I lie down on my side and blink over at him.
He watches me. He smiles a small bit before he rolls on his side, head resting in his hand.
And then he leans in towards me, eyes dashingly sure, and his mouth falls open as his eyes drop to my mouth. We’re close enough now that I can feel his breath on me, and it feels heavy. It hits me like that tired wave you get late at night to carry you off to the place where the dream lives. It makes me dizzy. Peter is like that though; he’s a free fall. Being with him can be scary and uncomfortable, but god, the view on the way down, the rush you get when he remembers you—it’s intoxicating.
And there are worse things than being forgotten accidentally.
Say, someone choosing to forget you, someone choosing to hurt you because you accidentally hurt them? That’s worse. Peter isn’t the villain. He might be occasionally misguided, and he might need a little bit of refining—he is inarguably in dire need of a mother—but he isn’t the villain.
He brushes his mouth over mine, lightly at first—it feels like butterfly wings and nervous feet—and then he rolls on top of me, kisses me heavily, and it spreads through me like flooding water. I feel it in every part of me. He’s like a dip in the ocean. You know when you’re in the water and you’re fully immersed, and you walk into a cold spot and you feel it everywhere, and it’s fresh and it makes you feel alive and startles you all at once?
That’s what it feels like to kiss him. Like that and a rip. Like with him on my body like this, it feels as though I’m being pulled by a current, far out to sea. The sea is impossibly blue and the sky is unimaginably clear, and I am incredibly alone in the ocean besides him.
It’s him and me in the cold patch in the deep, and I think it’s good that kissing him feels like a cold patch in the ocean, don’t you? Because it’s refreshing. That’s a good thing. Refreshing is good. Not everything needs to feel warm and like a fire, and besides, fires can really hurt you if you get too close to one, can’t they? I got too close to one before, I think. Did I? Was I too close, or was I not close enough? What am I thinking of him for anyway? I don’t want to think of the pirate now.
I want to think about Peter and where his fingers are running along my body. I want his fingers on my body like this, don’t I? It’s lovely to be wanted, don’t you think? It’s a great way to feel alive, which I am, and I’m increasingly aware of what it means to be human: how good it feels to be seen and touched and how sweet it is to be gazed upon by the eyes of a boy who likes you, to have your shoulders kissed by seven suns but also kissed with the strange and quiet awareness of mortality… That I’m here and I’m breathing and there’s air in my lungs, and I’m with Peter and I’ve waited so long for his attention to just be on me and me alone, and finally it is—his attention and his eyes and his hands. Are his hands on my throat? I don’t think they are. Maybe, are they though? I don’t open my eyes just in case, because I love being here, I think, and I love being with him, and it’s where I’m meant to be, right here, all alone with him.
And then it scurries through my mind—this quick, terrible thought that I don’t want in there, like a mouse scurrying through the house in the middle of the night with the lights off—because it is just him and I alone in the middle of the sea that this great and tremendous kiss has pulled us out into, and the kiss is just that—it is great, I promise, it’s great; I can feel it in my fingers and crawling up my spine, which is great—and I wonder, quietly, maybe, just for a second, whether he might drown me, and then my eyes spring open.
I sit up a little bit on the lily pad, breathless, face flushed.
“What?” He props himself up, frowning a bit.
“Nothing.” I shake my head, flashing him a smile that the pirate would never buy. “I just lost my breath.”
He nods. “I do that to girls.”
I stare past him at the sky, let that comment slip off me like silk on skin, but it lands less lovely than that sounds.
“Girl,” he says, staring at me very intently.
I look over at him, waiting.
“Is there more?”
I frown at him a little, curiously mostly. “What do you mean?”
“To this.” He nods at me, glancing at his hand on my waist. “I feel like there’s more to do than just this, what we keep doing.”
“I mean, yes.” I scratch my neck. “Technically,” I add as an afterthought.
Peter perks up quite a bit. “More to kissing than kissing?”
“Well, yes.” I frown. “But then it becomes—do you remember when we spoke about sex?”
“Of course I do,” he says unconvincingly.
“Right, then do you remember what sex is?”
He scowls at me, face darkening even though he’s sitting in a sunbeam. “Course I remember. But remind me so I know you know too.”
I shake my head politely. “Actually, I would rather not if I don’t need to.”
“You need to,” he tells me without skipping a beat.
I sit up, tuck my feet under me, and hug my knees, then I give him a look. It’s gently reprimanding, softened both by how my frustration towards him dissipates when he blinks at me as well as by the giant poppies and tulips on the edge of the bank that hang over us like willows.
Peter moves in towards me, one of his eyebrows up. He touches my face. “You could show me?”
I breathe in. It takes me off guard. Why has this taken me off guard?
“Show me,” he tells me, his hand on my leg now. It’s casually demanding. It’s not a threat, more an expectation.
I shake my head at him. “I’m not ready to show you.”
He takes his hand back and rolls his eyes. “Do you not know how?”
“I do know how, but I’m not—” I shake my head. “I don’t want to.”
He stands up, proud and annoyed. “Why don’t you want to show me?”
And his name flashes through my mind like a burn.
Jem.
It shouldn’t though. So I grab a cold compress and smother it away.
I stand so we’re toe-to-toe. He has two freckles on his chest, on his right pectoral muscle, and when I put my head on his chest, they align perfectly with my chin and my nose, and sometimes I think it’s a sign. If I was looking for a sign, that might be one.
But my head isn’t on his chest, and I stare up at him with big eyes that feel small.
“Because I’ve never done it before,” I tell him, and then he laughs, and for some reason, it sounds mean.
“So you don’t know then.”
“Well, I suppose I don’t.” I give a small shrug.
Peter tilts his head, not letting go of my eyes. “Then how do you know you don’t want to?”
I stand up straighter and say to him rather clearly, “Because I know I don’t want to.”
He reaches for me, slips his hand around my waist how I always want him to, but in this very moment, I don’t want him to, and I don’t like it.
He tilts his head the other way. “But how would you know?”