“I can’t say I’m not! I am. Look.” I thrust the bud out toward him, cupping it in both hands. He turned, his face drawn. There was only a second’s pause, and then the petals unfolded, one after another, until the bloom had grown large enough to touch each of my fingers. I stared at the velvet yellow petals cupped in my hands, and then back up at him.
Luke hugged his arms around himself. “Impressive,” he said in a small voice.
I didn’t understand his reaction. “But you knew I could do this, already. Why else would you have said it?”
He turned away again, shoulders hunched. “Could you give me a minute?”
I had done something wrong. I shouldn’t have shown him. But he had known, hadn’t he? What had I done? I retreated quickly down the aisle, pushing my way through the double doors into the narthex, where I swiped one of my eyes dry. For a long moment I stood in the dim room, looking blankly at the fliers for bake sales and Bible studies on the bulletin board.
Then I heard him shout, “Damn you! Why?”
I looked through the clear glass of the narthex doors to see if he spoke to some barely seen faerie. But to my eyes, there was no one there but Luke and God.
We didn’t talk about the rose on the drive home. For a long time, I stared out the window at the specter of the moon, hanging above the black silhouettes of the trees, while the stripes on the road whipped by me. Something about the way the moon looked, enigmatic and eternal, reminded me of how I’d felt when I made the rose blossom in my hands.
Abruptly, Luke pulled the car off onto a barely visible dirt lane by the highway. He wrenched the parking brake up and studied the glowing clock face in the dash.
“Are you angry at me?” he asked.
Surprised by the question, I looked at him. His face was green and peaked, illuminated by the lights in the dashboard, and his expression was genuinely concerned.
“Why would I be mad at you?”
“You’ve gone all quiet. That’s the only way I could tell you were mad before, so I assume I’ve done something to tick you off.”
“You’re the one who went all quiet. I thought you were mad at me for—” I stopped short. I didn’t know if I was supposed to mention the church or not.
Luke sighed and made a vague gesture. “This is all just unfamiliar territory for me.”
“What is?”
“You.” He shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know what to do.”
“About what?”
“You.”
“About what happened in the ch—”
Luke interrupted hastily. “No. Just about you. You, yourself. I keep waiting for you to tell me to leave you alone. To tell me I’m creepy.”
I pointed at him. “That’s why I haven’t told you to leave me alone.”
“What—why?”
“Because you keep telling me how weird you are. Truly sketchy people don’t tell you how sketchy they are.”
“I also forced myself on you, in an alleyway. That’s sketchy.”
So that’s what this was about. The kiss. It was sort of charming that he was worried about it. I laughed. “You didn’t force yourself on me. And it wasn’t even an alley.”
“I didn’t ask.”
I wasn’t up on the rules of dating, but I didn’t think anyone ever asked permission to kiss a girl. Maybe in the movies. “I kissed back.”
He looked at me out of the corner of his eyes. “I don’t want to go too far—do the wrong thing—and get myself in trouble.”
Crap, that sounded familiar. “Luke, I’m not mad at you. And …” I had to look away when I said it, and I blushed, too. “You’re not going to get yourself in trouble. Or—maybe I’d like the sort of trouble you’d get yourself into.” Afterward, I thought maybe I shouldn’t have said it. Maybe he’d think I was a slut. Maybe he would go too far. Maybe he wouldn’t know what I meant. Maybe—
Luke gave me a half-way smile, somewhere short of humor, and reached across the car to brush my chin with his hand. I wanted to close my eyes and lean into his touch, to forget about everything that made me Deirdre.
“You’re a baby. You don’t know how much trouble I can get into.”
I bristled, pulling my face away. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I didn’t mean it like—aw, see, now you’re pissed at me again.”
I regarded him frostily. “No, really? You called me a baby.”
Luke thumped back in his seat, voice frustrated. “It was a compliment, really.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Because you make me forget how young you are.” He struggled to explain, looking away from my glare. “You’re just—you’re just so like me. You know—you take everything in like you’ve done it a hundred times before. The way your eyes look when you’re playing music—I just forget you’re only sixteen.”
“Aren’t you supposed to add ‘incredibly beautiful’ and ‘dazzlingly intelligent’ while you’re pouring on the unreasonable compliments?” It would have been nice to believe him—but my mind couldn’t reconcile stunningly invisible with stunningly desirable.
“I’m being serious. You are incredibly beautiful, though.” His voice was earnest.
I shook my head. “Eleanor is incredibly beautiful. I know what I am, and beautiful I am not. I’m fine with that, too.”
A weird look crossed his face at the mention of Eleanor. “No, Eleanor’s something else. You’re beautiful. Especially when you’re staring at me with that boy he’s a condescending asshole expression—yeah. Beautiful.”
I studied my hands; the lights from the radio cast a weird colored glow over them, like I was lit from within. Softly, I said, “You could say it again.”
But he didn’t. Instead, he said, “You’re different.”
His voice sounded like it was the best compliment in the world to be called different—“different” like a brand-new species of butterfly, not like a cardigan-wearing girl in a sea of tank tops.
I heard Luke shift in his seat to gaze out the windshield into the darkness. “You’re like me. We’re watchers of this world, aren’t we? Not players.”
But I wasn’t a watcher of this world, the little planet inside the confines of his car. In this world, scented with Luke’s summer-smell, I was an irreplaceable player. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to cry or bust out the biggest smile in the universe.
“Dee,” Luke said softly. “Where are you?”
I looked at him. “Right here.”
He shook his head.
I smiled self-consciously. “I was imagining my life as a little planet all its own.”
Luke ran a finger in a circle along the steering wheel: a shape without end. “With very attractive aliens.” He reached over and carefully drew the same circle lightly on the back of my hand, raising goose bumps along my arm. His soft, level voice was completely devoid of emotion when he asked, “Are you still pissed at me?”
I half-closed my eyes as he traced the finger up my arm toward my shoulder, his touch as light as a feather. It tickled in a way that made my gut clench and my breath stop. He leaned across the console and kissed my lips, just as softly. I closed my eyes and let him kiss me again, one of his hands cupping the side of my neck, the other hand braced against the dash. Headlights flashed against my closed eyelids as a solitary car drove by on the highway.
“Do you want me to stop?” Luke whispered.
I shook my head. He kissed me again, biting my lower lip gently. It drove me crazy in ways I hadn’t even thought of. Irrationally, I suddenly thought, So this is making out. I didn’t even know if I was doing it right. Was I drooling too much? Did he like it? What the hell was I supposed to do with my tongue?
But a part of me was immune from self-doubt, and it was begging me to touch him and be touched. I felt as if I was sitting in the back seat, watching Luke and me kiss. I saw the way the dash light lit up the side of my face as I tipped my chin for his mouth to touch mine. I saw how his tongue carefully traced where my lips parted. From outside of my body, I watched while I leaned into his hand as it pressed down my side, fingers ironing out the wrinkles in my shirt. I heard my breath grow unsteady, saw his eyes close, felt his fingers on my thigh, asking for me to go further, to places I hadn’t yet explored.
I froze, and Luke sat back hastily, looking ill, as if his hand had moved of its own volition. His voice was uneven. “I’m sorry.”
I wanted to say I’m not, but I didn’t know if I meant it. I didn’t know what I wanted. Lamely, I said, “It’s okay,” which wasn’t what I meant.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I wasn’t trying to—” He closed his eyes for a minute, and then opened them. He released the parking brake.
My leg burned where he had touched it. I could still feel the desire in his touch, and I couldn’t stop shivering. I wanted him to kiss me again. I wanted him to start driving so I wouldn’t want him to kiss me again.
Luke pulled out onto the highway again, swallowing, not looking at me. He looked faraway and unfamiliar in the dim glow.
I reached across the console and took his hand, and without looking away from the road, he knotted his fingers tightly in mine
seven
I slept on the couch that night. The idea of sharing a room with some faceless faerie thingy wasn’t exactly appealing, and even though I knew it could just as easily be faceless downstairs in the living room, I slept easier on the couch.
I woke up giddy. Last night, I’d been weirded out by the experience in the church and the idea of faeries stalking me, but this morning, fully rested, with early pale light filtering in through the delicate white curtains, I felt on top of the world. All the negatives seemed far away, and my mind just kept replaying his kisses over and over again.
Upstairs, I heard movement and thumping in my parents’ room. Mom was awake. I’d seen the look on her face last night when Luke dropped me off at eleven and apologized for keeping me out so late. I wasn’t keen on having that conversation right now. Or ever, for that matter.
“Rye,” I whispered. He looked up from his post at the base of the couch. “Walk?”
He leapt up, tail whipping, and I followed him to the kitchen, wiping sleep from my eyes and pulling my hair into my usual choppy ponytail. I donned a pair of jeans from the laundry room, folding the bottoms into uneven cuffs so they wouldn’t get wet in the grass, and went outside into the morning.
God, the sun was gorgeous today, light trickling through early morning mist. The morning was still cool—dew hanging in spiderwebs, the air smelling of freshly mown grass. Everything was beautiful.
He kissed me. He kissed me.
Rye, oblivious to my inner fireworks, pushed past me, white tail high as he bounded through the still wet grass.
Not that way, faerie dog. We’re going this way. Down the road.
He stopped, ears pricked as if I had spoken out loud. Then he wheeled around and trotted toward the road. He paused, waiting for me.