“We’re going to be fertilizer,” I say more to myself than to Deiss.
“What?”
“Our bodies will be trampled, so they’ll just leave them here.” The details unveil themselves as I work through the scenario. “Why would anyone want to load up a bunch of bloody corpses and drive them back to town? It would be like chumming the waters in a sea of sharks.”
“Liv,” Deiss says, a little louder this time.
“Wild animals would be diving teeth-first into the vehicle.” I can hear the shakiness in my voice, but it sounds farther away than it should. I squeeze into Deiss’s forearm, finding the bone beneath the muscle. “They definitely wouldn’t risk it. They’ll leave us here. Maybe they won’t even tell anyone that we died. I wouldn’t, if my business depended on people feeling safe. It sounds much better if we just disappeared, doesn’t it?”
My voice cracks at the thought that my mom will assume I’m yet another person who has abandoned her.
“Nobody’s dying,” Deiss says. “And nobody’s disappearing, either. It’s just elephants.”
He sounds so earnest that I find myself laughing in response. It’s just elephants. It’s just a herd of animals that weigh up to fourteen thousand pounds each. Of course Deiss isn’t worried. He’s so loose that an elephant could step on him and his organs would probably slide to one side and take a nap until the pressure let up. My organs, on the other hand, would pop like tightly stretched rubber bands. My heart and lungs already feel stretched beyond their limits. They don’t even need to be fully stepped on. A little swing of one of the elephants’ trunks should be enough to shatter them like ice.
“Hey,” he says.
My laughter has turned into sharp little gasps. I look into his face. His eyes are just dark orbs outlined in white. I try to focus on them, but there’s another crash outside the tent. It sounds nearer this time, and a shriek rips out of my throat.
He leans toward me, and the padding of his thumb presses lightly against my lips, silently warning me to be quiet. I don’t know if he’s worried about me freaking out the elephants or our friends, but I hear the whine in the back of my throat that says another scream is on standby, straining to be released. Deiss seems to hear it, too, because his fingers slip down my jaw and over the tension before wrapping behind my neck and pulling me forward.
I feel the heat of his mouth on mine before I realize what he’s doing. Actually, even then I’m not sure what, exactly, he’s doing. Because it’s not a kiss. Not really. For a moment, his lips brush against mine, but then they still, so close I can feel them like a whisper, but not quite making contact. My heart pounds, and I start to lean back, but his hand on my neck holds me in place, despite the lack of tension in his grip.
Our breath mingles, mine fast and his slow. His fingers slip up into my hair and come back down again, leaving a tingling trail in their wake. I feel the strange urge to bite at his lower lip with my teeth and tug it into place against my mouth. His forehead leans lightly against mine, and I feel the brush of his nose on the tip of my own. I focus on the pacing of his breath and am shocked to discover mine has slowed to match his. It’s overwhelmingly intimate, like he’s taken control of my insides and pulled them into a slow dance to some silent melody.
Through a haze, I hear the loud pounding near our tent, but the sound of it disappears when Deiss pushes through the invisible barrier between our mouths and captures my top lip between his. His tongue swirls against mine, sending an aching need through my belly. Before I can appease it, Deiss’s mouth is gone.
He says something I’m too distracted to hear, flashing a grin I can see in the dark.
I blink at him. I want a repeat of what just happened. It’s the only way I’ll be able to determine how it felt eternal and like a blip at the same time. “What was that?”
“You were panicking,” he says, “and I didn’t want to slap you.”
“So, you kissed me?”
“In my defense, it wasn’t meant to be a kiss. But then the elephants came closer, and . . .”
“You decided to shove your tongue in my mouth to keep me from screaming again.” It’s an ugly, unfair way to phrase it, like insisting silk is actually burlap. I can’t help myself, though. What was funny on the boat feels embarrassing now. By hypnotizing me with his pheromones, or whatever that magic was, he’s made me look as malleable and eager as my mother.