Page 18

FOURTEEN

Oak drives me up Swamp Wells Road.

The worst of the storm dissolves overhead, lightning shivering in the distance, only a soft rain continuing to scatter across the windshield.

Seated in Oak’s truck, smelling the familiar scent of tires and sunlight, I’m reminded of early-summer days when we drove with the windows rolled down, my hand floating through the warm air. It feels like a hundred lifetimes in the past. And for a single moment I pretend I am still that girl—naive and hopeful. I pretend we are two teenagers in love who will give this thing a shot out in the real world. I imagine his hand is reaching across the truck to grab mine. That we are leaving this town together.

Fleeing. Starting over.

I am a stupid girl.

He slows the truck, steering down Aspen Avenue, and the seconds are moving too fast. The truck rolls to a stop in front of the train station, and Oak puts it in park. His hands grip the steering wheel, like he’s afraid to let go. Like he can’t trust his own hands.

I draw in my bottom lip, not knowing how to sit beside him and not touch him—sink into his arms and breathe in his scent. River and wind and wilds. Not knowing how to say goodbye.

My eyes settle on the paperback on the dash. Atonement , by Ian McEwan.

A love story, tragic, if I remember right.

He follows my eyes. “It’s about a man who loses the one he loves, all because of a lie. A rumor.”

“Some rumors are true,” I answer in reflex.

He shakes his head and says, voice so low it’s nearly lost to the rain, “I don’t give a shit about the truth.”

Another long silence. Watching the rain against the windshield.

“I wish it were different… I wish I…” I want to say, I wish I weren’t a Goode. But I can’t apologize for what I am. We did this to each other. We broke each other’s hearts. And wishing for a different past is useless.

He nods, breathing shallow, and his shoulders settle like he knows this is really the end. “I hope you get everything you want.”

This hurts worse than anything. Worse than the time we spent apart.

His hands twist around the steering wheel, and I know… this is the last time I’ll see him, and none of it feels fair.

“I don’t know what else to say,” he mutters. His jaw tightens. He is a brick wall seated beside me—no part of him begging me forward, urging me into his arms.

“I don’t think there’s anything left to say.” The words are almost enough to shatter me—my own words… are lies. Because I want to say a thousand things; I want his hand to touch mine; I want him to say that there will never be enough words, never enough moments between us, never enough time. Because he’s missed me so much that it’s felt like death.

But he doesn’t.

He closes his mouth, a subtle nod tipping his chin down, like he understands that it’s too late for that. There’s no going back.

He breathes, then finally speaks—saying the worst thing of all—so softly, I almost don’t hear it. “It was just a summer thing… anyway.” My eyes flash to his, but there is nothing there. No comfort. No regret. Only his words, and they feel like a rusted blade driving straight down to bone. Twisting. Shattering what’s left of my insides. Ripping me apart. But I manage to nod, agreeing , even though I don’t mean it.

This is the end of our story.

The tulips are gone, torn away with the flood, and maybe now… what he felt for me is gone too. The enchantment, the allure, has worn off. A thing he can’t pinpoint, a feeling that was once alive inside him, has evaporated with the storm.

His heart no longer aches to reach out for me.

When I leave, when I’m gone, he won’t miss me.

He’ll hardly think of me ever again.

I wish I felt the same.

I wish I felt nothing.

But when my eyes skim over him, I know my thoughts are just as wrecked as they’ve always been. He rubs a hand down his forearm, and I think how impossibly beautiful he is, how he was the boy who made me forget, for a few brief weeks, how dangerous love is.

I want to say so many things, but I know it doesn’t matter now. “Goodbye, Oak” is all that comes out. I touch the door handle, about to step out into the night, but he reaches for me, and I feel his hand against my arm. Gentle but pleading.

I don’t even realize I’m crying until I turn and Oak is touching my face, wiping at the tears, pulling me into his arms. Maybe it’s pity he feels, the last lingering remnants of compassion for the girl he once thought he couldn’t live without.

I press my face to his shoulder and I breathe in his scent—the river at night, the sun against his tanned skin. Too long I’ve craved this, to feel him against me, to hear his heartbeat in my ear, beating wildly.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “For everything.”

I’m sorry too, but I don’t say it. I don’t know how.

I lift my head from his shoulder, and his horrible, beautiful, painful green eyes lift a millimeter to meet mine… and every part of me cracks into a billion unsalvageable pieces, dissolving onto the floor. Don’t look at me like that, I want to scream. Don’t hold me so close that I can smell the wind in your dark hair. Don’t let each word hang against your lips so slowly that I can imagine myself suspended against your mouth, tumbling, falling, smashing into you.

Fuck. I still love him. And I hate myself for it.

I try to swallow, to dampen my throat enough to speak, but all the right words are now the wrong ones.

I miss you.

Don’t drive away.

I love you.

I always have.

… I still do.

His mouth is only inches from mine; it hovers so close, I could—

Tears stream down my cheeks, and I want to scream—I want to be a million miles away from here and I want to be nowhere else. I want…

I want…

“Lark…” The name leaves his mouth, as if it were a question, as if it were a devotion, a desire. A request.

Heat roars in my cheeks. I feel his heart racing beneath my palm, and the divide between us evaporates, as if the particles of air couldn’t possibly exist between us. As if nothing would dare separate us. As if fate were a force stronger than any fear coiled tight in my chest.

His lips hover over mine. Barely touching all the hurt I hold, both of us scared to death. Both of us unable to pull away. Both of us… lost in a future we can never have.

And maybe this is why.

We have nothing more to lose….

I breathe, unable to hold myself steady another second more. I press my mouth to his, deep and angry and broken. I let my lips sink in; I let myself forget every moment before this one. I don’t care if I shouldn’t. If it’ll only make the goodbye harder. I kiss him. I kiss the only boy I’ve ever dared to press my mouth against, and I feel his warm, dangerous fingertip slide carefully along my jaw, behind my ear, into my hair at the base of my neck.

I kiss him for every minute we lost with each other.

I kiss him for every night I lay awake, wishing I could touch him again.

I kiss him for every line of his face I drew with my pencil, etching him into memory.

And he kisses me back, ferociously, like he knows I’m going to slip from his grasp. Eventually. Always. Like he knows what he feels for me is long gone. And this is the last goodbye.

Because it’s my heart that feels shredded, that feels tangled up in the sway of his mouth, his hands as they slide up the back of my shirt, soaked with rain, against my skin. I feel dizzy and drunk and like I’d trade everything to be with him. Sacrifice every plan I’ve made. I’d give it all up, all of it , just to hold on to this feeling, just to be here with him in the warmth of his truck, the rain falling down, and forget about the life waiting for me beyond this town.

I am a stupid girl, I think again. But I don’t care.

His mouth finds my throat, and I hope he never lets go. I hope time stalls on this moment, refuses to click forward. I hope this isn’t a dream. I hope I never wake. Why do his hands feel like relief against my skin, like the only thing I need?

My eyelids flutter open; I need to remind myself to breathe….

I blink and stare at the paperback on the dash. Atonement. A story of loss and heartache and passion. I think of how he’s touched its pages like he touches me now. I think of the stories resting beneath his skin. I think of how we are a story that keeps weaving together.

Fated.

Predestined.

Doomed.

I think how impossible it is to forget him. His hands trace my rib bones, and I think of the first time I saw him, standing in the parking lot, shoulder pressed to a tree, a book in his hand. I remember how he looked walking away.

And I hated it. Even then. Before I knew his name.

I hated seeing him striding away from me, not knowing whether I’d ever see him again, whether his eyes would ever peer into mine. I knew I needed to be closer to him, even then. Even when I tried to push the thought away.

He was always there, beneath my skin, as if he were stronger than the curse.

As if he might be the only thing to save me.

But he wasn’t. It was all a lie.

His mouth strays over mine, and I feel myself unraveling again beneath his hands, forgetting about the train, about leaving, about the house carried away into the trees. But I can’t pull my eyes from the book, something about it… something keeps me glued to its wrinkled pages, still damp from the flood. They fan open slightly, the pages beginning to dry, heat pouring from the vents, and there is something there. Pressed flat.

Innocent and delicate—tucked between the pages.

Hidden.

Safe.

I narrow my gaze, trying to see….

A cruel, treacherous red against the white of the paper.

Bloodred.

Angry red.

Lying red.

Oak’s mouth stalls against mine. “What’s wrong?”

I reach out—Oak’s hands pressed against my ribs—and I grasp the silky petals. It’s flattened from the book, dried a little, lost its weight and moisture. But it’s still intact, verdant—ready for its next victim.

Time squeezes against me, and the air falls from my lungs.

“Lark…,” he begins, his dark eyebrows pinched, his full lips still hovering so close to me, I could sink into them again.

But no, no, no, no.

I push back from him, across the wide truck seat, until my back hits the cold door. “How long have you had this?”

“Lark, I just… It’s not what—”

“How long have you had it?” I demand, feeling like my voice is going to cave in. My throat a desert.

He tries to reach for me again, but I shake my head. “Oak, where did you get this?”

I can see the breath held in his throat, see his mouth slacken. “It was just on the road…. It was there and I picked it up. I didn’t think anything of it.”

“When?” I sputter, the word tangled against my teeth.

“I—I don’t know. A month ago, in the spring.”

My vision shifts out of focus, then snaps back. “Where on the road?”

“In front of your house. I was walking by.” His eyes are pleading, I can see he wants to move closer to me, but he resists. “I heard voices, girls whispering, it was late, and I saw them leaving from your house. They were carrying flowers, and they dropped one.”

Clementine, I think, and her friends. It was probably the first night they raided the garden and stole the tulips. “You were walking by my house that night?”

He nods, breathing through his nostrils.

I try to imagine it, Oak striding up Swamp Wells Road that same night—maybe he’d been walking by every night for weeks, curious about the Goodes, about the family who broke his—until one night he saw a group of girls squealing and laughing as they sprinted away from the garden, dropping tulips behind them as they ran up the road toward town.

“I told you someone broke into the garden,” I press. “I told you that someone stole the flowers, but you never said anything?”

“I didn’t know who they were.” He shakes his head. “And I didn’t think it mattered, they were just flowers, I didn’t know… I didn’t realize it was so important to you back then.”

My hand is trembling, my lungs are heaving in and out. “But you kept it,” I say. “You found this tulip and you kept it in each new book you read…. Why?”

“I…” His eyes slope down. “I held on to it because I thought, I don’t know, it reminded me of you. That’s all. It wasn’t… I didn’t know…” He’s grasping at his own thoughts, unable to pinpoint it exactly. But I know why: he kept it because of how it made him feel. Just like everyone else who’s possessed a tulip—he couldn’t part with it, couldn’t let it go.

But this isn’t the worst of it.

This isn’t what makes my head start to whirl and crack.

If he’s possessed a tulip—hidden in a book, tucked in his back pocket—this whole time, since the night Clementine and the others stole our flowers… If he’s had it since the day he saved me from the mob in front of the school, since we lay on our backs on the train, since he held my hand while thousands of lightning bugs swarmed around us…

Then maybe…

It’s not his heart I should have been worried about.

Maybe he never felt entranced, charmed, bewitched by Lark Goode. Maybe he wasn’t lured closer to me by a family curse that grew behind our house.

Because he possessed a Goode tulip from the start. Instead, I was lured closer to him .

Maybe… it’s my heart I can’t trust.

We’ve never known what would happen if a tulip was stolen, held, hidden , by someone who wasn’t a Goode. We’ve never known what would happen to us if we fell in love with someone who kept a tulip secreted away.

And now.

I was afraid that whatever Oak felt for me… was a lie.

But… what if my heart is the one in danger?

My heart is the one that felt what it shouldn’t.

Love is a mistress who will clench her fist around your heart until you bleed.

Mom warned us. But she never told us what might happen if someone else kept a tulip pressed inside the pages of a book and we let our hearts spill into theirs.

I’m starting to doubt everything.

My eyes begin to water, and the inside of the truck feels too hot. Too suffocating.

This thing I feel for Oak, this need, this longing I’ve felt for him from the start—a feeling I couldn’t quite pinpoint—was never real at all. It was a feeling that came on much too fast, burrowing under my skin, making it impossible to forget him.

I felt fascinated by him. Hypnotized. Entranced. Obsessed with finishing the sketch. With seeing him again.

I shake my head, the realization slamming against my skull.

It was the tulip—the one he kept hidden. Safe and preserved.

I never really loved him.

Ever.

I exhale, and it feels like a storm, a hurricane across a sea that will destroy everything in its path, and I snap my gaze away from him.

My heart was a lie, everything I felt… was a lie.

I clench down on the tulip, crushing it in my fist.

“Lark,” he says again. But I shrink away.

There’s nothing he can say. No words to put this right. Everything I’ve felt wasn’t real. Whether he meant to keep this from me or not. It doesn’t matter.

Everything he stirred up inside me only moments ago, with his mouth on mine, wasn’t real .

It was the tulip.

I reach for the door handle.

“Wait…,” he says. “Please… I didn’t know. It’s just a flower. It doesn’t mean anything.”

I can see the guilt, the regret, behind his eyes. While the sting of tears rises in mine. “It means everything.”

Our entire lives, others have been drawn to Archer and me like insects to lamplight. Dizzy and delirious. But I never considered what would happen if someone else possessed a tulip and I fell under the same spell.

I shake my head, the tulip still in my fist. “Like you said before. It was only a summer thing. And we can’t be sure if any of it was real. If you and I… were ever real.” I open the truck door and slide down to the pavement, the rain falling gently. I let myself look back at him. “Will you tell my brother that I’m okay? Tell him I left on the train.”

Oak nods, and we stare at each other one last time.

Nothing more to say.

Nothing that can put these broken pieces back together.

So I slam the door closed, forcing myself to walk away.

I walk through the rain to the office of the train station, leaving Oak sitting in his truck, a boy marred by desire and deceit. Two things so knotted together, I’ll never be able to pick them apart.