Page 69 of When We Were Magic
“How did you get lost?” I ask. My knees feel warm and I look down and realize that somehow, she has come closer. We are touching. Our knees are touching, and our hands are touching, and she’s grabbing my other hand too. Holding it. And she finally looks at me. My breath catches when our eyes meet.
“I walked off,” she says. “I was looking for my mom.”
“Where was she?”
“No, you don’t understand,” she says, shaking her head and looking at me intently. “I was looking for my birth mom. I dreamed that she was in the woods, and I wandered off to find her. It was the middle of the night.”
“How old were you?” I ask. The first time Roya did magic in front of me, we were eight and she still needed two nightlights. I can’t imagine her in the woods by herself, in the dark. No moonlight would be enough to keep the shadows from looking like monsters.
“Four,” she whispers. “I was so scared of the dark, but I wanted to find her. I wanted to find my birth mom. And I stayed here because I thought she was going to come get me.” She squeezes both of my hands, and I squeeze hers back. She’s looking back and forth between my eyes like there’s something there, some answer to a question she hasn’t asked yet. “I come here sometimes to think about stuff, or to be alone. I’ve never brought anyone here before.”
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know why she’s showing me. All I can say is “Thank you.” I run the pad of my thumb across the palm of her hand, and she bites her lip. I’m stuck between absolute certainty that I’m imagining something between us and absolute certainty that I’m not imagining it at all.
“It’s a magic place,” she says. She lifts one of my hands to her mouth and presses her lips to my thumb, still staring directly into my eyes. My breath is loud in my ears. “Of course I wanted to show you,” she whispers to the curve of my palm.
“Roya,” I start to say, but I don’t know what should come after.
Or, I do know what should come after, but I don’t know how to say it. I’ve been biting back the words for so long now that I don’t know how to push them past my lips.
But it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter, because she’s kissing me.
How can I explain what it’s like?
It’s like soft grass under your back on a hot day.
It’s like the first ripe strawberry from the garden.
It’s like watching someone fall asleep with their head on your shoulder, and knowing that you could brush the hair away from their eyes without waking them.
It’s like coming home.
When Roya stops kissing me, she rests her forehead against mine and laughs.
“What?” I breathe.
“Look,” she says, her mouth so close to mine that I can taste the letterLtumbling from her lips.
I look. I don’t want to, because it means moving my head away from hers, but I look. “Oh,” I say, and then “oh” again, because the first time wasn’t quite enough.
The clearing is carpeted in flowers. All except for the place where we’re sitting. Tiny purple flowers and huge, spreading yellow ones, and a fine tracery of white clover blossoms. The air is fragrant, and Roya is laughing and running a hand over the tops of the flowers closest to her. She flings herself backward and lands hard, but she keeps laughing as she sprawlsher arms out on the flowers. Petals fly up around her like a snowdrift.
“That looked like it hurt,” I say.
“It did,” she says. “Try it.”
I fling myself down next to her, and she’s right, it hurts. And I’m glad I did it. I watch as flower petals spiral up in the air over our heads, and I listen to Roya laughing, and I can feel myself bleeding magic too. A swarm of butterflies circles overhead and settles in the branches of the birch trees, their yellow wings fluttering like autumn leaves.
“I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time,” Roya says.
“Would you like to do it again?” I ask, then laugh at how slick I sound. I’m still laughing as her mouth finds mine, and then I’m not laughing anymore because she’s not what I thought she would be. She’s more. Her lips are soft, and her hands are both tangled in my hair, and she’s straddling my hips and making a soft noise that means I’m more than she thought I would be too.
When we stop for air, her hair is loose around her shoulders, falling into my face. It’s not dusk yet, but the light outside has taken on a long-shadow quality that means it will start getting dark before too long.
“Wow,” I breathe.
“Yeah,” she says. She touches her nose to the soft skin behind my ear and I pull up two fistfuls of flowers. “We should go soon.”
