he remembers you—it’s intoxicating.
And there are worse things than being forgotten accidentally.
Say, someone choosing to forget you, someone choosing to hurt you because you accidentally hurt them? That’s worse. Peter isn’t the villain. He might be occasionally misguided, and he might need a little bit of refining—he is inarguably in dire need of a mother—but he isn’t the villain.
He brushes his mouth over mine, lightly at first—it feels like butterfly wings and nervous feet—and then he rolls on top of me, kisses me heavily, and it spreads through me like flooding water. I feel it in every part of me. He’s like a dip in the ocean. You know when you’re in the water and you’re fully immersed, and you walk into a cold spot and you feel it everywhere, and it’s fresh and it makes you feel alive and startles you all at once?
That’s what it feels like to kiss him. Like that and a rip. Like with him on my body like this, it feels as though I’m being pulled by a current, far out to sea. The sea is impossibly blue and the sky is unimaginably clear, and I am incredibly alone in the ocean besides him.
It’s him and me in the cold patch in the deep, and I think it’s good that kissing him feels like a cold patch in the ocean, don’t you? Because it’s refreshing. That’s a good thing. Refreshing is good. Not everything needs to feel warm and like a fire, and besides, fires can really hurt you if you get too close to one, can’t they? I got too close to one before, I think. Did I? Was I too close, or was I not close enough? What am I thinking of him for anyway? I don’t want to think of the pirate now.
I want to think about Peter and where his fingers are running along my body. I want his fingers on my body like this, don’t I? It’s lovely to be wanted, don’t you think? It’s a great way to feel alive, which I am, and I’m increasingly aware of what it means to be human: how good it feels to be seen and touched and how sweet it is to be gazed upon by the eyes of a boy who likes you, to have your shoulders kissed by seven suns but also kissed with the strange and quiet awareness of mortality… That I’m here and I’m breathing and there’s air in my lungs, and I’m with Peter and I’ve waited so long for his attention to just be on me and me alone, and finally it is—his attention and his eyes and his hands. Are his hands on my throat? I don’t think they are. Maybe, are they though? I don’t open my eyes just in case, because I love being here, I think, and I love being with him, and it’s where I’m meant to be, right here, all alone with him.
And then it scurries through my mind—this quick, terrible thought that I don’t want in there, like a mouse scurrying through the house in the middle of the night with the lights off—because it is just him and I alone in the middle of the sea that this great and tremendous kiss has pulled us out into, and the kiss is just that—it is great, I promise, it’s great; I can feel it in my fingers and crawling up my spine, which is great—and I wonder, quietly, maybe, just for a second, whether he might drown me, and then my eyes spring open.