“Is that what happened last summer when you… when you—”
She finishes for me. “When I tried to kill myself?”
I nod into the darkness.
“I don’t know really. I’m not sure that I meant it.” Aimee sucks in her breath and holds her hands up in front of her face. “Th-there was this guy at school that I knew would have pills… I got them but I wasn’t sure exactly what I planned to do with them. And for a long time, I just kept them sort of like a backup plan that I promised myself I would never use. It’s not like I—it’s not like I planned it out really. It was a moment.” She pauses, holds her breath uncertainly. “Just a single moment when everything slipped away from me. And even though I knew, somewhere in the back of my head that it wasn’t okay—that my parents and my grandparents and my sister all loved me and were counting on me to be okay—I… it was just like none of that stuff mattered enough.”
“What about now?” I’m not sure how to ask this question but I need to know. “Do you still feel that way?”
She’s doesn’t hesitate. “No.”
Aimee
Once my story is purged, I feel so raw that I can hardly breathe. Cole is staring up through the muted darkness toward the sliver of clear, bright moon. His face is faintly creased with concentration.
He glances at me. “It wasn’t your fault that Jillian died,” he says. We are so close that even in the dark, I can see the detail of color in his luminous eyes. A thousand shades of green. “It wasn’t.”
“Maybe,” I say, letting my heart float just outside my body. “Maybe not. We were both stupid. She was too out of it to be driving and I should have known it. But I… I can’t think like that anymore. I can’t go back and change it. All I can do is go forward, right?”
Cole is quiet for a long time. When he finally fills the silence, his voice is low and steady. “The day before my mom left us, we had a fight. I called her a selfish bitch right to her face. Sometimes I think that our fight was the last straw—the thing that pushed her out the door. I wonder if she decided that if her own kid thought about her that way, what did she have to lose?”
I crawl over him, no longer worried about the fact that my skin is salty with dried sweat from my earlier run, and I gather his hands between our bodies. Gently, I press my lips to his and slide my tongue into his parted mouth. His stubble scratches my skin as I absorb the taste of him—faintly charged and electric like the air right before a storm.
Cole tips his head and feathers his lips right above my temple where my hair meets skin. “You’re so amazing,” he whispers as his hands skim my waist and grab at my hips. “You know that, yeah?”
Maybe it’s strange after all that has just passed between us, but desire, fresh and hot, pumps through every nerve ending in my body. Cole’s mouth is on mine, his tongue winding me senseless until my entire world is reduced to the sensation of his hard, strong body pressed into mine.
Cole groans approval. He wheels his hands greedily up my bare back over the fabric of my sports bra to rest on my shoulders. He fingers the tiny hairs at the nape of my neck and rotates his thumbs along my jaw, drawing me closer, his lips clinging, sucking, sending a spiral of heat down my back.
The salty breeze pushes in from the water, coaxing me, rousing a ripple of tiny pinpricks over my exposed flesh. Cole rocks me against him and slips his mouth to the side to brush that tender spot just below my ear with the edge of his teeth.
“Aimee… Can I? Do you?” His hot breath teases my skin.
I’m quivering, caught up in the storm surging beyond his eyes. My breath is fast and hard, keeping time with my heart. “I…I… yes, I want to.”
Cole sits up quickly, bringing me with him so that my knees straddle his hips and his arms twine around my thighs. He shifts his back against the rigid metal of the truck and maneuvers the thin blanket so that it’s carefully bunched around my lower half. Watching my eyes closely, he reaches up and frees my hair from its ponytail. I drop my head to one side, feeling my loose hair fall damp and cool against my flushed skin.
With the moon and stars as our only spectators, Cole clasps my face within his strong hands and drives our mouths together. As his tongue sweeps over mine rhythmically, I realize how much I want to remember this moment. I want to write it down in black ink on a sliver of plain white paper and keep it in my pocket forever. I’ll write about the sound of our kiss, the coarseness of his face rubbing against my cheek, and the sensation of his hands mapping my body, memorizing every curve and depression of bone and skin.