Chapter 23: : Chapter 23

SHE’S STRADDLING HIS WAIST, BUTTONING and unbuttoning the first half of his shirt, over and over, fascinated with how much concentration it takes. She’s seen him do this with one hand in only a few seconds.

But after he fell in the lake, it took him a week to be able to button his shirt easily.

She watches her fingers move along his chest and down across the toned lines of his stomach. Her flesh flickers between ivory and peachy opaque. She has no scars, no freckles, no bruises. Aside from the way her skin seems to glow and dim, there’s nothing that differentiates her from an airbrushed photograph. Colin’s hands are rough and damaged. He has a small birthmark on the back of his left wrist, scars across two knuckles on his right hand. He’s so obviously human, and she is so obviously not. She wonders for a flash what it’s like for him to see these differences now, after the lake and the snow, and their skin that felt the same.

“What do you think I’m made of?” she asks.

“I think you’re made of awesome.”

“I mean, you’re mostly carbon. Nitrogen. Oxygen. Hydrogen. Some other stuff.”

“Probably a lot of other stuff.” He laughs. “I eat a lot of junk food.”

“But what am I?” She presses her hand to his chest again, brushes a curl off his forehead. Even when she’s trying as hard as she can to be still, she swears she can feel the collisions of thousands of molecules inside her. “I feel like my body is solid mass but . . . so different. Like I’m made up of the elements that happen to be hanging out in the air at any given moment.”

He slowly peeks up at her and smiles. “You’re definitely here, and you’re definitely different. I think I like your theory.” His eyes sparkle. “So I guess we should be glad you weren’t brought back somewhere near Chernobyl. You’d be even hotter.”

She laughs and he grins at his own cleverness, but their smiles fade as they stare at each other.

“When I kissed your cheek at the lake, before I went in, you were more solid,” he says.

She felt it too. Felt stronger, more present. “Maybe it’s the water in the air. It’s drier here in your room with the heater on. If there’s more moisture in the air, there’s simply more content for my body to steal and use.”

He makes a sound in the back of his throat that sounds like agreement.

The question bubbles up, escapes. “What were you thinking when you found me on the trail but you were still in the lake . . . ?”

He blinks away, looking out the window. “I didn’t feel cold or hot or scared. I only wanted to find you.”

“Why don’t you seem to want to talk about this?”

He pushes his hands behind his head. “Because I want to do it again.”

The sentence, finally and so plainly spoken aloud, echoes in his room, hanging like a thick, plastic curtain between them and coating the moment with a strange, leaden shadow. Her immediate reaction to his words is a paradoxical relief, so her response comes out thickly, like it’s fighting to stay on her tongue. “Colin, that is insane.”

“What do you mean?” he asks, sitting up so she’s forced to move off his lap. “I ended up on that trail, beneath your tree, Luce. There was something different about that world, something perfect. And you were there. It isn’t insane.”

She tucks her legs under her and stares at him. Part of her—the part that is dark and tiny and dangerous—feels a thick, curling love for what he’s saying. He’s right; it wasn’t insane. For those few minutes, she could touch him, kiss him. He was hers. On the trail, he was just like her.

And then she remembers that she’s supposed to be his Guardian, and a sharp spike of guilt shoots through her.

“It was easy to find you,” he says. “Like we were meant to be there together.”

“Colin, I know what Henry says about me protecting you, but . . . I mean, you could have frozen to death. You could have drowned.”

He leans forward, carefully kissing her bare shoulder next to the strap of her top. He pushes it aside and kisses the spot where her heart should beat. What feels like pure white electricity shoots through her. She wants to put her hands in his hair and hold him there.

“I don’t think so,” he says. Lucy opens her mouth to argue the obvious, but when no words come out right away, Colin shakes his head. “Just listen. Okay?”

She nods, unable to protest convincingly. She has no idea how much time she has with him. It lends a certain urgency to every minute. She wants him in the water, on the trail, in the underwater starry sky, with her.

“What if I could go into the lake again and have an hour with you every now and then? Just us, curled up together in the snow. Luce, the world was crazy there. It was silver and light and, like, alive.” When he pauses, she can’t find words, and in her silence he barrels on, encouraged. “I have to see it again. Jay could come with us and pull me out fast. . . .”

She remembers feeling his skin and his lips and his laughter. She remembers tasting his sounds and feeling how they fit. He kissed her like he was discovering a new vibrant color. And while she remembers other kisses, smiles pressed tightly to hers, she knows it was never like this. Still, the temptation tastes wrong somehow, a vinegar-dipped sugar cube.

“I don’t know if he would be up for that. . . .” She trails off shakily.

“After you walked away in the hall, this girl Liz came up. She said her cousin fell into this lake in Newfoundland. He got out, but was unconscious on the ice for four hours.”

Her eyes snap to his. “What?”

“Four,” he confirms, grinning at her reaction, as if she’s already signed on to this.

She stands, moving to fiddle with a cup full of pens on his desk. She lifts it easily, as if it weighs nothing. Before she has a chance to marvel at the achievement, he stands and walks over to her, buttoning his shirt.

“I read about the story, Luce. It’s true. It was all over the local news. And it’s happened before. Apparently, there’s at least one story about it every winter. The reporter is one of the guys on the forums now. He’s totally obsessed with it.” He puts a hot hand on her shoulder and squeezes gently, but this time she barely registers it. She wants more information. “I think if we’re careful, we can make it work. Plus,” he says, quieter now, “that kid didn’t even have a Guardian.”

“If I let you do this, I’m not a Guardian,” she says, stepping out of his grip. “I’m something bad.” She tries to keep her voice light, but the truth keeps the words stark, blown bare like a smooth tree trunk.

“You’re definitely not bad,” he says with the kind of conviction that she’s certain she’ll never have. “Do you know how I know?”

She looks up and melts. In the dark room, his eyes are deep amber, his lashes long and his blink so slow and patient. “How?”

“Because I’ve lost everyone I loved. Instead, I got you. The universe might have taken the others away, but it sent you back.”

“But don’t you ever wonder why you need a Guardian, and why it’s me?”

“I used to.” He glances out the window and then down at his shoes, kicking at something on the floor.

She watches him closely. With a small tug of anxiety beneath her ribs, she realizes he’s kept something from her. “What changed?”

He looks up again and meets her eyes. “I think we’re connected because I was the kid who saw your murderer take you into the woods. I told Dot, and she called the police.”

Lucy stills, her hands bracing on the desk chair behind her. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

Colin speaks over her, apologizing immediately. “I was afraid that if you had closure, if you knew all the details, that you’d go away.” He reaches out, touches her arm as if to convince himself that she is, indeed, still here.

“So they caught this guy because of you?”

He shrugs. “I think so. That’s what the article said, anyway.”

She feels her smile form on her face and spread down into her chest, where she never feels hollow when she’s with him. “I may have only a pocketful of memories about anything useful, but I do know one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You were my Guardian first, then.”

His grin matches hers, but it has a distinctly cocky twist to it. “I like to think so.”