Page 7 of Good Losers (Lochkelvin Academy)

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His mouth tastes like fire.

He cradles the back of my head with urgent, severe fingers that dig like desperate shovels into my skin. Clear jewels of rain glitter between us, forking down the slopes and angles of our hot, connected mouths, entwining around the edges and arches of a furious kiss like devious snake tongues.

I drink rainwater when I taste Rory. I gulp it down, craving it, drowning in it. It’s a life force I didn’t know I needed.

His lips scorch my frozen ones, my face as stiffened through shock as though I’ve been carved from ice. I’m an imprint on this mountain, a statue fixed in place by bones and time. He angles my head, not his, for better access, the soft wool shelter of his cap nudging against the tightened elastic of my hood. We’re so clothed, so wrapped in ugly fabric and noisy waterproofs. I wind trembling hands around Rory’s neck, waiting for the first burst of laughter, waiting for the too-English sneer as he shoves me back onto the wet grass and calls me a pathetic girl.

It doesn’t come.

With the rain beating harder beside us, I breathe out a shaky, relieved sob into Rory’s mouth, a secret addressed solely to his lungs, only for it to be stolen by the wind.

Maybe I was right. Maybe I’ve been right all along. Maybe I haven’t imagined this.

He continues to kiss me, a forceful, brutal claim that should bring to mind the last time I was kissed in this way — by Benji. But it doesn’t because there’s a necessary difference between those kisses: this time I want it.

I ache for it.

Rory’s hands draw down my hood, and the wisps of my soaked windswept hair are free to tangle with the tips of his caressing fingers. He buries his fingers in my roots, as though trying to shelter me better than any hood ever could, pressing hot, body-warming kisses across the slick ridges of my face.

He tilts my head to the side, examining me carefully.

“Are you crying?” Rory asks me, the curiosity in his voice roughened by our rain-drenched kisses. “Have I made you cry?”

I shake my head, though I can’t tell if it’s true. Rain mixed with tears long ago. He focuses on my face as though to uncover my innermost secrets. He traces the outline of my brows, wiping away the moisture before sweeping his thumb beneath the bones of my eye sockets. Being held by him feels primal. I’ve never been touched so tenderly, examined so deeply. The heat and concentration in his gaze alone is overwhelming, like he can see all of me at once with those stone-sharp gray eyes, even the parts I’m determined to keep under lock and key. Language has gone — there is no need for it here. We’re bodies now, made up of ancient genes passed down through lineage and creaking family trees, bound in the human biological code of man and woman, and the furious cloud of attraction that in turn made us, and made us stand here today and confess.

Kissing alone on a desolate mountaintop, with soggy grass underneath our knees and an enthusiastic dog panting into the ether nearby.

It’s not how I ever dreamed I’d be kissing Rory Munro. And yet I couldn’t imagine anything more perfect.

“I didn’t think…” He stops, brushing my parted lips in fascination with the pad of his thumb and the tips of curious fingers. “You were only supposed to be my dancer. Nothing more.”

I speak against the gentle fingers prying at the seam of my lips. “You asked me to dance for you then got shocked when I liked it.”

A smile plays at the corner of his rain-glistening mouth. “Didn’t ask, if I recall.”

“Demanded,” I amend.

He leans his soaked blond head close to my ear and murmurs, far too knowingly, “Did you like that better?”

I say nothing, though his warm breath makes me shiver and he’s so close to me that I swear he can hear the guilt in my swallow.

With control, Rory slips one finger and then another past my lips, and I suck them in as though I have no choice. Maybe I don’t. I don’t know why I’m doing this, giving in to Rory the way I always do, but he holds sway over me, an enchantment that I don’t truly want to resist.

This is new, however. Fingers in mouths, lips against lips. This is all so new.

“You were Luke’s,” he reminds me, his eyes flaring with heat as he watches me suckle both fingers down to the lower knuckle. In my head, I’d built Rory up as a being of paper and ink, but I taste nothing from him but salt and skin. This desolate landscape is a world away from libraries and books. “For all of, what, one afternoon? Luke’s my friend.”

“Funff ffend,” I say loudly around his fingers —some friend. We haven’t spoken about Rory’s role in hisfriend’ssoon-to-be downfall, but I know for certain that I can’t take anything Rory says about Luke seriously.

But language isn’t necessary here, and Rory’s eyes narrow at the spike of sarcasm embedded in my tone. He slides his fingers free from my mouth, withdrawing them past my lips with a wet pop, the disks of his gray eyes sliced in half from the amount of scrutiny he’s giving me.

He grips the back of my head securely, tilting it so that I look up at the sky. It’s a punishment, a waterboarding, for undermining Rory’s authority. I’m surrounded by gray in every direction. Rain darts into my eyes, splashing down my cheeks and my exposed neck while Rory inspects my face for something he wants to see but cannot.

“You were with Luke,” he repeats in a steel voice, “and then Danny-boy, and that’s not even mentioning whatever you and Finlay get up to on your secret study breaks. And nowme.”

“You want me, too,” I whisper spitefully to the sky, wishing he could prove it again by putting his mouth back on mine for another hot, indecent moment.

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