Page 95 of The Same Backward as Forward

Last night was want. Last night was need.Thisis tender. Her fingers slowly explore both scars and unmarked skin.

“Is this when we pretend that no part of me is ruined?” I ask.

Hannah’s hand stills, pausing her exploration of my body. “You really mean that.”

That I am ruined?I do mean that, in more ways than I understand or could possibly explain to her. Out loud, all I say is “Iam not the liar.”

“Maybe I’m not, either. Anymore.” Hannah resumes her exploration, her touch light—but not too light. “And maybe scars are just a body’s way of sayingI survived.”

Her hand moves from my chest to my face, and suddenly, I have something much more dangerous than hope.

I have faith. In her. In this. Inus.

I still do not tell her that I love her, that it is possible that I havealwaysloved her—not in those words, at least.

“I survived,” I whisper, “because of you.”

Chapter 25

Dreamless sleep passes in a heartbeat—or rather, two.

Hannah’s.

Mine.

I wake up first, filled with an alien kind of joy and ready to play. I can tell by the absence of light spilling through the cracks in the lighthouse walls that it is not yet dawn. For all I know, it might be the middle of the night, but my body is done sleeping.

Through the darkness, I brush the hair from Hannah’s face, careful not to wake her up. It hits me that I could stay here forever, close enough to her to feel her body’s warmth like it is my own, but I know, as surely as I know that there is no going back to sleep, that if I am here when she wakes up, we will fall right back into each other, and I don’t want her to think, even for an instant, that I want only one thing from her.

I want everything. I want togive hereverything—the world and the whole damn sky.

I slip out of the lighthouse and realize one thing about myself: I’m not just the kind of person who’s fond of wagers and games. I am wired for grand gestures, going big or going home.

My current options for any such gesture, however, are limited. Hannah is not the girl you give flowers to, any more thanI am the boy who plucks them in the dark.I’m the one, I think, winding my way back around the lighthouse, my path lit only by the moon,who writes palindrome poetry in giant letters in the sand.

By the time I make it down, my mind is awash in letters and words—specifically,heteropalindromes, words that form a different word when spelled backward.Liveandevil,drawerandreward. My mind sorts through possibilities like it is what I was born to do.Dessertbecomestressed, andreifiedbackward isdeifier.

Those last two intrigue me.Reified, to have made the abstract concrete.Deifier, one who worships another, deifying them in the process. A poem starts to take form in my mind, one of those words at the beginning, the other at the end, the frame for an ode that reads exactly the same backward as forward.

But the middle of the poem is trickier, and I don’t know how long I have until Hannah wakes up. So I set aside poetry for the moment and return to the thing that feels most likeus.

Like Hannah and me.

She won our game of Hangman, but last I checked, she still hadn’t broken my code. I lower myself to my hands and knees and begin carving the alphabet into sand. I make it toYbefore I hear footsteps to my right.

I look up. Moonlight suits Hannah. The tilt of her chin tips me off. “You thought I left, didn’t you, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward?”

She wraps her arms around her waist. “Leaving the wrong way could get you killed.”

I’ve already pieced togetherwhothe threat is. What remains is thewhy. I am less concerned about myself than I am about her. “Tell me.” I stand, done with the sand.

“The answer or the truth?”

Do I want her to tell me the solution to my letter code, or do Iwant her to tell me why—precisely—the two of us are in danger? In the back of my mind, I can hear Jackson warning me,You don’t know what you don’t know.

Something in me will not let me ask. “Dealer’s choice.”

Hannah kneels in the sand and begins to work her way backward through my alphabet. I inspect my own work: all straight lines, no curves.