Chapter 19
Nineteen
A fter an unusually low-contact day from Mia, Tori was trying not to overthink. Trying not to obsess over what the hell was going on with her. Mia rarely withdrew when something was wrong, or at least she hadn’t before. She normally projectile- expelled all her thoughts.
But now she was eerily quiet—and had been ever since Tori picked her up for Daniela’s wedding. Tori was sure Mia was dealing with something, and she couldn’t control the unbearable urge to know what.
Curled up on her couch and pretending to watch a true crime documentary, Tori considered how going to a wedding while getting divorced must feel. It had been Mia’s idea to skip the ceremony and go to the reception. Was it because she couldn’t stand to watch a couple swear to forever?
Did it remind Mia of her own wedding day? Did it make her miss her estranged husband? Jealousy Tori couldn’t suppress fast enough twisted in her gut. She resisted thinking of Mia in a white dress and focused on the stupid show.
Her smartwatch buzzed with a text. On the small screen, the dark image was hard to see. As soon as she reached for her phone, her heart dropped out of her body and plummeted several stories to the ground below.
The photo of the night sky with the top of a mango tree creeping into the frame could only come from one place. Tori’s throat went dry and her pulse thrummed in her neck.
Come over.
Tori read Mia’s words over and over until they lost all meaning. Until her vision doubled. Everything in Tori wanted to reply with a single word. Why?
A parade of whys assaulted Tori and pushed to break from their nearly twenty-year-old cage. Why are you asking me to come over at ten o’clock at night? Why did you keep my jacket and the notes I passed you? Why do you know how to pull me back to you like it’s effortless?
Tori was so sure she shouldn’t go. That she was walking straight into heartbreak with her eyes wide open. That she’d worked so hard to recover from the exact pain she was apparently gagging to feel again. But she couldn’t pretend that she didn’t want to go. That she never grew tired of being with Mia. That, in truth, she never got enough.
Ugh. I am so fucked.
Standing, Tori yanked on the jeans she’d tossed over the couch earlier and asked herself only one question while she walked toward her keys. Why can’t I stop myself from coming when you call?
The answer was an ache in her chest, in the place where Mia had seared her brand into her skin so long ago. Where it still burned red hot, even if all it did was consume itself. An Ouroboros tattooed on her heart, perpetually trapped in its cycle of death and rebirth.
Laboring under Mia’s spell, or her own hopeless stupidity, Tori pulled up to Mia’s driveway. She’d never answered her text, she realized, as soon as she parked next to the old station wagon.
It seemed dumb to reply with an okay , and weird to give her a thumbs up. Instead, Tori walked around to the side gate. She strode into the narrow backyard and skirted the pool.
Wrapped in an artificial calm that bordered on numb, Tori was disconnected from herself as she walked to the pool house. The moment she looked up and saw Mia on the roof, her body betrayed her composure—heart racing and T-shirt sticking to her dampening skin.
“Are you coming up?” Mia’s voice was unusually small and fragile.
In the dark of the moonless night, Tori couldn’t see Mia’s face. Couldn’t read her expression for context. It only added to how disoriented Tori felt. How unmoored.
“Please?” Mia added before Tori could protest about how unwise it was to climb up an old ladder. To find her footing on a pitched roof in the dark.
Tori only noticed her hands were trembling when she reached for the first rung. Only realized her legs were weak when the ladder creaked under her weight. Only accepted she was more afraid of what Mia was going to say than she was of heights when her heart jack-hammered against her ribs.
As soon as she got to the top, tree branches reaching over the roof as if to help her the rest of the way, Mia’s hands appeared in the darkness. Eyes adjusting, Tori looked into her face and found the same expression that had drawn her in a thousand times before. The same gravitational pull that had always made resistance illusory.
“Did you bring me up here to flaunt your crime?” Tori asked with a tremor she wished she could conceal.
Mia looked down at her jacket. The one with Tori’s name and athletic achievements embroidered in the fabric. Mia’s eyes blazed even in the dark.
“It always looked so good on me,” she whispered, a smirk on her lips coming into full relief.
Taking Mia’s hands was muscle memory. Their fingers found each other like they had countless times before, and Tori’s body remembered everything her mind had desperately tried to forget. The way Mia’s touch sent a current up her arm and jolted her heart into racing. How she could make Tori feel like she was flying and falling at once.
Despite her unsteadiness, Tori transitioned onto the roof. She managed to get on her back without slipping off the terracotta tiles, tiles that were significantly more brutal on her body than they’d been when she was a teenager.
Just like the night before, Mia curled in at her side and Tori stopped thinking about physical peril. Scattered stars blinked down at them while Tori struggled to untangle dreams from reality. Wishes from facts.
Could Tori trust she was really there? She could easily have drifted to sleep on the couch. It made more sense that she was in a vivid dream or hallucinating in a damn coma than for Mia to be wrapped around her while the stars watched.
The stars had always been her witnesses. Ancient lights reaching across impossible distances just to illuminate this moment. Tori imagined them as Fates, bent over cosmic looms, weaving and unweaving destinies. How many countless lives had they watched unfold over billions of years? How many hearts had they seen crack open and heal and break again?
Tori couldn’t help but wonder if there was one particularly sadistic watcher in the sky. If she was standing over her cauldron or pyre or sacrifice and composing another break because the first hadn’t been enough.
Mia’s touch roused Tori out of her strange thoughts. Her fingertips traced the inside of Tori’s wrist and followed the small vein that curled around her knuckle. It was barely a graze, but everything with Mia was so amplified, the contact ripped through Tori like an earthquake splitting a continent in two.
Tori’s curiosity fell in the chasm Mia left in her wake. She couldn’t make her dry mouth form the question thrashing in her mind. Couldn’t make herself ask Mia what the hell they were doing there. She almost didn’t care what the answer was, she just needed to understand. Understand her own feelings and Mia’s motivations and how to name the impossible want that was dead-set on making Tori miserable.
“What are you thinking?” Mia asked softly, propping herself up on one elbow and looking down at Tori.
Tori’s attention snagged on the strand of red hair falling over Mia’s cheek. On the curve of her full lips and the unknowable galaxy in her eyes.
“I can always hear you thinking.” Mia’s voice was so soft it sent goosebumps skittering across Tori’s molten skin. And then she ran her fingers through Tori’s hair, pushing it away from her face even though it was already tossed back. “Why did you stop telling me your secrets?”
Mia’s blunt nails against Tori’s scalp made it impossible to think. Impossible to subdue her racing heart or coax her lungs into breathing.
“Why do you want to know everything?” Tori’s response was weak and devoid of conviction. She couldn’t even pretend she had any defenses left.
Mia leaned in closer. Her perfume mixed with the summer night and Tori’s shallow breaths. When Mia moistened her lips, eyes fixed on hers, Tori was lost. She was sixteen again, shivering despite the sticky heat. Frozen in place, she was back to endless want and hopeless desire.
“Because lately I’ve had to learn some pretty critical things about you from other people.” Mia’s fingers found the back of Tori’s neck, her thumb running over Tori’s cheekbone. “Why can’t you talk to me?”
Tori considered the madness of truth. It pushed at her lips, desperate to take an unfettered lungful of air.
“Please?” Mia breathed with her hand in Tori’s hair and her bottom lip trapped between her teeth.
It was Tori’s undoing. The whispered plea would be the end of their friendship. The friendship that had been doomed from the start.
“Because I can’t un-feel this.”
Tori’s confession was a spiked tangle in the back of her throat, but once she started, there was no holding back. The truth had gotten a taste of the light, and it wouldn’t be shoved back into submission. “This constant churning in my chest.” She closed her eyes because looking at Mia was too hard. She didn’t want to see her expression morph into horror. Didn’t want that moment seared into her memory so it could haunt her with precision accuracy.
“This constant hunger. This yearning for something always out of reach.” Tori swallowed hard, but she couldn’t steady herself. Couldn’t stop the emotion stinging the back of her eyes. “Even after all this time. After all these years…”
It was too pathetic to reveal that no one she’d been with had come close to making Tori feel what Mia had. That she couldn’t figure out how to want less. How to stop comparing everyone to an imaginary standard.
Tori saw the keys to her release and clawed at them in the dark. If she couldn’t force herself to stop loving Mia, she could make Mia firebomb the bridge connecting Tori’s heart to hers.
“You coming back here is just a reminder of what my stupid heart wants and I can never have. No matter how hard I try, I can’t?—”
“Says who?” Mia’s voice was barely a whisper, but it sent Tori’s eyes springing open.
Vision blurry and jaw so tight that pain shot down her neck, Tori stared at Mia. Mia with her fair skin visibly flushed in the low light. Mia who was looking at her with a furrowed brow and imploring eyes.
Tori’s confusion left her winded. “What?”
“Who says you can’t have what you want?” Mia asked like that made any more sense than her original question. Like she wasn’t just making a bunch of disjointed sounds. Sounds Tori couldn’t process over her hammering pulse.
“Why do you think I’m here, Tori?” Mia’s question was a wisp of sound while Tori’s mind played tricks on her. While she imagined Mia inching closer, dipping her head lower. “Why do you think I’m on this roof? Why do you think I keep trying…”
Tori’s mind betrayed her like it had in high school. It was showing her what she wanted to see rather than what was really there. “What are you saying?”
“Maybe talking is the wrong thing to do with my mouth,” Mia murmured, erasing the inches between them. She hovered over Tori, breath warm and sweet where it landed on her. “Is this okay?”
Stunned, Tori hardly processed the question. Couldn’t process the way Mia was looking at her with hunger etched on her beautiful lips. Couldn’t believe what was happening.
Her pulse broke the sound barrier when it sped up her throat. It was the only part of Tori’s body that wasn’t paralyzed in disbelief. She’d been so sure for so long that she’d never be here; she had spent years convincing herself that she could survive without Mia. How was she supposed to just…say yes?
Distantly aware that she wasn’t dreaming, Tori nodded. And then Mia’s lips were pressed to hers. Lips that were so much softer than she’d imagined. Soft and full and covering hers so completely, Tori couldn’t breathe. Mia’s kiss was hesitant but snapped Tori into mind-altering clarity.
When Mia pulled away, eyes wide and searching Tori for a reaction, Tori broke. She reached up for Mia before she could stop herself from doing the thing she’d wanted for half her life.
Burying her fingers in Mia’s hair, Tori pulled her down to kiss her in earnest. The gentle press of lips exploded into something wild and desperate and achingly real. Mia’s mouth opened above hers with a gasp that Tori swallowed with unabashed greed.
Tori’s imagination paled in comparison to the reality of Mia’s tongue parting her lips and deepening their kiss. To the way Mia made a fist in her hair like she was afraid Tori might disappear. To the little whimper that rumbled in her throat when Tori caught her bottom lip between her teeth.
Need roared through Tori’s body, demanding more. In one fluid motion, she rolled Mia onto her back. She pinned Mia beneath her, chasing the heat, chasing the truth, chasing the fall.
The movement broke their kiss for half a heartbeat—just long enough for reality to slam into Tori. She pulled back, intending to check in with Mia. To make sure she wanted this, make sure she was okay.
Eyes half-lidded, Mia looked up at her, flushed and breathless. Before Tori could speak, Mia surged up to reclaim Tori’s mouth. She kissed her so hard that Tori was sure that she’d busted her lip, even more sure that she’d bleed for Mia any day.
The way Mia claimed her, possessive and sure, was Tori’s undoing. It was like she was the one pouring years of wanting into their kiss. Mouth searing, Mia urged Tori to take more. To take until there was nothing left.
Mia’s hands slipped under her shirt, nails raking across her lower back, sending a sharp, liquid heat straight to Tori’s core. Her touch was everywhere. Every nerve ending, every inch of Tori’s body was alive with it—with her. With Mia.
“Fuck, Tori,” Mia groaned, nails digging into her and pulling her between her parting thighs.
The sound of her name tumbling from Mia’s mouth and dripping with lust was an avalanche of reality. Tori eased out of the kiss, but Mia locked her legs around her to keep her from leaving.
She looked down at Mia and her kiss-swollen lips and flushed skin and gaze smoldering like all she wanted was more. If Tori’s entire body weren’t humming with enough voltage to take down a Grizzly, she wouldn’t believe her lying eyes.
“What are we doing?” Tori panted because there was no way she was going to make sense of Mia’s kiss on her own.
Mia’s attention was on Tori’s mouth when she said, “What I think we would’ve done a long time ago if you hadn’t kept secrets.”