Page 15

His throat tightens, and he sways a little on his feet. “It’s been three years since my dad left…. I kept waiting for him to come back,” he whispers. “But he never did.” For a long moment he is silent, breathing, like he’s searching for the right way to explain. “I finally got up the courage…. I wanted to see for myself.” He shakes his head. “I needed to see the family that ruined mine.” There is hurt in his eyes, a raw kind of pain I’ve never seen in him before, and it tangles up all my emotions. “I wanted to hate you….” His green eyes drive straight through me. “But when I saw you outside the school, I felt something… like…” He winces. “Like something was burning me from the inside out.”

My hands shake, not wanting to hear this.

He felt what the tulips wanted him to feel. Love. A pull toward me, unexplainable, perilous. He felt an ache, a need, a desire that wasn’t real.

It never was.

I swallow, the feeling inside me like a sudden storm, a sea crashing against rocks, violent and terrible.

Everything between us has been a lie from the start.

He takes a risky step toward me. “I wanted to know if I could be around you… and not feel something. I wanted to prove to myself that I was stronger than my father, that I could resist a Goode.”

I feel like I’m going to be sick. I thought he was immune; I thought the tulips had no effect on him. But maybe I only wanted to believe it. Needed to. I was stupid. Wrong. He felt what everyone else does, but he fought it, resisted, for as long as he could.

This is why he’s tried to keep his distance, why he pulls away when we get too close—because he feels himself falling, tumbling , an urge to be even closer to me. The enchantment digging its way under his skin. That day in the boat, I asked about his father, and it must have reminded him of why he came to find me in the first place—it reminded him of the promise he made to himself, not to fall in love, not to repeat what his father did.

“He bought it for her,” he says, nodding to the photo still in my hands. “Only a few months after they met, he bought her that sailboat. He was so in love with her.”

I bite down on all the pain cracking through my ribs, making my heart feel shriveled and black and worthless. “Was she ever here, in this house?” My eyes dart around the living room, trying to imagine her seated on the low gray couch, trying to imagine her at ease within these cold walls.

But Oak shakes his head. “No. He never brought her here—he knew how I felt. I had heard about the Goodes at school, heard rumors. I told him that she couldn’t be trusted, but he didn’t care.” He dips his chin, eyes to the floor, breathing. Oak thought the Goodes couldn’t be trusted… but he is the one who lied. “One morning,” he continues, “he said he was taking a trip with her. They were going to take the sailboat out, leaving from the coast. That was three years ago. He just never came back.”

Three years. I know the weight of those same years.

“Have you heard from him?” I need to know… need to know if his father cares enough to write, when our mother hasn’t bothered to send even a postcard.

Oak nods. “He calls sometimes, doesn’t say much. They were in Europe a couple of months ago—Spain, I think. I know he feels guilty for leaving, and I think hearing my voice just makes him feel worse.” He blows out a breath, looks exhausted and angry and broken. “But he also sounds… I don’t know… happy, I guess. Like he really loves her.”

I cringe, knowing that my mother is more to blame for all of this than his father. Maybe she loves Oak’s father, or maybe she is only using him. Either way, she used the tulips—our family’s charm—to convince him to take her far away from the town she always hated.

She convinced him to leave his son behind. And never go back.

She is the villain.

But if his father still thinks he loves her, then the enchantment hasn’t worn off, hasn’t left her flesh. It trailed her even after she left Cutwater. But eventually she will lose him, her charm will run out, the allure will wear off—it won’t last forever—but not before she hurts everyone in her orbit.

Oak’s eyes flick back to mine, and I don’t want to admit it, but we both have known the same pain. The same years of waiting. The same loss.

We both have been abandoned because of love—the wrong kind of love.

The lying kind.

We both have made vows to ourselves—not to end up like our parents.

And now… here we are.

Tears leak down my cheeks; I’m unable to press them back down. He takes a step toward me, like he’s going to wipe them away, but I shoot him a look not to touch me. “You lied,” I tell him. “You knew all along, and you didn’t say anything.”

“I’m sorry. I never should have kept it from you.” His eyes are dewy points of light, pinpricks of hurt. “I screwed up. But I wanted to believe that I could see you and not feel anything.” I can see the anguish in him, the tears pressing against his eyelids. “I had to prove it to myself. But it became harder and harder not to think about you, not to…”

I shake my head, not wanting to hear any of it, and I clench the towel tighter against my chest.

“I’ve tried to stay away…,” he says, voice rough, like the words are a burden he’s carried too long, and I think I see his lips trembling. Pain tucked into every crevice. “I thought I could fight it, but…” His chest swells. And my heart starts to crash against my ribs: fearful of what he’s going to say next but needing to hear it, needing to know what thoughts have tormented him. Needing to know why I shouldn’t just leave and hate him forever. “I went to the abandoned train car, the place you took me that night. I stood on the roof and tried to think of all the reasons why I needed to forget you. But they were all the wrong reasons… because it’s not… because I…” He shakes his head, exhaling like it’s the last breath he’ll ever take. “I told myself I would never see you again and that eventually it wouldn’t hurt so bad. But I don’t think that’s true either, because seeing you now…” I try to look away from him but can’t. My eyes are buried in his. “I don’t think a girl like you can be forgotten. Not really. Not ever.”

His words peel back old scabs, breaking my bones all over again. “You only think about me because I’m a Goode, because you can’t help it. What you feel isn’t real.” It hurts to say this, I wish it weren’t true, but I know he can’t trust his own heart. Every unshakable thought he’s had about me… is a lie . What he feels when he sees me is a lie.

I am the monster. The daughter of the woman who took his father away.

“No,” he says, jaw tensing, eyes flashing to the fireplace. “I don’t believe that. It’s… it’s not your last name. It’s not this town or anything that could grow from the ground behind your house.” He scrapes a hand through his dark hair, like he’s not getting the words out quite right. His eyes click back to mine, the dark centers of his pupils cut through with pain. “Lark, tell me you don’t feel anything… and I’ll believe you. If it’s only me, then it must be the tulips, then I’ve been stupid this whole time. I’ve imagined this whole thing. But if you feel something… then it’s not your family, or those flowers….”

My lungs have stopped inhaling, and it feels like a broken knife is cutting apart every inch of my swollen heart, leaving it in shreds on the floor of his beautiful home. And he won’t take his dangerous, savage, painful eyes off me. “I can’t…” I can’t let myself…. I can’t admit how he makes me feel.

Because he’s lied. And I feel betrayed—not just by him, but by my own mother. By everything that’s happened. My family has broken his in ways that I can’t make right.

There are too many hurts between us for there to be room left for anything good.

Still, he moves closer. I tell my legs to walk away, I tell my body to run, but my muscles are useless—as if there’s a gravity in him I can’t pull away from.

“Tell me something, Lark, anything,” he presses. “Tell me you hate me. Tell me you never felt a thing for me. Tell me you never want to see me again.”

I want to be angry. I want to tell him I’ll never forgive him for what he’s done, the secret he kept, but it’s not what I feel at all. I feel my whole body spinning into dust, into nothing; I feel every need inside me growing out of control. My heart is a drum in my ears. “I—I,” I stammer, my lungs caving in. “I don’t feel anything for you,” I lie. Because I feel everything. Because I have to keep my distance, because he doesn’t understand what will happen if I allow myself to tip too far into something we can’t return from. We can’t trust.

He exhales, but his eyes stay on me, unflinching.

“I’ve seen the lives those flowers have ruined, just like they ruined yours,” I tell him instead, trying to make him understand. The truth I can’t escape. “You once said that the people in this town want the tulips because they’re afraid they won’t be loved without them. But I never told you what I’m afraid of.” My head pulses, words pressing against my teeth. “I’m afraid the tulips are the only reason anyone will ever love me.”

I’m afraid I am a girl who will only ever know false love. Conjured by a flower that blooms each spring outside my bedroom window. I’m afraid I’m a girl who is unlovable otherwise. But mostly… I’m afraid of what will happen if I let myself fall for him.

I’ll end up losing him.

Like my mother lost my father once tulip season was over.

Heartache is always waiting on the other side of summer. Once the tulips wilt and die, so does the delirium of love they cause.

Oak’s eyebrows pull together. “So you’d live your life afraid to let anyone love you?”

“If it keeps me safe, keeps my heart from breaking a hundred times, then yes.”

He takes a brave step toward me, and I can see all the pain crashing against the shore of his eyelids. “You’re not afraid of being loved…,” he says, defiant, cavernous. “You’re afraid that you’ll fall in love, and everything you’ve ever believed was wrong. You’re afraid that love is the only thing that will save you. That love is the only thing you really want.”

I breathe, anger and pain bleeding into something that feels like truth. “You were afraid too,” I point out. “You were afraid of me . And you lied,” I remind him. “You only came to my window that night, on my birthday, to see how close you could get to Lark Goode without falling in love. But you failed. You’re just as weak as the rest of them.” The words sting; they slice against my tongue.

I am the monster, I remind myself.

“I’m not like the rest of them, and neither are you,” he says, moving even closer, unfazed by my words, and I want to yell at him, tell him to keep his distance or we will destroy each other. It’s the way of Goodes. It’s how it’s always been. “I don’t believe in the curse, Lark. I spent so much time blaming your family, your mother, for what happened. But it was my father who chose to leave, who decided that she was more important than staying here with me.” He exhales, his chest deflating. “Maybe your family wanted to blame the tulips for everything that’s ever happened to them, and maybe the town wanted a reason to explain what they felt for the Goodes, because they couldn’t accept that they might be drawn to a family like yours. The tulips are just an excuse. A story we tell ourselves to make sense of what we feel.” My breathing slows, and a strange quiet settles over me—his voice makes every knot inside me slip apart, my heart easing into a rhythm it knows only with him. “This thing I feel when I’m with you has nothing to do with the garden behind your house. And I don’t want to wake up one day and regret not telling you this. I don’t want to wake up and wonder where you are, wonder what might have happened if I had.”

The warm air from the fire suddenly feels too warm.

“I never should have lied to you,” he says, temples tightening all the way down to his jawline. “I know I hurt you, I know I pushed you away, and I’m sorry.” I can see the tears breaking against his eyelids. Watery edges of regret. “I should have told you all of this sooner. I should have stood at your window and told you that it’s my fault. And I know… it might already be too late.”

Confusion rips at me. I want to believe him. Maybe it was never the tulips. Maybe we wanted to believe in a curse so badly to make sense of this —this fever that weaves tight around our throats and makes it hard to breathe. Maybe there is nothing to fear in the garden behind our house. It was only ever a story we told to make sense of the heartbreak and misfortune that has always followed us. We wanted to believe it, and so we did. And the town did too. The only real sickness is our belief. A fable, a folklore we can’t shake.

Maybe the only thing I can actually trust is what I feel right now.

Here.

With him.

“Lark…,” he says softly, so close that I can smell the rainwater on his skin. “If you never want to see me again, just tell me.”

He’s giving me another chance, and my mouth falls open. I hate you, I should say. I hate you for this secret you kept from me. But the lie no longer has weight. Meaning.

Neither of us has trusted love.

Neither of us knows how.

So I do what I shouldn’t: I reach out for him.

My cold fingertips find the warmth of his collarbones, feeling the pulse at his neck. He is the river and the midnight air that soaks into his skin when he reads beneath the stars.

I want to believe he’s right.

I need to.

He lifts his arm, the muscles of his chest tensing, and he touches a strand of my wet hair—as if it’s as close as he dares to get. But it’s not enough— he’s never close enough —and I don’t care that a part of me is still shouting that I need to leave, I don’t care that I’ve made promises to myself, because my heart is now a piston, firing out of control, about to break my rib cage into a thousand jagged pieces of bone.

I stare up into his impossible eyes, pleading for something I’m certain only he can give me: relief, hope . Meaning in the torment of his hands on my skin.

I want so bad to hate him… but instead I am breathless and desperate, and I want only one thing.

This feeling will break me. I’m certain of it.

“It’s not just you,” I admit.

His thumb slides down my cheek, across my chin, my bottom lip, and he looks at me like he’s forgotten everything that came before this moment, all the words spoken between us, all the near misses when we pulled away from each other.

Maybe we don’t have to make amends for the mistakes our parents made. Maybe we don’t have to punish ourselves; maybe we don’t have to resist what we feel because we’re afraid of ending up like them. We have to make our own mistakes.

We have to risk everything so that we feel something .

So that we live.

I lift onto my tiptoes, and I graze my lips gently across his—air and rain and a thousand hours that I’ve spent tracing the outline of his mouth, that I’ve imagined the softness of his breath against mine. And now…

Now…

He sucks in a breath, and I dig my fingers into the back of his neck, feeling the heat of his skin. Feeling myself tremble at the same moment his lips sink in, tracing the delicate, never-before-touched curve of my mouth. Rainwater falls from our flesh, dries up, evaporates just like my heart. My fingertips graze his wet hair, while his hands slide beneath the towel, finding my waist, my hips, and it feels like we’re tumbling backward, heat and breath and all the lies between us. But none of it matters. He lifts his mouth and kisses my throat, the soft place beneath my earlobe.

I feel weightless again, lost in the warmth of his fingertips as they trace the landscape of my flesh that no one has ever touched. I kiss him back, tasting the rainwater on his skin; I kiss him so desperately, I worry we’ll both break. His hand slides along my ribs, beneath my soaked tank top, and I swear it feels as if my heart is pounding so loud that it’ll rattle the walls of his house.

His mouth is on my throat again, tracing every freckle, his hand now against my belly. He takes a deep breath, stalls, and I close my eyes, falling, falling , tipping recklessly into something I never want to wake from. His mouth is on mine again, desperate, both of us losing ourselves in whatever this is: lust or love or a madness.

“Lark,” he whispers against my flesh, and I feel a deep, dangerous unspooling inside me. A rupturing behind my eyelids, a feeling like I want to cry and laugh all at once. A feeling in the very center of my being, a thing I’ve always feared, a thing I’ve been warned about.

Love.

It tiptoes up the base of my spine, careful and quiet, as if I might miss it, as if it’s only a whisper. Hardly there at all. A thief. A pickpocket.

But once it lands in my chest, it thunders through every muscle and bone, splitting apart every cell… and there’s no denying it.

This is what I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid.

But when it settles behind my eyes, I feel tipsy and inside out, like I’m drifting away. I feel inhuman, a speck of stardust. A riddle and a blade of grass. Nowhere and everywhere.

I feel like a girl who is having her first kiss.

Who fell for a boy one perilous summer and never looked back.

I let myself feel it all. I draw in a ragged breath, my skin alight, and I stare into his eyes, trembling. Maybe Oak is right: It was never real, the curse . It was only ever a story, a thing told to Archer and me, a fable my mother believed in, a tall, tall tale.

I lay my lips on his and he kisses me back. The chill that tunneled across my skin when we ran through the rain is now gone; only warmth is left. His hands slide back down my ribs, and I kiss him, knowing I’ll never lose him again. I kiss him for all the times I wanted to but never could. I kiss him without fear, and I pull him to me, scraping my fingers across his collarbones. I want to know every feeling I’ve denied myself. I want to make up for lost time. I want to know what it feels like to wake up in his arms, the morning sun shivering across our bare skin. I want to lose every part of who I used to be.

His hands are in my hair, and my heart feels like it’s going to explode. Break clean through my flesh, kill me instantly.

But it’s something else… that destroys me.

Something else.

His voice against the soft flesh of my ear, vibrating against my eardrums, delicate and small. But with the weight of a hammer. “You smell like flowers,” he murmurs. The words sound far away, as if uttered beneath water, whispered against a cold wind whipping down from a mountaintop.

I pull my head away, and he blinks, looking briefly confused, like he never intended to say the words. As if they’d been spoken by someone else.

“What did you say?”

He shakes his head, eyebrows crinkling together. “I—I didn’t mean…”

“You said I smell like flowers.”

“I just meant that… I shouldn’t have said it….”

I shake my head and slip free from his hands. Fuck. I smell like flowers because I am a Goode. Because the scent of tulips is laced like poison along my skin: it lives in my hair, pollen dotting my eyelashes, the perfume of love and desire inescapable. And with only a few words from his lips, I know the truth. His hands trace my flesh only because of the flowers that grow wild and dangerous beside a cursed creek.

Even if he doesn’t believe it, even if he convinced me for a brief, dreamlike moment that the tulips are only a story told to make sense of the past. His voice has shattered the illusion.

I can never escape the lie the tulips tell on my behalf.

He desires me because I am a Goode. Nothing more.

“Lark…,” he begins.

But I stagger back from him. And it feels like being dropped from a cliff.

“It’s not real…,” I hear myself say, but my thoughts are already breaking apart, coming undone.

“It is real…,” he insists. “I’m sorry I said that, about the flowers, it was stupid. I didn’t mean anything by it. I don’t even know why I said it—it just came out.”

I allow my eyes to scrape up to his. “You said it because your thoughts aren’t your own. Your mind isn’t your own. This is all…” I shake my head. “I shouldn’t have come here.”

“Lark, no.” He tries to step toward me, but I take another step back, then another.

I can’t believe I let myself trust this feeling, trust him, trust this moment.

Love is a lie. And it always will be.

But it’s not his fault…. It’s mine.

I am a Goode. I am the monster.

“I’m sorry,” I say to him. “I understand why you lied, about your dad and my mom. But I should have known better. I should have stayed away.”

My legs carry me back, and Oak stands frozen, the firelight making ribbons of light and dark across his chest. The hurt in his eyes is so heavy, I can’t bear to look directly at them.

“Please, Lark, don’t go. Don’t walk away.”

I risk a glance at him, feeling my own tears welling against my eyes. “It’s not your fault, how you feel,” I say. Words that burn. That cut me apart. “But you should try to forget about me. About this summer. And by winter you won’t even remember why you spent a single day with me; it’ll all seem like wasted time.”

“No,” he mutters.

But I force my eyes away from him, yanking open the door, and I duck out into the storm.

Raindrops explode against the asphalt. The air fills with its warm, atmospheric scent. And my heart is ash.

Mom’s words repeat in my head: Never trust your heart, never trust love.

I run, the wind howling against my face, the air burning in my lungs, my bare feet smacking against the pavement. I can still feel the places where Oak’s hands touched my skin. The scent of him pressed into my flesh: of the river behind his house, wet earth, and a long, winding road.

I left my sandals beside the back door of Oak’s house. But I’m not going back. I won’t risk it; I can’t trust that my heart won’t tip back into his arms. That I might forget why I left in the first place.

All the fear that lives inside me, the warnings I’ve repeated to myself my entire life— never get too close, never make eye contact, don’t let them love you —force my legs to pump even harder. My heartbeat cracking against my eardrums.

I reach our driveway and sprint toward the house, over the creek, and gasp for air on the front porch before pushing inside. Archer is leaning against the kitchen counter, sipping a cup of coffee, the shotgun at his side—like he intends to stay awake all night.

“What happened?” He sets his mug on the counter.

But I march past him and out into the garden. The tulips sway innocently, a section of the crop now headless, ripped from the soil, but most of the garden is untouched.

Over the years several of my ancestors have tried to destroy the tulips: Uncle Sergie mowed down the whole garden with a riding lawn mower one night while drunk; my great-grandmother Pip tried to dig up the bulbs with a shovel, uprooting most of them in hopes that a local man who bred horses on the other end of town would stop loving her. But it didn’t work. The tulips always returned the following spring, and the locals kept falling in love. Obsession and desperation and misery.

I head for the toolshed and find a pair of large, rusted shears. They’re heavy, haven’t been used in a decade, but I make for the garden, determined. At the first row, the tulips churn around me as if they sense something, feel the malice of my intention, and I swing the shears up, snip off three beautiful tulip heads, and watch the blooms hit the ground like they’ve been decapitated.

“What the hell are you doing?” Archer shouts from the back porch.

“They ruin everything,” I say, shearing off another five tulips.

I hear Archer’s footsteps on the porch stairs, but I keep hacking at the tulips, watching the blooms roll across the soil, the air fragrant and alive with their terrible scent. But just before I can snip off another towering clump, Archer rips the shears from my hands in one swift move. “You think destroying the tulips will be this easy?”

I turn on my brother, my ears pulsing. “I have to try.”

Archer holds the shears at his side, and I eye them, ready to snatch them back, but he gives me a look, his eyebrows raised. We both know that I won’t be able to wrestle them from him: he’s stronger, and he’d win this battle one way or another—just like when we were little kids and he’d swipe my favorite stuffed rabbit from my bed and run into the woods, knowing I couldn’t catch him.

His eyes flatten, trying to unearth the truth from his sister. “What happened tonight? You went to see that boy?” He squints, his upper lip curling a little, like he’s found it. Discovered the thought I’ve been trying to hide. “You started to fall in love with him, didn’t you?”

I don’t answer.

“Shit, sis. You know better than that.”

I exhale, craning my head back to stare up at the moonless sky, every star vivid and sharp like needlepoints. “I really liked him,” I whisper, I confess, heat rising behind my eyes. “I thought… I don’t know, that maybe it was real.”

“First rule of being a Goode: never believe anything that feels like love.”

I lower my head, looking down at the pile of tulips at my feet, and I feel suddenly afraid that I’ll never leave this house—just like Archer. That all my plans are impossible. Improbable. And I’ll never be any better than everyone else who couldn’t find a way out of Cutwater.

That I’ll stay here forever.

Archer grips the shears, using them to point to the garden. “Without the tulips, what do we have, Lark? We’re just two orphans living in a shit house, in a shit town, with no future. But these flowers give us power. Control.”

“But we’ll never have love. Real love. ”

He turns away from me briefly, like he’s hiding something, a thought, a memory he doesn’t want me to see. Then his eyes swing back. “I’ll take power over love any day.”

He starts toward the back porch, then pauses, turns to face me again. “If cutting down the garden would end the curse, someone in this family would have done it long ago. This garden… this is our life. It’s all there is. The sooner you accept it, make it work in your favor, the less miserable you’ll be.” His eyes soften, pity forming at the corners. He feels bad for me. “I know it’s hard. But we have to be tougher, more resilient than anyone else in this town, or this life will destroy us.”

My eyes drop to my feet. Tulip season will end, winter will come, yet we will still be the Goodes. And the curse will not end for us. We will never be rid of it. It will start all over again next spring.

My brother leaves me in the garden.

The screen door banging shut behind him.

I’ve known a lifetime of lovesickness; I grew up watching Mom push away unwanted affections, our doorbell ringing at all hours of the night, men standing on our porch pleading with her to love them in return—their voices waking me from sleep.

I grew up with this maelstrom of forsaken love all around me. And when I scan the garden, I see what others do: the beauty of each rare bloom, white petals cut through with an ancient red incantation. But I also know the tulips are made of darkness. They are a plague. And they will ruin us, one way or another.

I push in through the back door and march down the hall. My heart is a twisted knot, my body is still razed with memories of him , and I peel away my clothes.

In the Goode family, love means destruction. It means pain.

I step into the shower and turn on the water as hot as it will go. I need to rid him from my body. I need him gone. I allowed myself to believe, foolishly, that maybe Oak wasn’t affected by the tulips. That he was drawn to me like any normal boy enchanted by any normal girl.

But now I know the truth.

I scrape at my skin. I tilt my head back and let the water stream down my face, mixing with the tears, washing me clean of the girl I used to be. But it’s no use.

I can still feel every place his hands pressed against me, his fingertips at my hip bone, his mouth beside my ear. I touch my lips, remembering the way it felt when he kissed me. And I want to feel it again.

No.

I am a girl who is cursed.

I can’t strip away my name—I can’t undo who I am. That part of me will never be washed down the drain.

I leave the shower and crawl into bed, knees pulled to my chest, naked, hoping that by morning I’ll forget who he is. I’ll forget a boy named Oak who once touched me like I was his gravity—the only thing keeping him from drifting away. From disappearing. A boy I still want just as badly as I did before I stepped into the shower.

The feeling has burrowed in deep.

An ache in my belly, a pulse behind my eyes.

A thing that’s hooked its claws into me and won’t let go.