Six #3
I lowered my hand only once I’d managed to straighten out my teeth. I watched Mason’s fingers flex into my sleeve as he twitched. His hold slowly loosened, until he let go of my arm to tighten his fist in the baggy material of my sleeve. He eventually let go of that too.
“I can, uh. Drive you home.” I felt stupid after voicing it, like maybe I should have done so with more anxiety or bravado. Something to match the gravity of the moment, instead of saying it like I’d said it dozens of times before, to Cella, on completely ordinary occasions.
“It’s fine,” said Mason, his voice coarse but even. “I can get home.”
“You’re going to get arrested if you run around like that. Unless you plan to, uh.” The word—change, or shift, or transform—caught in my throat.
He grimaced.
“Right,” I said. “I guess you probably can’t, right now.”
I untied the drawstring on my sweatpants.
“What are you doing?” Mason’s alarm would’ve been funny any other time.
Turning my back to him, I took off my pants and held them out behind myself.
After a long hesitation, they slipped from my grasp.
Unfortunately, I was wearing my birthday gift from Annalisa underneath.
Just sitting on the forest floor in baggy black boxers with the human skeleton printed on the front and back from pelvic bone to femur.
Mason grunted in pain as he half dressed.
After a bad-sounding moan, I looked over without pausing to consider that I might see more than I’d bargained for.
Fortunately, he’d gotten the sweats on (they were a terrible fit, too long and too tight).
He started to sit up but moved too fast. Up on one forearm, he screwed his face in pain.
His forehead beaded with sweat. It seemed like the right thing to do to stop him, leaning down and pressing against his shoulder.
“Quit it,” I said. Again, my words felt inadequate. Mason might have been having the same issue, because he moved his mouth wordlessly before clamping it shut. His breathing had evened. “No use rushing now. Let’s just . . . wait it out.”
I didn’t understand what was going on, and he obviously didn’t either. But I would stay as long as I needed to.
Mason showed no sign of registering. I thought for a second he couldn’t hear me, some after-effect of silver poisoning, and was trying to read my lips instead. He was looking right at them.
He grasped my sweater by the hood, hauled me down, and kissed me.
I was frozen, wide eyes seeing only his face, the determined wrinkle between his brows.
And then, somehow, I wasn’t seeing anything.
Despite panicked, swimming thoughts, my eyelids were heavy, sliding shut as if I might drift off to sleep.
But I’d never felt awake like this, like time was a live wire.
Mason’s mouth pushed insistently. So I pushed back, thoughtless.
Mason let loose a noise that seemed to unravel from the back of his throat.
My stomach flipped at the sound of it, the puff of his exhale against my cheek.
His hand slid from my hood to the back of my neck, and he pulled me in.
He crowded closer, gasping in what was probably pain, with the way his shoulder tensed beneath my fingers.
I dove in, seeking out the depths of him, inconsiderate as ever.
The welcoming slide of his tongue on my lips was warm against the early October chill.
I followed it, finally understanding why humans followed sunbeams through windows and fire in winter, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
The few people I had kissed—a short list of nameless girls in the corners of school dances I hadn’t wanted to go to—I had kissed in the hope of understanding what it meant to kiss, what all the fuss was about, what the point was at all.
Mason was the last person I’d ever look to for those answers, and the first to show me.
Kissing had always seemed like this secret need, or at least want, that I didn’t know about.
But need was what I smelled in Mason’s blood; want was the constant urge to taunt him.
This was something else. Mason sat up, winding an arm around my hips, and my hands jumped up to cradle his face.
I held his lip tight in my teeth so we wouldn’t disconnect.
The point was this: to find. Kissing was seeking, stalking, chasing.
His fingers twisted in my hoodie, dragging me against his chest. My lips slid messily across his cheek and down his neck. I tasted the salt on his skin. Mason panted like he’d been wounded all over again. I bit down. Mason whined, then winced.
I launched myself off him, slamming back against a tree, covering my mouth with both hands.
Mason’s arm hovered in the air for a moment before dropping. He stared after me, misty-eyed, and tilted his head. The stretch exposed two small, red marks on the side of his neck, oozing blood.
“I could’ve sworn a moment ago you were right here,” he said. “I’d like to go back to that.”
I turned and ran.
***
The clock on my nightstand, when I got back to my room, read 11:51 p.m. So much for my Mason-free birthday.