Page 209 of Darling Venom
He leaned down, whispering into my ear, “I’m going to kiss you now.”
“Please, do.”
He seared my lips with his, and it was tragic and illicit and beautiful, like precious art stolen during a bloody war.
“Again,” I pleaded.
He did.
“Again.”
Another kiss.
“Again, and again, and again.”
That night, in a field of planets absent of stars, he granted my demands, kissing me until my lips bruised and the sun rose over the horizon.
I panted, resting my forehead against his.
Leah’s words from The Night Of shotgunned through my head.
Falling in love makes you feel immortal. Don’t you want that?
Yes, I thought. Yes, I do.
I came to Tate’s bearing good news. The second Terry saw me, he staggered back against the couch, looking like he’d seen a ghost. My brows pressed together. I waved a hand in front of his face, waiting for him to snap out of it.
“You good, Ter?”
Yes, we’d graduated to nicknames, and this one was light years better than the one I’d given him junior year of high school—Terry-ble.
He recovered after a minute, fingering a chain on Kellan’s jacket. A typewriter charm glinted from the loop. “Where did you get this?”
“Kellan left it on the roof one night.”
He didn’t ask me to explain. He knew about the roof.
After reading Darling Venom, he knew about everything.
And if Tate reads it, he will, too.
That bitter thought seized me. It jumped at any opportunity to remind me we were destined for doom.
“His mom bought it for him.” Terry flipped through some notes before him, sliding one on the coffee table between us. He hammered his pointer finger into the center of the page. “It happened around this time.”
I stared down at the paper. They were bullet-pointed. Marked in his signature thin strokes that always started neat and ended in illegible scrawls.
Just beneath the edge of his fingertips, a comment Terry wrote about The Imperfections pre-release press tour glared back at me.
Re-read chapter three. Things fell apart when I returned from the tour. Kellan lashed out often. Piece together what happened. Did someone tell him something? Is it my fault?
The rest eluded me, too messy to make out. With Terry, it could either be unintentional or by design. I once spotted notes he didn’t want me to read. He’d kept them close to his body at all times since.
“Really?”
I plucked at a chain, this one with two charms in the same beaded holder. An actual cartoon vagina charm and a middle finger.
An ode to Tate, I figured.
