Chapter 29
The Boy Who Healed My Heart
Paisley
The silence wakes me up.
Normally I’m a mummy in its sarcophagus: I only fall asleep when it is completely dark and still.
But at the Winterbottoms’, still is a foreign concept.
Either Knox is having one of his parties or he’s having people over, Wyatt and assorted groupies, for example.
And on those rare days when he’s alone, he keeps his TV running all day long in the room underneath mine.
Not a soft, pleasant tone of some kind of documentary, say, but some action film or other, full of lots of shooting and all.
Most of the nights I’ve been here at the resort I’ve cursed Knox and longed for days when I can fall asleep without earplugs and curses on my lips.
Now, it is quiet. But instead of enjoying it, my heart is starting to hammer against my chest, and I tear my eyes open.
It is alarmingly quiet. Suddenly I’m afraid that something’s happened.
Maybe there was a break-in, and now Knox is chained to a chair while a guy in a black hoodie is holding a gun to his head, demanding millions.
Okay. Stop.
You have definitely seen too many of Knox’s action films, Paisley Harris.
I dig through my various pillows and stick an arm out from under the beaver-fur blanket to grab my phone.
It’s 5:20 a.m. I love the early morning hours when the rest of the world is asleep, and it feels like I am the only person in the world.
When everything feels a bit unreal, a bit like a dream, a bit hazy, a bit surreal, magical somehow, as if all my cares and concerns didn’t exist, as if I was all alone. Just me and the world.
Getting up, my hair falls into my face like a tattered bird’s nest. I yawn, rub my eyes, pull the heavy curtains back a bit, and enjoy the panoramic view of the Aspen Highlands at night.
It’s snowing, of course, and like every other time, the view takes my breath away.
I want to pull the curtains shut again and toss myself into my pillow-dream-come-true, but something flashes in the corner of my eye.
It’s the moonlight reflecting on one of the sunken iron lights by the pool. And in the pool, I see Knox. All alone. None of the other guests are around anymore, and all the beer cans and cups and stuff are gone. The outside area is…clean. This confuses me more than the sight of Knox in the pool.
Pulling my thick socks back over my feet, I slide into my slippers and go downstairs.
Here, too, everything is clean. Even the garbage bags have been changed.
The zip line is gone. I examine the area beneath the balustrade where it had been mounted and can only find the holes with effort.
They’ve been filled in and painted over with some kind of brown paint so well that I doubt Mr. Winterbottom will ever notice.
I can tell Knox hears me slide open the glass door and walk toward him by the way he tenses up his shoulders, but he doesn’t turn.
He’s leaning against the side of the pool, his back to me, elbows on the icy ground, looking off toward the Highlands.
It’s not as cold as before, as Knox has lit the big fire bowl on the terrace.
Flames are licking the cold air and chasing it off.
Crackling. I crouch down next to him and look off to the mountains as well. In the distance an owl is hooting.
“You cleaned up.”
He doesn’t say anything. This makes me feel insecure.
Knox isn’t usually the kind of guy to stay quiet.
Most of the time he says too much. But never nothing at all.
I think this frightens me. The idea that I could lose him, although he was never really mine.
And my body immediately reacts by panicking.
It’s fascinating. My mind isn’t asked whether it agrees as my hands pull my baggy AC/DC hoodie over my head and my woolen Christmas pajama bottoms with ho-ho-ho on them down.
The clothes land in a pile beside the pool. He turns and looks at me.
My underwear and bra don’t match. There are women who can manage that.
Matching underwear and bras. I’m not one of them.
My panties have purple dots. The elastic is coming away from the cotton to reveal a slice of my hip bone.
My bra is black. The underwire is sticking out of the fabric and poking me in the side.
I always wear a bra, even at night, because I’m afraid of someone coming and touching me.
Because of Ivan. But I don’t want to think about Ivan.
I won’t let him dictate my life. Not anymore.
Knox is staring at my hip bones. The gap between the elastic and the cotton is embarrassing, but the panic of losing Knox is greater. And so I’ll give him everything. I will give him all of me, though I’m not all that sure how much is left.
My feet are naked, my toenails unpainted.
I get hot when Knox’s eyes finally leave my hips and wander across my stomach, linger on my simple cotton bra as if it were made of the nicest fabric.
He licks his lips, inconspicuously, unchecked, but my abdomen reacts with a violent pull.
His eyes reach mine and I see it, I see it real clearly.
Knox wants me. Not my body. Me.
I slide into the water. It’s warm. Almost hot, but maybe that’s just my blood boiling.
I sidle next to him. My thighs touch his. We don’t look at each other. We’re both staring forward. But our hearts are beating together in time. They are racing, as if they wanted to break out.
Eventually, I look at him. You’re allowed to, I tell myself. I’m allowed to because I know that Knox wants me. It’s time for me to stop moving and to turn toward him instead of always walking away. It is time for me to let go, so I can finally start over.
“Hello, Snow Queen.” Knox’s eyes are glowing. The bright points in the green combine with the black light of the recessed lights. He looks at me hungrily. As if he had been fasting for weeks, just for this moment, just for me.
I like it.
My nerves are tingling, I want to touch him. It feels like having a plate full of french fries in front of me. I can taste the salt on my lips. I can smell the fat. I want them, but I can’t because my life isn’t made for fries.
I’ve always stuck to that. To the rules. But I don’t want to anymore. I want my fries.
I want Knox.
Water pearls from my hand as I raise it and touch his face. He’s burning. His lips open and he lets out a soft sound. Something like hruhh, meaningless, in other words. Just for me. For me, this hruhh is everything.
My body is pulsating. With the outside of my hand I caress the outline of his face, past his ear, past his birthmark until stopping where his pulse wants to nestle up against me.
“Is this okay?” My voice is fluid, very soft. It lands on the quiet surface of the water and is carried away, but Knox smiles. Real faintly, and a little cloudy somehow.
“Yes.”
His Adam’s apple bounces. With fluttering lids his eyes wander to my collarbone.
He caresses the tender bones as if wanting to explore them, and then along my jaw.
For a second, he stops at the point below my ear, and I know why.
He can see the faint, semicircle-shaped scar, a white half-moon on my skin. I break out in goose bumps.
“Here,” he says, before moving on to my nose and drawing the direction of the sky. “Here, too.”
My cheek grows wet as Knox moves the knuckle of his index finger across it: my skin tingles, electrified and charged, as his little finger runs along the shape of my ear. He stops at my earlobe, rubs it between thumb and index finger. “And this here.”
“Tell me,” I whisper. “Tell me what you mean.”
“These are the places I lost myself and found you.” His glance is careful. Slow. His eyes like a spring leaf, like the spot beneath the morning dew. Water is dripping off his hair onto my arm. I don’t even feel it. “I can’t get past these places when I look at you.”
My fingers leave his throat and wander upward. Stop at his birthmark. Touch it.
“Here,” I say.
Knox’s fingers slide away from my ear. They dig into my hips, just a bit above the loose elastic band.
His thumbs are on my hipbones. He strokes them, takes me as I am, with my tattered cotton panties and broken heart.
We look at each other, we both see it, this longing, this hunger, and then he kisses me.
His caresses feel right. They feel sure. As if I could let myself fall and he would catch me. He will always catch me, no matter how deep the earth below me breaks. That’s what his kisses say. And I can feel it.
Seconds pass. Minutes. Time goes by but neither of us interrupts what we have.
I think of a jar of jam. I think about capturing this moment and being able to keep it forever.
The feeling of his warm lips on mine. The warm water on our skin.
The cold air in our faces. The crackling of the fire.
The silent snow falling from the sky. This hot, irrepressible, and unconditional longing.
This here. Jam-jar moments. My moments, and I take them, hold them, they belong to me. I hold Knox, because he belongs to me, too. His lips. His birthmark. His caresses, soft as silk, wild as fire.
Knox and I are a storm. We are storms and flashes of lightning; we are thunder and rain.
We are perfect chaos; we’ve lost control, each of us in our own way, but together we make sense.
He the violent heat, I the long-evaporated water—ultimately, we had to come together.
Ultimately, nature wanted it this way. Water and heat have to touch in order to explode.
Knox and I have exploded. We touched each other and exploded.
My hand makes its way through his wet hair, makes its way over and over through every individual strand before my fingernails move to scratch his back and come to rest on his wide shoulders.
Knox growls against my lips and, with a single movement, spins me around so that my back is now against the side of the pool.
His chest is pressing against mine, his hips against mine, his thighs.
I lay my hands on his back, can feel the taut muscles, wrap my legs around his body out of the fear that he could slip away if I don’t.
All around us is water. Heat. Cold. But when Knox lays his forehead against mine in order to catch his breath and makes that sound again—that hruhh—I don’t notice any of it any longer.
Swollen lips. Lowered eyelids. Blotchy neck. That’s Knox.
Racing heart. Pulsating desire. Captivating, authentic feelings. That’s me.
I kiss him; his kisses are everything. They are the light in my darkness. They are the line that pulls me to him in my isolation. They are quiet and peace where previously there was only a hate-filled hissing, where previously there were memories that did not want to let me go.
I don’t want to stop kissing him. I am hooked on how he makes me feel.
But then I do. I stop. I back away from him, lower my head and gasp, while looking at his blurry hands, there, on my hips beneath the water. I stop because I’m afraid of Knox wanting to go away again. I want to, I really want to, but I can’t. Not yet.
But Knox doesn’t go any further. He doesn’t say a word. He just exhales heavily, just like me. And then I feel his cheek against mine. His wet lashes brushing my temples. His heart beating against my chest. It’s quick.
“I could do it,” he says.
My lips pucker against his skin when I smile. All of a sudden, we’re not in the pool anymore. We’re in the movie theater. The moment repeats.
“What could you do?”
“Be ready.” His breath brushes my ear and suddenly there’s a hot pulsing between my legs.
When I speak, my voice is husky and out of breath. “For what?”
His lips leave a warm and damp trace across my cheeks that get lost at the corners of my mouth. Knox looks at me, hardly an inch of space between us. “To change myself for you.” The end of his nose brushes mine. I feel his breath on my skin. “If you want.”
A gust of icy snow blows through the air. I can see it. I am sure.
“I do,” I say. “Be prepared, Knox.”
He smiles against my lips.
Kisses chase kisses and nothing has ever felt so right.