Page 47 of The Same Backward as Forward

The Don’t Look Down Game. It was past midnight two days later, and I was running out of excuses to delay leaving any longer. The two of us were standing at the very edge of the lighthouse point, the tips of our feet hanging over the drop-off, like a glass of whiskey balanced precariously on a pool table.

“We’re standing on the edge of the Eiffel Tower,” Harry said. Between the two of us,hewas clearly the more accomplished liar. He had a gift of making every word out of his mouth sound and feel true. “We’re at the very top,” he continued as the wind picked up. “It’s a thousand-foot drop.Don’t look down.”

I didn’t look down; I edged forward—just a little more—well aware that the old Hannah wouldn’t have ever taken the risk and equally aware that Harry would never let me fall.

“Why would I look down,” I retorted, “when we’re so close to falling off a tower spire?” I could picture it so vividly in my mind—the two of us, elsewhere.

“A tower?” Harry murmured. “One of yours?”

In his fairy-tale version of my life story, I’d locked myself in tower after tower after tower. There were no walls between us now, no boundaries between my body and his, nothing between us except the reality I kept putting off.

“Don’t look down,” I whispered. I swallowed as the ground shifted slightly beneath our feet, a rock audibly falling away from the edge.

I could hear the waves, angry and rough, down below, but I couldn’t see them.

Don’t look down.

Don’t look down.

Don’t look down.

Harry squatted, picking up a rock without ever lowering his chin or his eyes, then stood again, the smooth movement a testament to just how far he’d come. Without a word, he hurled the rock into the distance, into the ocean.

Don’t look down.I thought about the day he’d thrown the metal token against the wall, so hard it had sounded like a gunshot. Within seconds, I had a rock in my hand.

The wind picked up, and with no warning, lightning flashed somewhere in the distance. I was taken back to that day at the hospital, to the moment flames had shot into the sky.

“There’s a storm coming,” Harry said beside me. I wondered if any part of him remembered.

“Looks like it could be a big one.” I picked up my own rock and hurled it into the waves, keeping my eyes trained on the velvety darkness of the horizon.

The storm was coming, and neither one of us looked down.

Harry took a step back from the edge. His arms wrapped around me from behind, and he lowered his head, breathing me in. “As far as I’m concerned, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward, you’re the storm.”

He never called meliaranymore, not in any language, not since I’d given in, fully and completely, to this thing between us.Nothing—or everything.

I closed my eyes and leaned back against him. I could smell rain on the wind, and some prescient part of me said that the storm was a sign. I knew in the pit of my stomach that I couldn’t put it off any longer.

He was ready. Once the weather cleared, he could make it across the rocks.Wecould.

This had started with a storm, and now, it was ending.

We stayed out long enough that we got caught in the rain. It rolled in off the ocean like a sheet of solid water. We saw it coming, and neither one of us made a single move to back away.

Deep down, I thought he probably knew, too: This was our last night.

The rain was the kind that battered you from all sides. Within seconds, we were drenched, and still, neither one of us could take a single step toward the lighthouse, let alone the shack.

“You look like a wet cat.” Harry had to yell to be heard over the roar of the downpour.

“You look like a wet dog,” I told him, and he proved my point, shaking off the water. His hair was long enough now that it was almost always in his face. My fingers itched to push it back, but he beat me to moving first, burying his fingers in my wet hair, pushing it back and away from my soaked face.

“You look like a fairy tale,” he murmured. He stared at me then, like he was preparing to draw me again or committing this moment to memory, the way I was. “Come with me, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward.” He paused. “When I leave, come with me.”

Those words, sudden and real, took my breath away. My mouth went unbearably dry. “I am coming,” I told him. “Across the rocks. I’ll get you to where you can call for help, and—”

“No.” He ran his hands back through my hair, and then they were cupping my jaw, lifting my face toward his. “Come with me, Hannah.”