Page 10

SEVEN

Oak might be the villain of my story.

He might be the thing that unravels me—makes me feel something I shouldn’t. Something dangerous. A boy who is a paradox. Who defies all the warnings Mom recited to me before she left.

But every time I see him, the less I’m able to remember what it is I should really fear.

I sink back into bed, knees pulled up, and stare at my suitcase. Nothing has changed, I tell myself. I can leave the following day. I don’t have a train ticket. I don’t have anyone waiting for me. I make my own rules. I can spend one last day in Cutwater, with Oak, before I leave for good.

No harm in that.

I’m allowed one more day.

I stay awake and read Peter and Wendy , turning each page as if it will reveal some secret about Oak—tell me who he really is—but the story begins to feel like an omen.

A fable about the truth of who we really are, deep down. About the life we choose. And about loss. Wendy may love Peter, but she chooses the real world instead.

But my life is not a fable. It’s much worse, because it’s real.

I close my eyes and let the sound of the creek muddy my thoughts.

“Forsaken Creek is the only way to leave,” Jude said. But his fortune might only be another fable. A made-up tale, a trick he learned from his mom.

I fall asleep just as the morning sun peeks through the damp woods, the book resting beside me in a streak of sallow light, and I dream of lands far, far away, where boys can fly and no one ever grows up.

But I wake not long after, a loud bang vibrating through my dreams.

I sit up, shaking off the haze of too little sleep, and I hear Archer’s boots stomping down the hall. But he stops short before reaching my doorway, and I hear him enter Mom’s abandoned room—a room we keep closed. A room we never step inside.

I throw back the bedsheet, still in last night’s clothes, and hurry down the hall. Mom’s doorway is still open, but Archer is no longer inside. I find him in the living room, moving toward the front door. “There’s a whole damn crowd out there,” he says, flashing me a look, then pointing toward the front window. “And they’re asking for tulips.”

It takes a moment for my mind to catch up, to realize what Archer is holding: our grandfather’s old, antique shotgun. There’s no ammunition for it—it’s so ancient and rusted that it wouldn’t matter even if there were—but Archer pulls open the front door and steps out onto the porch, holding the gun as if he’s about to fire it into the sky.

A dozen of our classmates from Cutwater High have gathered at the end of the driveway, several cars parked along the ditch, one of them still idling.

For years they couldn’t understand why they felt drawn to the Goodes each spring. But now they do. They know. It was the tulips all along—because now they feel the ache, the pull toward the tulips.

And they want a bloom for themselves.

Yet none of them have mustered the courage to walk down our driveway. They stand, shuffling nervously, desperate for a tulip but unwilling to face the Goode twins, who might be witches, vampires, trolls who sleep beneath the floorboards of our house, who will rip out their eyes and swallow their hearts if they get too close.

Archer broadens his stance at the edge of the porch. “Get the hell off our driveway!”

The group falls quiet but doesn’t move.

“Keep standing there… and you’ll find out how serious I am,” he adds, voice booming through the clear morning air.

Still no one moves.

A wretched need for tulips keeps them right where they are. And I wonder if there’s a twisting pain inside them, a longing they can’t ignore—a desire for love that overrides everything else.

A feeling I’ve spent my life trying to avoid.

Archer grumbles something, irritated, and he clomps down the front steps, over the creek, and starts striding up the driveway, shotgun at his side. He’s fed up. He won’t call the local police; he’ll deal with this himself.

“Archer!” I call after him, afraid of what he’ll do.

But he never reaches the end of the driveway. Maybe it’s the look in his eyes, maybe it’s just Archer himself, but in an instant the crowd scatters. They scramble back to their cars, climb atop bicycles, peeling away up Swamp Wells Road.

They don’t stick around to find out how far Archer will take it.

He’s a Goode, after all, and Goodes are both gods and monsters. Unpredictable and dangerous, with nothing to lose. Because everything has already been taken from us.

“They’re vultures,” he growls when he climbs back up the porch steps.

He’s scared them off. But I know it won’t last.

They’ll come back with hope in their eyes. Tomorrow or the next day, they’ll return. As the old tulips they possess wilt and fade, the effect wearing off, they’ll need more.

They’ll crave it.

Because the tulips bring them an even more potent intoxication:

l

o

v

e

And now that they’ve had a taste, one more will never be enough.

I dig through my suitcase, pulling out my jean shorts—the ones I cut off from a pair of thrift-store Levi’s—and my favorite teal-green tank top with the three white buttons down the front. I pull them on, then face the mirror over my dresser. What the hell am I doing? I should have been on the first train leaving Cutwater, sketching the faces of the other passengers, daydreaming about the life waiting for me at the end of the tracks.

Instead I’m standing in my room, in this house, all for one last glimpse of a boy I can’t explain. A boy who is a riddle I feel desperate to solve.

“Thought you were leaving today?” Archer asks. I turn, and he’s standing in my bedroom doorway.

“I’m still leaving,” I assure him, stepping into my sandals. “Just delayed it a little.”

He squints down at my suitcase, partly unpacked. “Decided that you’d miss me too much, huh?”

“Hardly,” I reply, striding past him.

“Seriously, though, why are you still here?”

I stop at the front door and look back at him. “Just something I have to do tonight.”

“That’s how it starts. One more day , and before you know it, twenty years have gone by and you’re still in Cutwater.”

I pull open the door. “That’s not happening to me.”

Archer follows me out onto the porch. “Sure, little sis. Ten bucks says you’re not going anywhere. You’ll still be in this house by the end of summer.”

“I’m not taking your bet, little brother. Because I’m leaving… just not yet.”

“Doubt it!” he calls.

“Watch me!” I move down the driveway, but I hear him laugh, and then the thump of the front door as he retreats back inside. These are the moments I will miss. The back-and-forth with my brother, my twin. When I’m gone, there will be a silence where he used to be.

The light drains from the sky, crickets sing from the tall grass along the back porch, and I stand in the shadow of a crooked birch tree beside the mailbox, waiting.

I don’t want Oak walking up to the house like he did last night. I don’t want to risk Archer seeing him, asking questions, making things unnecessarily awkward. So I wait.

There are no headlights on the road, and as the minutes pass, I begin to wonder if Oak will even show up.

Maybe he changed his mind. He’d be smart if he did, if he stayed away.

I tilt my eyes to the star-studded sky, breathing in the warm night air. Maybe I am stupid for staying in town, for delaying my escape. All for a boy who I’ll never see again after tomorrow. Why am I wasting my time? Why am I standing out here in the dark?

I close my eyes, feeling foolish, thinking I should head back up to the house, when I hear the crunch of gravel underfoot.

Squinting through the dark, I see him. Oak is walking up Swamp Wells Road, hands in his pockets, wearing a gray T-shirt and looking like he was swept in on a summer breeze.

He came after all, like he promised.

“Hey,” he says, casual and airy and full of secrets. And all my resolve to walk back to the house, to forget about Oak, melts away. Just like that.

“Sorry,” he adds. “Were you waiting long?”

I shake my head, my thoughts tangled up. I’m not used to this: Meeting a boy after dark. Being this close to someone, getting to feel like an ordinary girl.

“Are you okay to walk a little farther?” I ask, not knowing exactly how far he’s just traveled to get here.

“Sure.”

He doesn’t ask where I’m taking him, doesn’t question whether he should be this close to a Goode, but follows me around the side of the house, past the newly fenced garden, to the dirt path through the woods. The path leads us alongside Rabbit Cross River, where the water is cold and full and rushing, and the night air is like a warm breath against my throat. We haven’t walked far when the path veers deeper into the trees, and we reach the train tracks that run east–west through Cutwater.

“We’re almost there,” I say, and he nods, seeming content just to walk. Unaffected by the scent of tulips always on my skin.

We make our way silently up the tracks, an owl hooting from somewhere in the trees to our left, until at last we reach the abandoned train car—left on an unused section of track. Rusted in place, a relic forgotten.

But not by everyone.

The door into the train car is slid wide open, the dark interior filled with empty beer cans, half-smoked cigarettes, and names painted on the walls. Kids from Cutwater have been coming here for years to mark their place in the world, to declare that they were here in this shitty, middle-of-nowhere town.

But I don’t move toward the door; I walk to the metal ladder on the outer wall and hoist myself up to the first rung, then climb up to the flat roof of the train car. When I glance back down, Oak has already swung himself up the ladder without much effort and reaches the top quickly.

“You come here a lot?” he asks, turning in a circle to gaze out at the forest pressing in around us.

“Sometimes. In the summer.”

I lower myself to the roof, stretching out onto my back—my heart a riotous thump in my chest—and Oak does the same. The metal roof is warm beneath us, heated by the sun during the day, but above us the stars feel close, drawn down by the spiky treetops. It always feels darker out here, swallowed up by the night.

I press my palms against the roof and close my eyes. “Sometimes I swear I can feel the train moving,” I say. Sometimes I swear I can feel it inching down the tracks, gaining momentum, a ghost train come to life.

Oak presses his hands to the metal, his fingers only a millimeter from mine—the width of a snowflake, a tear, a strand of hair. “You want out of here that bad?” he asks, turning his head, his eyes almost black in the darkness. But his mouth is a calm, comforting line: a dangerous mouth, one that is far too close.

I breathe and pull my eyes away. He should feel drawn to me, but instead it’s me who can’t control my own thoughts—an unmistakable, fathomless feeling, like falling into an unknown darkness. And I keep waiting to snap awake, for the sensation to pull me back to the waking world. But it doesn’t.

Through my lashes, I peer up at the starlight, counting the seconds and imagining the trees whipping by as the train carries us both far away from here. I don’t know why I don’t tell him the truth: That I was supposed to be on a real train this morning, leaving this place behind. That he is the reason I stayed.

“Don’t you want to leave?” I ask instead.

He doesn’t answer, an unnameable silence bending the darkness around us, shaped by the things he doesn’t want to admit, doesn’t say. But I know what it is to keep yourself secret, hidden, safe. And I smile, liking the quiet between our words.

“Everything feels different at night,” he says after a long exhale. “Like it all has more meaning.” He breathes, and I know there is more to this boy than what I can see beside me.

I tilt my head to look at him. A moment passes. Then another. Unfettered by noise, only our hearts thudding in our chests. A feeling that’s hard to describe: like the ends of my eyelashes are lit with electricity, like the sky right before a summer thunderstorm—the mere seconds before the first snap of lightning. He’s not looking for a response—it’s the silence we both crave.

But then it comes… the low rumble I’ve been waiting for, and I push myself up to standing, squinting through the dark down the tracks. “There,” I say, nodding.

Oak rises to his feet, his shoulder steady beside me, a boy who is a mountain, who is a tree , who is a heartbeat too close. Our eyes watch the tracks, where a beam of light is breaking through the forest.

A train is coming, only a few minutes behind schedule.

Never on time.

It travels on a track that runs parallel to this abandoned section—where we stand on the forgotten train car. The ground begins to tremble. This is my favorite part: the anticipation. The world shaking out of focus just a little.

The vibration grows stronger, the train moving quickly, only seconds now. I step to the very edge of the roof, closer to the other track, my heart climbing up from my chest—the adrenaline inching along my veins. This is why I come, the thing I want to feel.

Oak watches me, and I can sense the flicker of uncertainty in him. But he steps forward, filling the space beside me—this boy who stands so close, he could touch me if he wanted. He could pull Lark Goode into his arms and lay his lips against mine, but somehow he resists . Somehow he seems immune when others would have slid their hands along my floral-scented skin by now, begging me to love them back.

Somehow, somehow …

And yet.

A part of me wishes he would.

The light of the approaching train grows impossibly bright, filling the sky, flashing across the trees, sending the ghosts back into the dark. I suck in a breath just as the train slams past us. A rush of air and sound roars against my ears, the metal wheels rattling over every divot in the track, and I swear the air smells like all the places the train has been—sun-soaked beaches and snowy mountainsides and deserts where nothing grows.

This train doesn’t stop here in Cutwater, doesn’t even slow down; it passes through on its way to better places.

The wind screams against our faces, the stationary train car shuddering below us, vibrating up our legs, and I hold out my arms to feel the rush of the wind against my skin, my hair swept out in waves behind me.

Oak grabs my hand.

He touches me.

Clenches his palm to mine.

I flick my eyes to his, and I can see that the fear in his tensed jaw and sharp green eyes isn’t for himself; it’s for me—he’s keeping me from tipping forward into the passing train as it shrieks past.

My heart bangs against my eardrums, and I pinch my eyes closed: the heat from his palm, the wind against my face, it makes my body feel wrenched inside out, ripped free from the roof and sent down the tracks. A girl who once lived in Cutwater but was swept up into the sky by a boy and a train.

“Lark,” I think I hear him say, my name against his lips, his voice like the first snowfall on autumn trees, cold and verdant and sanguine. I swallow, the pulse in my chest thudding louder, louder….

Until all at once the train is gone.

Whoosh.

Slipped back into the night, the last of the roar echoing off the trees, carried away into the distance, and the wind goes with it. Silence falls over us, the lack of noise almost unbearable, ears ringing, blood spilling back down my veins. But I don’t want to let go. I want to hold on to this moment, make it last, suspended like a raindrop against a cold windowpane.

But Oak slides his hand free from mine, and the moment is broken.

I feel lightheaded.

My heart is still beating against my ribs when I turn to look at him. “Do you want to go home?” I ask, breathless, senseless, reckless.

His eyes are blades. “No.”

“Good. I have something else to show you.”

A half mile down the train tracks, we reach a rarely traveled dirt road overgrown with blackberry bushes and cattail reeds—no cars have passed down this way in a decade—and we walk the length of the road until it dead-ends, a star-lit clearing opening up ahead of us.

At the edge of the meadow, an abandoned farmhouse stands against a line of evergreens, windows boarded, the interior dark, crowded with cobwebs and long-neglected ghosts. But at the other end of the meadow, where the ground slopes away, sits a clear, crescent-shaped pond with a view out to the rolling hills in the distance.

We make our way through the knee-high grass, the ground turning soft at the shore of the pond. Oak watches me, and I can feel the question in his eyes.

“I swim here… sometimes,” I explain.

He hesitates, and the air feels tight in my throat. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought him here. He looks uneasy, a flicker of doubt across his face. We’ve already spent too much time together—I’ve risked too much by bringing him here.

“The tulips…,” he says suddenly, not looking at me—like his thoughts have carried him far away from here. “I’ve seen them. In town. People are… They’re acting…” He doesn’t finish.

“I know.” I rub my hands up my arms. “The flowers were never meant to be in the hands of anyone outside of my family.”

He glances at me. “Why?”

I keep my eyes on the surface of the pond, unsure how to answer. In Cutwater, locals tell their own stories, their own legends about why the Goodes should be avoided. And now I feel strangled by my own thoughts, searching for the right answer. “The tulips are responsible for everything bad that’s ever happened to my family. And now that someone has stolen the flowers, passed them around, I don’t… I’m not sure what will happen.”

A cricket chirps from the far side of the pond, the night air brushes across my flesh, but it does nothing to cool me.

“It makes them feel like they’re in love…,” he says. “The tulips.” But I can’t tell if this is a question or an observation. He’s witnessed the tulips in town, and maybe he’s trying to understand what they are—what I am. If any of the rumors are true.

“It’s a lie,” I explain, pulling in a breath. “It’s not real love.”

“How do you know?”

“Because my family has been tormented by love my whole life.” Each word stings to say out loud.

But he falls quiet, the meadow a soft hush around us, until he finally says, “We’re all tormented by something.”

In his face I see the same hurt that I often find in my own reflection: anger and doubt and dread—a feeling that desperately wants to become a scream. “What are you tormented by?” I ask.

His eyes cut to me, and I wish so bad I could see his thoughts—understand all the things he won’t say. Won’t let me see. Understand why I feel a strange, biting ache inside me when I’m close to him. Why he can occupy the air only a few inches from me and not confess his love—not beg me to spend the rest of my days with him.

“The past,” he answers, a bluntness to his words — as if this is all there is to say about it. I swallow, wanting to ask him what he means, what happened to him that he refuses to say aloud. But his eyes are sinking through me, steady and unblinking, in a way no one has ever looked at me before. He stares at me like I might already have the answers to my own questions. Like I am the riddle, not him.

Like he is the one searching for clues in my face.

Like the silence is its own kind of unraveling. Its own truth. Like the words we say won’t reveal a thing. It’s his eyes that tell me what I want to know. My heart battering in my ears that makes me want to be someone else.

A girl like any other.

Who doesn’t fear the look of curiosity in a strange boy’s eyes.

And this idea spreads like poison down my veins, making me feel lightheaded and wild. I pull my tank top over my head, peeling away my clothes. Because if I’m leaving tomorrow, I truly have nothing to lose. I’ll never see Oak again. This is my last night in this town. A night to be reckless, a night to forget who I used to be, and start unraveling the layers of who I will become.

I stride down toward the water, and I can feel Oak’s eyes watching me: silent, green and alive, as if he’s watching me shed my skin.

The ground is soft and silty beneath my bare feet; the water laps against my legs, my waist, as I wade into the shallows. I skim my fingertips along the surface, glancing back at him. But he stands motionless on the shore: a boy made of the unknown. I’m certain this will all end badly, but right now I want to press this night into my chest and hold on to it for as long as I can. I want to let myself believe I can swim with a boy who has lightning in his eyes. Who seems indifferent to who I am. Who, maybe, won’t fall in love with me. “You coming in?” I ask.

He doesn’t move; he is a watercolor silhouette set against a darkly smeared sky. For a long second I think he’s going to turn and walk away, too afraid, like he’s realized how close he’s strayed to a monster. And I swear I can see the conflict tugging at his features as he tries to decide if he should stay or run. If he’s made a mistake in following me here.

If it’s already too late.

But he pulls his gray T-shirt over his head in one quick stroke, as if to prove a point— he’s not afraid of Lark Goode . And the air gets tangled up in my throat as he moves through the grass, striding down into the water.

The pond ripples around us, two bodies beneath the cloudless, starry sky.

“The water’s warm,” he says, barely above a whisper.

“There’s a hot spring deep underground.” My chin dips below the surface. “It never freezes, even in winter.”

His eyelashes are dotted with beads of water, like a million tiny worlds. “How did you know this was here?”

“I’ve lived here my whole life. You know things about a place when you’ve never left.”

The wind slides across the water, gooseflesh pricks my arms, and I stretch my legs deeper into the warm pond.

“If I knew about this place…,” he murmurs, his voice endlessly cool, controlled, like he’s careful of every word that leaves his lips. His eyes flash to the meadow, the shadowy hills spilling out into the distance like great sleeping giants. “I’d come here every night.” His eyes scrape back to me, as if they could peel me open, and my heart starts battering against my ribs, drawn to him in ways that don’t make sense.

With effort, I drag my gaze toward the abandoned farmhouse—anchoring myself to something other than him. “The bank owns that house,” I say, my breath tight, my skin too warm. “You could buy it cheap after you graduate, then this pond and the meadow would all be yours. You could spend your days out here, until the end of time.”

His mouth plays at the corners, almost a smile, almost a shape that makes me want to drift even closer. Makes me want…

But he shakes his head, the rising moon reflected back in his eyes, the pale light making dreams of the water’s surface. “I’ll be long gone after graduation.”

“So you do want to escape this place?”

“Not an escape, a vanishing act. I want to get so far away, it will be as if I were never here at all.”

I can tell there’s more meaning beneath these words, but his chin lifts above the water, drops lingering against his lips, and the unfamiliar need inside me thumps in time with my heartbeat. I’m losing myself in the rhythm of his words, the shape of his mouth that I feel so drawn to that I almost forget how to breathe, how to be a girl cursed by love.

I turn and drift onto my back, my worthless body suspended on the calm surface of the pond, staring up at a cloak of summer stars. Trying to break the thread pulling me toward him. “Or we could just stay here,” I muse, pulling the night air into my lungs, swallowing down the stars, reminding myself to breathe. “Let the years drift by, and soon they’ll forget we ever existed.”

“They’d forget me,” Oak replies, his voice swept up in the moonlight. “But I doubt they’d ever forget you.”

I look at him. I’m losing this battle, I think. Reckless, reckless, reckless. I can’t let myself feel whatever this is: the torment of wanting something I know I can never have. Drifting in a pond beside someone who should be falling in love with me… but isn’t. Why? And wanting, strangely, impulsively , to reach out toward him, to lay my fingertips against a boy named after a tree.

No. Why are my thoughts so unruly, like they’re forming in someone else’s mind? I feel dizzy, drunk, dreamlike.

But he doesn’t pull his eyes away. And neither do I.

“You’re not what I was expecting….” His mouth rests half-open, the muscles of his shoulders settling, finding relief in the weight of my eyes on him.

I try to sever the tightness in my throat. But everything inside me is humming. “What were you expecting?”

“You’re just…” His voice trails away, and he runs a hand through his dark hair, water falling down his neck, across his shoulders. “I thought the Goodes would be more terrifying.”

I almost laugh, but there is a seriousness in his eyes. “So you’ve heard that we’re the undead who only come out at night?” I raise an eyebrow. “Or witches who turn our victims into a boiling stew or bury them below our house beside a cursed creek?”

His lips curl into a careful smile. “I actually heard that you’re all vampires, drinking the blood of anyone who gets too close.”

“Then you’re taking a risk coming way out here with me. In the dark. With no one around. No one to save you.”

The smile sinks from his mouth. “If you were going to kill me, I think you’d have done it by now.”

“The night’s still young,” I tease, my voice not sounding like my own. I’m fooling even myself: pretending to be a girl who can swim this close to a boy I hardly know—a boy who watches me, unafraid, as if he doesn’t know that his heart is in danger.

But so is mine.

The moon makes watery shapes across the pond, and he seems even closer now, like we are two madcap stars drawn together in the night sky by a gravity beyond our control. Unaware that each will obliterate the other when we collide. “How do you know I’m not descended from vampire hunters?” he says darkly. “And it’s not me who’s lured you here?”

His green eyes level with mine, only a breath between us. And there’s something desperate in his stare, unguarded, a perilous glint that might destroy us both if we’re not careful. Every nerve in my body feels like fire. “If that’s true…,” I say, my chest now only inches from his, breathing, breathing , gasping for air as if my lungs have forgotten how to stay alive. “Then I’ll have to turn you into a vampire first… before you kill me.” The warm, traitorous wind seems to push us together, and in an instant my fingertips are against his chest, against his collarbones, his throat, so close I can breathe him in , and my face is inches from his, close enough I could sink my vampire canines into his soft flesh, warmth and blood and desire. My body feels electrified—a pulsing in my eardrums, in the deepest cavern of my belly—and I know I’m breaking every rule my mother taught me. Every rule our family lives by.

Don’t get too close. Don’t let yourself fall.

I fight my own thoughts, my own mutinous need, and I clench my eyes closed, trying to push the feeling away. But when I open them again, our eyes meet, and I catch a flicker of something in his: a tension forming along his jawline, every muscle in his chest overwrought and tight. Like he feels what I do. But I can’t tell if it’s lovesickness in his gaze—the tulips finally winding their way around his heart, tightening like a fist—or something else.

Fear.

I don’t stay to find out.

I release my burning fingertips from his chest and push myself back, wading through the shallows up to the shore. My feet reach the grass, almost to our pile of clothes, when his hand grazes mine, and I whip around to face him.

“Lark,” he says, breathless, water spilling from the hard lines of his face. “I’m sorry.” As if this were all his fault. As if he brought me here and led me into the pond. As if he were the one who was cursed.

But now he’s too close, his breath heavy with each exhale, eyes pouring into mine.

And I want… a thing I shouldn’t .

A want I can’t seem to shake. To know the feeling of his mouth against mine, to know the relief it will bring and the heat of his skin and the feeling of the ground being ripped away.

“I never meant to…” His words break off, lost, and what’s left is only the dark between us. The night swollen in our lungs.

“You didn’t do anything wrong.” I clench my jaw. I need to walk away.

I’m leaving tomorrow, I repeat to myself. This is stupid, pointless.

Meaningless.

But his eyes fall to my lips, and I can almost breathe him in: salt and warm skin and pond water. I try to see what’s in his eyes—the curse pumping through his bones? A dangerous need taking shape inside him that he can no longer ignore. Or is it simpler than that? The kind of summer longing stirred up between any small-town boy and girl. Fingertips and sun-kissed skin and trembling heartbeats—wild and nocturnal and left wanting more.

In the quiet his mouth is the only thing I see.

“Kissing Lark Goode is a bad idea…,” I whisper.

He breathes, and I swear he shifts closer—this boy who was only a sketch in my notebook days ago but now stands inches away, the night air buzzing around us, the sky tilting above. “I know you want me to be afraid of you… but I’m not. I don’t believe any of the rumors about you.” He swallows, doesn’t look away. “I only believe what I see in front of me.”

Every warning inside me spins out of control.

His eyelashes blink, and I’m so close that I could press my lips to his and forget all the ways this will ruin me. Ruin us both.

But I feel something cracking wide inside me, the throat-closing sensation of falling into something I’m not prepared for. A tangled-up-in-knots feeling.

And I feel myself tipping toward an edge….

I glimpse what everyone else feels when they stray too close to Archer or me, when they grasp a tulip in their hands.

It’s the beginning of something….

A word I won’t let myself say aloud.

I pull myself back from him, sudden and quick, severing the moment.

I can’t let this happen. This lie. I won’t feel the pain I watched my mother endure—knowing that our father never really loved her.

I will run from it. Always.

Because it’s not real. What he feels in this moment, his heart racing in his chest, is only the tulips.

What I feel… will wreck me.

It will be the start of my unraveling. Of this boy breaking right in front of me.

I turn away, my lungs heaving, hating the feeling of separation from him, but I scoop up my pile of clothes. “I have to go,” I say in a rush, sliding my eyes back to him, a twitch at my upper lip. I love the way he looks in the moonlight, I think painfully, achingly.

“Good night,” I manage, instead of I can never see you again.

I catch the flicker of a smile against his lips—like he knows this isn’t goodbye, not really , not in any permanent way, because this thing between us feels more unshakable than that—but still, I command my legs to carry me away, up through the meadow, before I can change my mind, leaving a trail of water behind me.

I leave Oak standing nearly naked beside the pond.

And I force myself not to look back.