Page 191 of Burning Daylight
My fingers dust along the side of her face and across her cheekbones, lightly, like she might dissolve into nothing if I touch her too hard.
She’s so beautiful it hurts.
She’s the only thing that feelsgood, and I don’t want to give that up. I want to foster it instead, water it like a seed and watch it grow, and maybe in another life, we’ll be able to.
Her lashes flutter, and my fingers stall.
She blinks up at me, hands tucked beneath her chin, lips curved in a lazy smile.
It undoes me. Completely. Something inside me cracks, splintering right down the middle like a bone breaking.
“Hi,” she murmurs.
“Hi,” I whisper back, my voice hitching on the word.
She studies my face, and slowly awareness creeps in, and she jerks upright in the bed.
“Are youcrazy?” she hisses. “You’re sneaking into my room now?”
“I had to see you,” I admit. There’s a knot in my throat, and it’s hard to form the words.
Her eyes dart to the window. “What if someone sawyou?”
“They didn’t.”
“Are you sure?”
Sighing, I run a hand through my hair, praying she doesn’t see it shake. “I need to tell you something.”
Her eyes darken, and she slaps a hand over my mouth. “No.”
Her palm is warm. Familiar. And it’s shaking, like even ifshedoesn’t know, her body does; something has changed irrevocably between us forever.
I run my fingers over her face again, drinking her in like fine wine, desperate to touch her, to catalogue every single inch of her so that I can draw her a thousand times and keep her with me always.
She chews on her bottom lip, and the spaghetti strap of her pink silk tank top drops off her shoulder and rests on her upper arm.
My eyes follow its trajectory.
“I need to tell you something,” I say again, although it’s barely audible. Just a raw rasp lodged somewhere between my ribs and my throat.
Her pouty lips part, and her tongue swipes across the bottom one. I keep myself from leaning in and repeating the motion with my own like muscle memory.
But I can’t force myself to move.
“What is it?” she asks.
The words stick on my tongue like smoke.
I open my mouth.
Try to speak.
Fail.
And I’m a fucking coward, but I can’t be the one to tell her. Not when she’s looking at me like I’m giving her the world, and I know how much worse things are going to get when I walk away.
Images of her cousin, twitching on the ground, flash in my brain and I grit my teeth, my eyes closing as I try to force it away.
