It’s like soft grass under your back on a hot day.
It’s like the first ripe strawberry from the garden.
It’s like watching someone fall asleep with their head on your shoulder, and knowing that you could brush the hair away from their eyes without waking them.
It’s like coming home.
* * *
When Roya stops kissing me, she rests her forehead against mine and laughs.
“What?” I breathe.
“Look,” she says, her mouth so close to mine that I can taste the letter L tumbling from her lips.
I look. I don’t want to, because it means moving my head away from hers, but I look. “Oh,” I say, and then “oh” again, because the first time wasn’t quite enough.
The clearing is carpeted in flowers. All except for the place where we’re sitting. Tiny purple flowers and huge, spreading yellow ones, and a fine tracery of white clover blossoms. The air is fragrant, and Roya is laughing and running a hand over the tops of the flowers closest to her. She flings herself backward and lands hard, but she keeps laughing as she sprawls her arms out on the flowers. Petals fly up around her like a snowdrift.
“That looked like it hurt,” I say.
“It did,” she says. “Try it.”
I fling myself down next to her, and she’s right, it hurts. And I’m glad I did it. I watch as flower petals spiral up in the air over our heads, and I listen to Roya laughing, and I can feel myself bleeding magic too. A swarm of butterflies circles overhead and settles in the branches of the birch trees, their yellow wings fluttering like autumn leaves.
“I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time,” Roya says.
“Would you like to do it again?” I ask, then laugh at how slick I sound. I’m still laughing as her mouth finds mine, and then I’m not laughing anymore because she’s not what I thought she would be. She’s more. Her lips are soft, and her hands are both tangled in my hair, and she’s straddling my hips and making a soft noise that means I’m more than she thought I would be too.
When we stop for air, her hair is loose around her shoulders, falling into my face. It’s not dusk yet, but the light outside has taken on a long-shadow quality that means it will start getting dark before too long.
“Wow,” I breathe.
“Yeah,” she says. She touches her nose to the soft skin behind my ear and I pull up two fistfuls of flowers. “We should go soon.”
“Yeah,” I say. I don’t sit up. She stays with me for the space of three slow breaths; then she stands up and extends a hand to me.
“Come on.” She’s smiling. Her lips are a little swollen. The word “bee-stung” springs into my mind, unbidden. “We have to take care of Josh before we go.”
In the place where we were sitting before, there’s a circle of grass. Roya digs her fingers into the soft soil and pulls up sod. She sinks her hands into the earth and turns it up as easily as she might pull fistfuls of cotton out of a torn-open teddy bear. I watch her, and she catches me watching her, and she grins at me. “Magic,” she says, and I realize that she’s not just pushing her hands into the dirt; she’s pushing threads of magic, too, and the earth is moving for her.
“I wish I’d thought of that before I did all that damn digging,” I mutter. She laughs at me.
“Can you grab the bag?”
“Sure.” I pick up the duffel, which is half-hidden in a sudden profusion of bluebells. She takes it from me, and our fingers brush, and a flock of birds erupts from a nearby tree.
She doesn’t say anything. She just unzips the duffel and overturns it, letting the arm inside fall into the hole. She shakes the bag, and a few bits of trash fall out—gum wrappers, pencil lead, eraser crumbs. She starts pushing soil back into the hole, over the arm. “What should we do with the bag?” she asks.
“I guess … leave it in the woods? Or maybe drop it in a dumpster somewhere?” I realize that we should all probably dispose of the bags as quickly as we can.
“I’ll toss it on the highway,” she says.
“That’s littering.”
She gives me a long look. “You’re worried about littering? Really?” I shrug and she shakes her head. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. Come here.”
I sit beside her as she pats the last of the earth down over Josh’s arm. She fishes in one pocket of her shorts with two fingers and withdraws something small and smooth. She drops it into my hand.
“An acorn?” I ask, turning it over between my thumb and forefinger.
“Yeah,” she says. “To keep animals from getting at the arm.” She plucks the acorn from my grasp and shoves it down into the soil.
“We can’t make it grow, though,” I say slowly. “That’s a Marcelina thing.”
“Alexis. We can do whatever we want,” she says. She leans over and brushes her lips against my earlobe. “We’re magic.”
She grabs my hand and presses it down under hers, into the soil. She kisses me, and something new happens between us. Magic that feels like nothing I’ve ever done before. Something hot and vibrant. Something urgent and immediate. I feel the soil shift under my fingers, and then under my feet, and then we’re both toppling backward. Roya pulls me up by my wrist, yanking me away from—
A tree.
An oak tree.
A small one, twisting up out of the ground. Five narrow, trembling branches reaching up like fingers. Leaves bud and unfurl as we watch, our hands clenched together tight. Gray bark hardens and cracks and splits and grows again. A gash opens in one side of the trunk; it oozes sap and then heals over within a few seconds.
“Holy shit,” Roya says.
“Holy shit,” I repeat, because there’s nothing else that either of us can say. With a rustle and a shake of acorn-heavy branches, the oak stops growing. It’s easily fifteen feet tall, with a huge, full canopy. It’s beautiful.
It’s ours.
“We did that,” Roya breathes.
“Are you scared?” I ask.
“Of what?”
“Of what might happen next. Of what you might lose.”
She shakes her head. “It’ll happen how it happens, and you’ll be with me for it, so why would I be scared?”
I don’t say anything at all. I just grab her by the shoulders, push her back against the trunk of our new tree, and kiss her.
We make a pile of our clothes in the grass as the sun goes down.
Roya presses me down into the flowers as the crickets start to sing.
I gasp her name as the first few stars appear in the dusky sky.
I kiss her, and I kiss her, and I kiss her. And she kisses me back.
20.
THE DRIVE HOME FROM ROYA’S meadow is soft-focus: she drives with one hand and gives me the other hand, and I kiss her palm, and we don’t say a word to each other. The windows are down and the crickets are singing so loudly that we can hear them even over the sound of the road passing underneath us.
By daylight the next morning, though, I wonder if maybe we should have talked. Maybe I should have asked her if what happened in the meadow meant the same thing to her as it did to me. Even though all I want is to see her and the way she laughs and the way she smiles and the way she messes with her hair when she’s thinking hard about something and the way she gasps when I kiss the hollow of her hip—even then, I don’t want to see her because I’m afraid she won’t meet my eyes. What if she’s embarrassed around me? What if she says that it was just a joke, or a fling, or—worst of all—a mistake?