I swam toward him in one quick burst, pushing his back against the pier. He gasped a little, and I wondered if the barnacles that clung to the concrete had cut him. I didn’t care. His nearness and that bright jolt of uncut tobacco, the quality of the night, had made me bold.
I cupped his face in my hands, feeling reckless and wild in the way I’d always pretended to be but never fully felt. I swept my thumbs over his cheekbones as his hands ringed my waist.
“Iris . . . ,” he said, an exhale of my name.
“Quiet,” I said, then kissed him. His lips parted beneath mine and the kiss went deep, tongue against tongue all silky wet. Beneath the lacing of smoke, he tasted fresh and sweet, and I kissed him like I was parched, like drinking a glass of cold water down in long and greedy gulps.
He groaned low into my mouth, and my hips writhed against his in response. He drew me closer and turned us around twice, until we were on the pier’s other side, him sitting on the steps and me straddling his lap. I pulled back just enough to look into his face, still breathing into his mouth.
“Is this what you were thinking about, this morning?” I barely recognized my own voice, so low and rough. “Is this what you wanted? Malina heard you wanting me. So you can’t lie.”
“Why would I ever lie about that?” he said. “Of course it’s what I wanted. Just like I want you now, any way you like.”
A thrill pierced through me, like a red-hot needle pulling fiery thread. All that permission. All of it mine. I wound my fingers through his hair and pulled, licking the salty water from where his neck met the thick muscle of his shoulder, sucking on his skin until he hissed between his teeth. I even used my own teeth, biting down until I felt him tense beneath me, hoping that I’d leave a mark. He let me kiss him wherever I wanted, my hands tight in his hair in a way I knew must hurt. But his own touch stayed infuriatingly light.
There’d been two boys before this, tourists who’d come through the café and stayed for a week or two. One of them I’d slept with when I turned sixteen, but nothing with either of them had come even close to this driving need. I wanted him so badly I was afraid of how fast my heart was beating.
“Why won’t you touch me harder?” I demanded, nearly panting against him.
“You’re the one on top from where I’m looking, flower,” he said, brushing his thumb over my collarbone. “If that’s what you want, then tell me so. Though it seems like you could use a little softness.”
“That’s true,” I whispered, suddenly near tears. It was the oddest combination, wanting him so much while also wanting to nest my face into his shoulder and cry into it. “I don’t get very much of that.”
He traced his fingers over my profile, over my forehead and down the straight line of my nose, dipping above and below the crests of my lips. He even fanned his fingertip through my spiky lashes. “I think you might need some now.”
I kissed him again, slower this time, lingering and long. His lips felt so soft against the stubble that surrounded them. “It’s not fair,” I whispered. “I’ve already given you more than the allotted two.”
“I have been known to be a very wily son of a bitch,” he teased. “Maybe all this tenderness is entirely to my benefit.”
“Maybe. But thank you anyway. It’s been . . . I don’t know how to feel anymore. With everything that’s happened with my mother. And then my sister upset me tonight, made me so angry at her.” I paused. “I could tell you what happened, if you want.”
“Doesn’t matter what it was. It brought you to me. And if this is what comes of such upset, could be I’ll write her a thank-you note.”
“I don’t think she’d appreciate any kind of note from you,” I admitted. “She doesn’t seem to like you very much.”
“She doesn’t need to,” he said simply. “I happen to like you lots more than her. She seems nothing like you at all.”
That shouldn’t have made me so happy—she was still my sister, and usually a very good one—but I’d never had this, someone who would so clearly rather have me. Someone who looked at me as if I blazed against the night, like a trailing comet. Like I was blinding.
“And what do I seem like?”
“Like wildfire. Like beauty that dies as soon as it’s curbed.”
“I guess we know what you’ll need to do with me, then.”
He ran his fingers down the ridges of my spine. “And what’s that?”
I rested my temple against his. “Don’t curb me, and you can watch as long as you want.”
SEVENTEEN
LINA WAS STILL AWAKE WHEN I CREPT BACK THROUGH THE window—I was really getting to be an expert at avoiding doors—my tunic clinging to my damp bra and panties. She’d turned a lamp on, one of ?i?a Jovan’s whimsies, its base a bottle with a schooner trapped inside it and the shade in the shape of a mast and sails.
In its faint light, her cheek was striped with dried tears, and with her lips still trembling she looked like a lost and desperate little girl. I found that I just couldn’t be angry with her anymore, as if it had become physically impossible to summon that much spleen. Fjolar had bled it out of me with tenderness. Instead I felt a smooth, vast sense of peace, like a windless desert at twilight—anything unruly had burrowed deep underground, an expanse unruffled by living things.
Her eyes narrowed as I sat down on her side of the bed, her thick lashes nearly meshing. “I think you’re not mad at me anymore,” she said, each word blunt and careful, like a child picking out marbles.
“No,” I agreed. “I’m done with that, for now.”
Her brow wrinkled. “Why?”
“Does it matter why? We could just agree to be okay.”
“But you never just stop this way, Riss. Not without hashing things out, not without a fight. It’s not like you.”
The digging should have irritated me, but I couldn’t find any residual embers to fan, nothing that even threatened to grow into a flame. “I’m just feeling peaceful, is all. Can you let me have that, after everything we’ve been through for the past few days? It’s not that I’ve forgotten about you and Niko. I just don’t have it in me to care at this very moment.”
“That’s what I mean.” She scraped at her lower lip with her teeth. “I wanted to tell you that you were right, before. I shouldn’t have told her—especially not without asking you first. She’s my best friend. But you’re my sister. I should have been protecting you. I’m selfish like that sometimes, you’re right. Being sorry doesn’t always fix everything, and I know that I—that sometimes I use it like a patch.”
I stood and peeled the tunic and underwear off, shivering a little as the air hit my still-damp skin. “So, we’re good then.”
She was still frowning as I slipped back into bed, the heavier cotton of my borrowed nightgown wicking the last of the wet from my skin. “I just . . .” Her voice sharpened. “Did you go see that boy, Riss? Is that where you went?”
She wouldn’t like it, but I couldn’t be bothered with a lie. “Yes,” I said simply. “I smoked with him out on the beach. Then I made the water bloom for him, and then I kissed him on the pier stairs, and then I slept with him. See that? That’s honesty, right there. You could take notes.”