In that second of his tongue on her palm, she felt the new rosebud pressing out of her wrist. Even with the pain cutting through her forearm, she thought of kissing him until it was a full rose, bursting open.
She thought she felt his lips pressed against her hand, the place where the sugar would have worsened the burn if he hadn’t taken it into his mouth. But he did it so quickly. Before she could be sure, he set the cold rolling pin against her hand.
Her fingers trembled from the dulce de leche’s heat and the sudden chill of the wood.
She would never be Aracely. Fearless charm would never flow from her body like yards of chiffon. But Sam looked at Miel as if all her sharp edges and cursed petals, everything she’d tried to keep in shadow, were the glinting facets of unpolished rose quartz.
What Sam had told her the time she first kissed him, about pollinating each pumpkin blossom by hand, she knew it was true. He hadn’t made it up. But now it felt like something he’d invented, a fairy story about an enchanted paintbrush that shimmered with pollen like gold dust. It covered her in the feeling that his fingers were brushes, and under them she was growing into something alive.
She stayed still a few seconds too long. A stricken look crossed Sam’s face.
“Sorry,” he said.
He looked down at his hands like he didn’t recognize them, like they were not his to move.
“Tell me to let go,” he said, his hand still on the back of hers, still pressing her palm into the cold curve of the rolling pin. She could feel the ridges of the calluses on his fingers. “Tell me to, and I will.”
He kept his eyes on hers, and she could feel the hum of life in his heart like a dragonfly buzzing by her ear. His heart was not a dead thing, not weak from lack of use. It was hard and tight, a muscle that would not give.
“Do it,” he said, and now the edge in his words sounded like a challenge. But under it was a hitch in his voice that sounded like he meant it, that he wanted her to make him let go. “Tell me not to.”
In this second, she was not the child from the water tower. She was a girl noticing, for the first and for the hundredth time, that her best friend’s hands were warm as birch bark on summer nights. That his forearms were the brown of a yearling buck’s coat. That at the outer edge of his brown-black eyes was the thinnest ring of what looked like purple. The color of the saffron crocuses his family once farmed thousands of miles away, the men harvesting the cupped blossoms, the women picking out the thin rust-colored threads.
“Show me again,” she said.
“What?” he asked.
“How you make sure the pumpkin blossoms grow into something.” She felt the shiver of remembering the pollination brush on her skin, and he got it, he understood so fast that he shared it.
“I don’t want to do this,” he said. “Not now. Not if you’re gonna regret it.”
“I won’t,” she said. “I never did.”
She came toward him at the same time he pulled her into him, her mouth reaching his so fast her teeth nicked his lower lip. She tried to pull away, to tell him she was sorry, see if they could laugh about it. But he didn’t let her. He put his hand on the back of her neck and kissed her harder, a drop of the blood off his lip finding her tongue and turning to salt.
This was the boy who’d made her unashamed of how the bottom edge of her skirt was always damp, when everyone else thought it was a sign that she was odd or cursed. It had bothered her enough that she wore jeans most of the time, not hemming them, the bottoms dragging through mud and fallen leaves until they were frayed and dyed dark and it was impossible to tell that, like her skirts, they were always wet.
But with Sam, there was nothing she wanted to hide. Not the wound on her wrist that would not close even between roses. Not the petals she drowned in the river. Not even the way she could not sleep during the pumpkin harvest season without the light on.
His breath feathered over her mouth. His fingers caught in her hair. He kissed her so quickly that his tongue parted her lips before she thought to do it herself.
First he tasted like the sugared starflower petal she’d set on his tongue, and then the dulce de leche from the heel of her hand.
People here argued about what the moon smelled like. Some said it was a crisp scent, like pressed linen or new paper. Others said no, it was sweet and alive, like night-blooming jasmine climbing on the first warm night of spring. Others swore it was new and silvery, like just-washed spoons, still warm from a sink full of hot water and lemon soap. But to her, it was Sam. The metal and paper of his moons, the rosewater from his mother’s kitchen, the sharp trace of paint and turpentine she only ever picked up when she was this close to him.
Her hands slid down his back, her palms catching on his shirt. Her lips found flecks of paint that didn’t come off in the shower, the blues and whites and golds he had not yet managed to wash off his skin. A thread on his upper arm, a patch just above his elbow, a constellation on the back of his wrist.