The crash is huge, everything I could have daydreamed it would be. I feel it from the soles of my feet to the tips of my fingers. Every single part of me—cheeks, mouth, heart—is pulsing.
Jem falls back down on me, tired, his face in my neck, and I realise that the storm’s stopped, both in me and out there. Me in his bed, him on top of me, his hand holding mine, the weight of him anchoring me to the moment and maybe even the earth—god, I love the earth. He makes me think of it.
He lies there, breathing heavily for a minute, then he pulls back, looking at me.
He is the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen in my life.
The way his hair’s all rugged, bridge of his nose pink, those eyes that look like the water planet I was born on, look like the closest thing I’ve seen to home since I left it.
He gives me a tired smile. “I feel it like a flu.”
* * *
* The bleeding prick.
? Or, more aptly, just a woman, as we all know, to him, I am not one.
* Literal and metaphorical.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
We do it again once more after, and then I fall asleep in his arms.
Such a cliché, I know.
I’ve never slept in a boy’s arms before. Peter sleeps stretched out, both arms behind his head. If I grew cold in the night, sometimes I’d curl myself around Peter. If he was cold, sometimes he’d hold me back, but he scarcely needed to because Peter runs warm. He flies so close to the sun, there’s a residual warmth in him. That sounds sweet, doesn’t it? Maybe it is. It did mean he never needed me to stay warm though, and I have a sneaking suspicion that even if Jamison were warm, he’d hold me all the same.
I wake up before him and shift myself ever so slightly so I can watch him.
As I do, one of the suns starts to rise up through the window behind us and casts over him this perfect, blushy light.
I’ve never had the privilege of looking at his face this close up for this long, entirely uninterrupted.
Sometime in the last decade in Berkeley, California, a man invented a kind of coffee drink called a latte. The coffee and the milk combined make this beautiful, milky brown colour, and that’s how his skin looks. His hair’s all a scruffy mess from my hands being in it, and I fight the urge to touch it while he sleeps. It’s brown, mostly, flecks of honey through it.
He has facial hair too—more than a five-o’clock shadow, less than a proper beard. More golden than the rest of his hair, and it runs along his immaculate jawline as though it’s been painted on. Two pronounced freckles. One on his right cheek, one to the left of his nose.
And his nose. I think I already told you that it’s the best one I’ve ever seen, but up close, it’s a work of art. Michelangelo himself couldn’t have sculpted it better. Light pink lips that are perfectly balanced, top to bottom, and still they part in the centre anyway, as though something’s weighing them down. Soon it will be me, I’ll weigh down his lips with my own, but for now they rest, parted anyway, and they feel like an invitation. My thumb traces over them without my consent, and Jamison’s eyes blink open.
The eyes. I said they remind me of the earth, which I mean as the highest of compliments, but somehow, it still undersells them. The calmest sea in the world, on the prettiest part of the planet. A tidal wave of blues, flecks of it that I’m sure come directly from those fabled Neverland deposits. They’re like gemstones. Sapphires are too obvious, and his eyes deserve more. Aventurine and lapis lazuli and chrysocolla and dark blue opal—how many kinds of blue is that? Too many. Calling them blue dishonours them. Though staring into them right now, I’ve not got a single clue what else to call them. Whatever colour they are, whatever it is I should be calling them, it’s a question you’d want to spend your whole life trying to answer.
Jamison smiles at me, tired. His eyes look over my face how I was just doing with his. They drift over my mouth, and then his eyes catch and he jerks up a bit.
“Did I get it?”
“What?” I frown.
“Yer kiss.” He stares at my mouth, wide-eyed.
“Oh!” My hand flies to my mouth. “You tell me. Can you see it?”
He squints at my mouth.
“Is it gone?” I press where it used to live.
He pulls back, looking at me all bewildered.
“I think it’s gone,” he says, barely keeping his smile in check.
My eyes go wide. “You got it?”
He nods, bright-eyed.
“Wow.” I laugh, shaking my head. “Congratulations.”