She meant the kiss; he understood. “The sun. I still haven’t forgiven it.” The space between them could only shrink, not grow. Lazlo’s voice was music—the most beautiful smoky music—when he caught Sarai up in his arms, and said, “I want to catch it in a jar and put it away with the fireflies.”
“The moon on a bracelet and the sun in a jar,” said Sarai. “We really wreak havoc on the heavens, don’t we?”
Lazlo’s voice sank deeper in his throat. Smokier. Hungrier. “I expect the heavens will survive,” he said, and then he kissed her.
How had they survived a whole day on the merest touch that was last night’s kiss? If they’d known then what a kiss was, they couldn’t have. It would have been unbearable to come so close—to barely feel and almost taste and be snatched apart before… well, before this. But they hadn’t known.
And now they did.
Now, right now, they learned. Sarai leaned into Lazlo, her eyes closing in anticipation. His were slower. He wanted to see her. He didn’t want to miss even a second of her face. Her smooth cerulean loveliness held him spellbound. There was a dusting of nearly invisible freckles on the bridge of her nose. The glide of their faces was as slow as poured honey, and her lips. Ever so slightly, they parted. The bottom one, voluptuous as dew-bright fruit, parted from its fellow—for him—and it was the most enticing thing he’d ever seen. A blaze of desire surged through him and he leaned into the honey-slowness, pushing the hopelessness out of his way to take that sweet, soft lip between his own.
The searing softness, the melt.
When Lazlo had wished to discover, with Sarai, the realm of the unknowable, he had thought of great, huge mysteries like the origin and nature of gods. But right now, he’d have given it all up for this small mystery, this tiny, newest, and best mystery of Weep. This kiss.
This exact kiss.
Lips. The wonder of lips that could brush or press, part and close, and—parting, closing—catch the other’s lip in the sweetest of bites. Not a true bite. Not teeth. Ah, teeth were still a secret. But the tip of the tongue, well. Hopelessness had little chance against the discovery of the tip of the tongue. And the thing that was almost blinding, unfathomable, was this: Heady as it was—so heady he felt dizzy from it, tipsy—still he sensed that even this was only the threshold to another realm of the unknowable. A door pushed just ajar, and the thinnest sliver of light hinting at radiance beyond.
He felt light and heavy at the same time. Burning, floating. He’d never suspected. He’d been aware of girls, of course, and had all the sorts of thoughts that young men have (the better ones, anyway; better young men and better thoughts) and of course he wasn’t ignorant of the… biology of things. But he’d never had any inkling of what he now sensed lay beyond that tantalizing door. It was a radiance that felt rich and deep and huge and close and secret and delirious and… sacred.
It was his future with the girl he held in his arms, and whatever he had felt and feared on his walk home from the guard station, now he was certain: There would be a future.
Hope was easy, after all. Here in this place, anyway.
He drew her closer, his arms full around her waist, and lost himself in the marvel of her, of this. He breathed the scent and taste of her, and shivered when her fingers traced up his arms to the nape of his neck. She wove them through his hair and awakened more sensation, a fire of pleasure that radiated down his shoulders and up his scalp, nudging at that tantalizing door with all its luminous secrets. When he broke the kiss, finally, it was to press his face to hers. The ridge of his brow to hers, his cheekbone, rough, against hers, smooth.
“Sarai,” he breathed against her cheek. He felt like a glass filled with splendor and luck. His lips curved into a smile. He whispered, “You have ruined my tongue for all other tastes,” and understood finally what that phrase meant.
Sarai pulled back, just enough that they could look at each other. Her amazement mirrored his own, her gaze the equivalent of a whispered Oh, husky and astonished and awakened.
The laughter reached them first—children’s laughter—and then the color. They broke their gaze to look around, and saw the city no longer holding its breath. There were swallowtail flags snapping on the domes, and the sky was a mosaic of kites. And the market stalls were no longer empty, but coming to life as though opening for the morning, with vendors in long aprons setting out their wares. Flocks of brilliant butterflies moved through like schools of fish, and the upper levels of the amphitheater were espaliered with jeweled fruit trees.
“That’s better,” sighed Sarai. Up in the citadel, her tears dried on her cheeks. The clench of her fists and stomach relaxed.
“Much better,” Lazlo agreed. “Do you think we just did that?”
“I’m certain of it.”
“Well done, us,” he said, then added, with exaggerated nonchalance, “I wonder what would happen if we kept kissing.”
In a similar display of feigned indifference, Sarai shrugged and said, “Well, I guess we could find out.”
They knew they had to talk about the day, and the future, and all the hate and despair and helplessness, but… not just yet. That place in their minds that had worked their mahalath transformations was coloring Dreamer’s Weep with their snatched and grabbed happiness. Everything else could wait. “Lazlo,” Sarai whispered, and she asked him a question to which he already knew the answer. “Do you still want me in your mind?”
“Sarai,” he replied. “I want you…” His arms were already around her. He drew her even closer. “In my mind.”
“Good.” She bit her lip, and the sight of her fine white teeth bearing down on that decadent, delicate lip planted at least an unconscious thought in his mind regarding the potential of teeth in kissing. “I’m going to go to sleep,” she told him. “I’m already lying in my bed.” She didn’t mean to sound seductive, but in her sudden shyness, her voice sank to a whisper, and Lazlo heard it like a purr.
He swallowed hard. “Do you need to lie down here?” In the dream, he meant, because she had last time.
“I don’t think so. Now that we know it works, I think it’ll be easy.” She touched the tip of her nose to the tip of his. Shaped by fairy tales, she thought, which made it better than every straight nose in the world. “But there is one thing you can do for me.”
“What is it?” asked Lazlo. “Anything.”
“You can kiss me some more,” she said.
And he did.
Up in the citadel, Sarai’s body fell asleep, and as soon as it did, she stopped being the girl lying on the bed, and she stopped being the moth perched on Lazlo’s brow, and became only—and gloriously—the girl in his arms.
Kissing, it turned out, was one of those things that only got better the more of it one did, and became more… interesting… as one gained confidence. Oh, the ways that lips could know each other, and tongues, how they could tease and tingle. Tongues, how they could lick.