Page 159 of Because I Killed Him
“Then why me?”
His hand clenches at his side, tendons sharp beneath the skin. Then, as it slowly relaxes, the tension spreads up into his expression, a restraint stretched so thin it feels like he might turn and tear a tree from the ground for release.
“Because it couldn’t be anyone elsebutyou. I tried to stay away. I fought it every way I knew how. But I’ve put my fist through enough walls to know how useless that is, apart from giving me a view into the next room.” Edmund drags a hand across his face, unaware of the blood he smears over his cheek. “Protecting you isn’t enough anymore. It hasn’t been enough since you looked at me like I was a man instead of a Blue.” He takes a step closer, his stance hesitant, almost defenseless, as if he’s holding his heart out for me to see, and if I don’t take it, he won’t pull it back. He’ll leave it here in the forest when we go.
“I want to be worthy of that look,” he says. “Even if that’s still a long way off—and even if you don’t feel the same.”
If I don’t feel the same?
The thought makes my blood rush to my head. I open my mouth, desperate to tell him how deeply he’s grown through every inch of me and how hopeless the strain of resisting him has been over the past months, but all that comes out is a small, airless gasp. His words cut straight into me, into the part of my heart that already belonged to him but that I was too afraid to let him see. Now, as it breaks open, happiness floods me so violently it feels chemical, like I’ve swallowed a Bliss pill.
I can’t do it either.
I can’t resist him anymore.
“I’ll tell you how I feel, Edmund,” I say. “But I want to show you first.”
The need to touch him surges up all at once, too wild to contain. Before I register the mud squelching under my boots, I’m rushing toward him, watching him close the distance with the same fierce urgency. His hands catch my waist, his arms closing around me and lifting me high enough to reach his neck. I hold on, pulling myself to his chest. In that instant, I feel it all: the heat of his skin beneath my shuddering palms, the solid ridges of his shoulders, the scent I can never quite remember or forget, as impossible to hold onto as a fistful of wind. Edmund’s grip tightens, his hands bunching in the fabric of my clothes as he leans in to kiss me, his breath close enough to warm my lips. I drag my fingers down the hard line of his jaw, aching for his mouth, so desperate for him to take my own that I barely hear the pounding hooves closing in.
Edmund’s head snaps toward the sound, his chest heaving against mine. He squints through the trees, then curses and sets me down.
“Who is it?” I ask, still dazed by the rush of adrenaline. I swing around and reach for my horse, only then remembering it bolted from the rattlesnake.
“Blues.” He grabs the reins of his horse at the riverbank. “A lot of them.”
Edmund swings into the saddle, backs the horse away from the creek bank, then rides toward me with his hand outstretched. I grip it, and he pulls me up, settling me against him, facing him straight on.
“Why this way?” I breathe, holding his waist.
“So you can tell me when we’ve lost them.”
He digs in his heels, and the horse gallops into the forest with a furious snort. The world blurs into patterns of green as branches whip past, the creek and waterfalls shrinking behind us. I cling to Edmund unyieldingly as he urges the horse faster. I lean sideways in the saddle and see the Blues stopping to water their mounts at the creek, their figures breaking apart in the trees until the shadows swallow them whole. Relief tumbles through me, breaking into laughter.
“We lost them,” I shout.
But Edmund doesn’t slow down. He drives the horse onward, pushing until the trail bursts open, spilling us into a vast meadow where the grass stands tall around us, swaying in the bright, vivid blush of the setting sun. Only then does he ease the horse into a smooth canter. The wind blows coolly across my face, blending my hair with his, stealing the breath from my lips as we cut across the open stretch, Edmund’s heart pounding wildly against mine. The rhythm of it jolts through me, the same as that night on the surfboard, when I told myself it was nothing more than adrenaline. But now, after everything he’s said, I need to be sure.
I pull open the top of his jacket and run my hand along the folds of his shirt, pressing it flat against his chest. His head tips forward, a sharp breath tearing from him as his heartbeat kicks against my palm, so fast and forceful that the very feeling seems to roar. The impact rattles through me, scattering every thought until I can only look up.
When I do, I see Edmund’s face turned toward mine, strained and flushed, burning for me as fiercely as I burn for him. I push upward in the saddle, breathless. His hand closes at the back of my neck, tangling in my hair as he drags me into him, past the last slanting rays of sun between our bodies.
When his mouth touches mine, it’s startlingly soft, as if chosen for my sake, as if he hasn’t forgotten he’s my first. The gentleness undoes me. It rushes through me with the shock of a beginning, so transformative it feels like the first true touch of my life. My hand lifts on its own, my thumb brushing in a slow, trembling glide across his lips. Edmund’s eyes haze over briefly, then sharpen and fix on me with sudden, focused heat.
He catches my wrist and pulls me closer, and my whole body responds, my fingers curling into his jacket as I rise again to meet his mouth. This ismore than a release. It feels like a door opening, one that will never close again. And I don’t want it to. I race through it headlong into what lies beyond, every part of me unmoored as our kiss deepens, hot and relentless, as though, if we weren’t clinging to the horse beneath us, racing forward together, we might burn straight through each other. My hands slide up Edmund’s chest, over his neck, and into his hair as the kisses intensify, growing harder, wilder, until restraint finally gives way and the world collapses into nothing but the feverish movement of his mouth on my gasping lips.
The horse gallops beneath us, hooves drumming the earth, the meadow blazing gold in the last fire of the sun. Edmund’s hand glides to the small of my back, holding me fast, while the other tugs the reins as we tear through the windblown grass. Our kiss slows, softening again toward its end, just as the trail pulls us back into the forest’s shadow, the meadow falling away behind us. But unlike that night on the surfboard, I don’t cling to the experience in fear of losing it. I know it’s inside me now, in the part of my heart that belongs to him, where even a single moment can last and live forever.
I knew myself before her. With her, I know myself better. But if there were ever an after her, I’d become a stranger to myself.
—EDMUND PREW
CHAPTER 37
The rattlesnake bite, ironically, gives Edmund and me the cover story we need. His swollen hand explains why it took so long for us to reach the top of Brass-Spire Ridge and why we arrived together on one horse. Charlotte, Jack, and Dickie buy the excuse without a hitch. But I know that Edmund and I can’t keep pushing it. One disappearance when the five of us are together is normal; two is a coincidence; three starts to look like a pattern.
Yet in the days that follow, the noise in my head quiets until all I can hear is the wild echo of my own happiness. It feels as though a part of me has been awakened, one Vivian always promised would be, though I could only ever imagine the experience through her words. Now, falling headfirst into it, I move through my days buoyed by air, sailing to class like a drunken butterfly, laughter spilling out of me without warning. Each time I catch sight of Edmund, my heart swells with an addictive pain, stretching to make room for feelings that grow larger and more unruly with every passing day.
At first, we find each other only in the narrow slivers of time we can steal. Edmund catches my waist and pulls me into him for a brief, breathless moment before we follow the others from his suite. Another time, after the others have drifted out of the music room, I lean down from the top of the piano, where he’s playing, and kiss him, dissolving the melody into a discordant tangle of notes.
