The blindness lasts just a second, then the colors start flooding into me: not through my eyes but right through my skin, replacing blood and bone, muscle and sinew, until I am redorangebluegreenpurpleyellowredorangebluegreenpurpleyellow.
Brian pulls away and looks at me. “Fuck,” he says. “I’ve wanted to do that for so long.” His breath’s on my face. “So long. You’re just . . .” He doesn’t finish, instead he brushes my cheek with the back of his hand. The gesture is startling, atom-splitting, because it’s so unexpected, so tender. As is the look in his eyes. It makes my chest ache with joy, horses-plunging-into-rivers joy.
“God,” I whisper. “It’s happening.”
“Yeah, it is.”
I think the heart of every living thing on earth is beating in my body.
I run my hands through his hair, finally, finally, then bring his head to mine and kiss him so hard our teeth collide, planets collide, kissing him now for each and every time we didn’t all summer long. I know absolutely everything about how to kiss him too, how to make his whole body tremble just from biting his lip, how to make him moan right inside my mouth by whispering his name, how to make his head fall back, his spine arch, how to make him groan through his teeth. It’s like I’ve taken every class there is on the subject. And even as I’m kissing him and kissing him and kissing him, I wish I were kissing him, wanting more, more, more, more, like I can’t get enough, never will be able to get enough.
“We’re them,” I think/say, stopping for a moment to catch my breath, my life, our mouths inches apart, our foreheads pressed together now.
“Who?” His voice is a rasp. It creates an immediate riot in my blood, so I can’t tell him about the guys in the alcove at the party. Instead, I place my hands under his shirt, because I can now, I can do everything I’ve thought and thought and thought about. I touch the river of his stomach, his chest and shoulders. He whispers the word yeah under his breath, which makes me shudder, which makes him shudder, and then his hands travel under my shirt and the demanding hungry feel of them on my skin burns me to the ground.
Love, I think and think and think and think and don’t say. Don’t say it.
Don’t say it. Don’t tell him you love him.
But I do. I love him more than anything.
I close my eyes and drown in color, open them and drown in light because billions and billions of buckets of light are being emptied on our heads from above.
This is it. This is freaking everything. This is the painting painting itself.
And that’s what I’m thinking when the asteroid comes crashing into us.
“No one can know,” he says. “Ever.”
I step back, look at him. In an instant, he’s turned into a siren. The whole forest goes mum. It doesn’t want anything to do with what he just said either.
He says more calmly, “It’d be the end. Of everything. My athletic scholarship at Forrester. I’m the assistant captain of the varsity team as a sophomore and—”
I want him to be quiet. I want him back with me. I want his face to look the way it did a minute ago when I touched his stomach, his chest, when he brushed my cheek with his hand. I lift up his shirt, slip it over his talking head, then take off my own, and step into him so we’re all lined up, legs to legs, groin to groin, bare chest to bare chest. His breath hitches. We fit perfectly. I kiss him slowly and deeply until the only word he can manage is my name.
He says it again.
And again.
Until we’re two lit candles melting into one.
“No one’s gonna find out. Don’t worry,” I whisper, not caring if everyone in the whole world knows, not caring about anything except more now him and me under the open sky as thunder cracks and the rain comes down.