She turned the lock.
He realized that he didnot, however, like watching her disappear, whether it was behind a door or not.
He gave a soft, stunned laugh.
Kissing her for the first time, in the path lined with wild blackberries on the way up to Devil’s Leap, to this day remained one of the braver things he’d ever done.
And he’d been here at Devil’s Leap for about three years, but now he understood something: touching her again was the real homecoming.
But it was both perilous and as exhilarating as walking a wire strung high over the Hellcat River at snowmelt, when the water is moving most violently over jagged rocks.
The kiss was leaving his body only slowly.
And so that’s how he made his way back to his cottage. Slowly, so he could feel every moment of that unique intoxication; and by feel, through the dark, the familiar pale flagstones of the lawn and the moon overhead lighting his way.
MAC COLTRANE KISSED ME!
If she’d been fifteen again, that’s what she would have written in her diary that night. She would have surrounded it with little hearts and exclamation points. And maybe some lyrics from that particular Roxy Music song.
And then she would have written “Avalon Coltrane” about a dozen times under that. Just testing it out.
How dangerous it now seemed to be that innocent. To not know that kissing boys had ramifications that could fan out through a lifetime and trip you up when you least expected it and cause all kinds of problems, like those invisible laser security systems in sci-fi movies.
She headed upstairs to the bathroom, Chick Pea clicking daintily behind her. She peeled off her mother’s absurd old swimsuit with some effort and got in the shower, turned on the warm water, closed her eyes and aimed her face up at it the way you would if something ached. She did ache. Everything ached. Sweetly and savagely. She felt precisely as if she were being pulled apart, slowly, along some sort of serrated internal edge.
She started to tremble.
It was a surfeit of emotion, but damned if she knew whether it was stress or joy or what on earth to call it. The kiss had been so amazing she wanted to cry from it. Not because of its beauty or anything so precious or any of the romantic words that would have made Mac scoff; just because it was now very clear that nothing, nothing had ever felt thatrightsince the last time he’d kissed her. So enormous, so peaceful, so consuminglyhot. And laughing or crying, those were the things available to humans when emotions needed celebrating or releasing. Maybe the next iteration of human should include the ability to shoot rainbows from their eyes.
It was entirely possible she’d spent too much time looking at animated games.
So: it felt right.
But that didn’t mean itwasright.
She’d learnedthatfrom him, after all.
But shouldn’t things that felt so good and promised to be amazing be good for you and meant for you, and not cause pain instead? What in God’s name was the point?
Life. Now with More Irony.
She reached up to turn the water off and the old but handsome hot water handle broke off in her hand. She swore blackly.
And she got into the giant flannel nightgown and roped her hair up into a ponytail and sat down on her bed in the turret and curled her feet up underneath her, and Chick Pea went up her doggie stairs to sit on the bed next to her.
She stared through those old curved windows, ever so slightly warped, at the sky full of icily glinting stars, and thought she understood why the original millionaire had built the house there and why they’d included a turret. Because it was like sitting in a pile of diamonds.
It occurred to her that Mac had been a lot of things to her over the years. Rich Boy and First Crush and First Orgasm and Traitorous Heartbreaker and Flag Bearer for All That Was Perfidious About Men. Above all, a symbol.
Implicit in the wordsymbolwas a sort of distance.
And distance was safety.
And as an icon he was manageable.
As a person... he was potentially devastating. In every sense of that word.
But until tonight, she realized it was entirely possible she hadn’t fully experienced him as... a person. With dimensions and complexities and motives and vulnerabilities that in all likelihood didn’t have much to do with her, though she would bet a few of them did. Shaped by forces she could have actually analyzed and sussed out if she’d tried, because she was good at that sort of thing. She’d been so focused on her own heartbreak. She’d been the tragic heroine of her own story. One she’d allowed to be dictated by the hero.