“Jesus, you’re uptight.”
“I’m not uptight.” We’re touching now, his body leaning into mine, his erection hot as it presses against the fabric of my cover-up, and I find I didn’t even need to leave the room in order to get my suit wet.
“You know you can touch it if you want?” Harley whispers. “Be like old times?”
“I don’t want to touch it,” I say.Oh, but I do. I want to touch it so bad that my hand practically twitches. “Put some fucking clothes on, Harley.”
“You know you’ve always been cute when you’re flustered.” He presses a kiss to my temple.
I swat him away. “Shut up.”
Harley snags the set of shorts he had on earlier from the pile of clothes on the floor and slides them on. “We’re gonna need more booze.”
Yes, we are.
CHAPTER FIVE
Rose
Age thirteen
“Hey,” Harley says, walking through the back door instead of scaling the fence that separates our yards the way he normally would. I ignore him as my hands dig into the rich soil, sifting it through my fingers as if the small clumps of earth were grains of sand. Running out. Time is always running out. “Your mom told me about your grandma.”
“Did she tell you I wanted to be alone?”
“Do the parentals ever tell us anything useful?”
I shrug. “My mom told me about the birds and the bees once; it’s how I learned that bees were tiny little flower rapists, and I made it my mission to swat the bastards every time I saw one.”
“I knew you hated bees for a reason.” He laughs, sitting down beside me in the soft grass and picking up a seed pod. “What are we planting?”
“Paperwhites, Grams always loved those.”
“I remember.”
Harley uses his hands to smooth away the top layer of soil and teases the roots before laying it in the shallow bed he created. I love that he knows how to do this without being told because he’s watched me plant bulbs from the narcissus family for years, and he paid attention, even when I thought he wasn’t. Sometimes I think he enjoys gardening as much as I do, though he’d never admit it. I pick up a bulb, disrupt the roots and place it in the soil beside his.
We work in silence until all the bulbs are planted and I sit back with tears in my eyes because in thirty days we’ll have flowers that my Grams would have loved, only she won’t be here to see them. “Do you think we know when we’re about to die?”
“Jesus, Rose,” he says softly. A beat later, he stands up with his hands on his hips and in his best Peter Pan accent—which is always perfect because we’ve watched that movie more times than we’ve jumped off my parents’ balcony onto the trampoline below—he says, “I’ll never die.”
“Yes, you will. One day we’ll all die.” I pick up the watering can and shower the bulbs so the roots have a better chance of growing. “I just hope I go first.”
“Why?” Harley glances down at me with an eyebrow cocked and a troubled expression.
I set the can on the grass and brush my hands off on my clothes. I don’t bother going inside to wash them, because I’ve always loved the feel of soil caking in the whorls and loops of my fingerprints. “Because I wouldn’t want to be here if you weren’t.”
“Then we’ll die together,” he proclaims, pulling me to my feet and climbing up onto the trampoline, forcing me to go with him or lose an arm in the process. He turns us to face the empty backyard and shouts, “To die will be—”
“An awfully big adventure,” we both finish, as he falls onto the trampoline and I fall right alongside him.
Harley pulls me into the crook of his arm and kisses the top of my head. “I’m sorry about your grandma, Wendy.”
I shove at his chest for calling me that stupid name, but just as I’m reminding myself to be as indifferent as Peter and as courageous as Tiger Lily, I burst into tears. Harley holds me close. I like the feel of his arms around me.
Through wet lashes I stare up at him, and he does the most surprising thing ever—he kisses me. At first it’s nothing more than the gentle press of his lips against mine, but within seconds it changes into more. His tongue pushes into my mouth and slides against my own, coaxing as I lay there paralyzed with fear. For years I’ve dreamed about this moment. I’ve dreamed thathe’d kiss me, and that it would feel like fireworks exploding. But now that the moment is here, I’m frozen.
He places his hand on my cheek and rubs his thumb back and forth. I like the way this feels, this tender touch, so new, so different. Sparks form low in my belly, shooting off in every direction until I feel it—the fireworks every Hollywood movie ever promised me. I take his face in my hands and force his lips back to mine, but a gasp ruins it all.