But he did.
His muscled arms circled her waist. He drew her to him, and she could feel the clean line of their two bodies connecting—legs tangled up in legs, hips pressed into hips, chests heaving in time with each other. Daniel backed her up against the boardwalk’s railing, pinning her closer to him until she couldn’t move, until he had her exactly where she wanted to be. All of this without once breaking the passionate lock of their lips.
Then he started to really kiss her, softly at first, making subtle, lovely pecking noises in her ear. Then long and sweet and tenderly, along her jawline and down her neck, making her moan and tilt back her head. He tugged lightly on her hair and she opened her eyes to glimpse, for a second, the first stars coming out in the night sky. She felt closer to Heaven than she ever had before.
At last, Daniel returned to her lips, kissing her with such intensity—sucking her bottom lip, then edging his soft tongue just past her teeth. She opened her mouth wider, desperate to let more of him in, finally unafraid to show how much she yearned for him. To match the force of his kisses with her own.
She had sand in her mouth and between her toes, the briny wind raising goose bumps on her skin, and the sweetest, spellbound feeling spilling from her heart.
She could, at that moment, have died for him.
He pulled away and stared down at her, as if he wanted her to say something. She smiled up at him and pecked him softly on the lips, letting hers linger on his. She knew no words, no better way to communicate what she was feeling, what she wanted.
“You’re still here,” he whispered.
“They couldn’t drag me away.” She laughed.
Daniel took a step back, and with a dark look at her, his smile was gone. He began pacing in front of her, rubbing his forehead with his hand.
“What’s wrong?” she asked lightly, pulling his sleeve so he’d come back in for another kiss. He ran his fingers over her face, through her hair, around her neck. Like he was making sure she wasn’t a dream.
Was this her first real kiss? She didn’t think she was supposed to count Trevor, so technically it was. And everything felt so right, like she had been destined for Daniel, and he for her. He smelled … beautiful. His mouth tasted sweet and rich. He was tall and strong and …
Slipping from her embrace.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
His knees bent and he sank a few inches, leaning up against the wooden railing and looking at the sky. He looked like he was in pain.
“You said nothing could drag you away,” he said in a hushed voice. “But they will. Maybe they’re just running late.”
“They? Who?” Luce asked, looking around at the deserted beach. “Cam? I think we lost him.”
“No.” Daniel started walking away down the boardwalk. He was shivering. “It’s impossible.”
“Daniel.”
“It will come,” he whispered.
“You’re scaring me.” Luce followed behind, trying to keep up. Because suddenly, even though she didn’t want to, she had a feeling she knew what he meant. Not Cam, but something else, some other threat.
Luce’s mind felt foggy. His words knocked on her brain, ringing eerily true, but the reasoning behind them eluded her. Like the wisp of a dream she couldn’t remember the whole of.
“Talk to me,” she said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
He turned, his face pale as the bloom of a peony, his arms held out in surrender. “I don’t know how to stop it,” he whispered. “I don’t know what to do.”
SIXTEEN
HANGING IN THE BALANCE
Luce stood at the crossroads between the cemetery on the north side of campus and the path to the lake on the south. It was early evening and the construction workers had gone home. Light sifted down through the branches of the oaks behind the gym, casting dappled shadows on the lawn that led to the lake. Tempting Luce toward it. She wasn’t sure which way to go. She held two letters in her hands.
The first, from Cam, was the apology she had expected, and a plea for her to meet him after school to talk it out. The second, from Daniel, said nothing other than “Meet me at the lake.” She couldn’t wait to. Her lips still tingled from their kiss last night. She couldn’t get the thought of his fingers in her hair, or his lips on her neck, out of her mind.
Other parts of the night were hazier, like what had happened after she sat down next to Daniel on the beach. Compared to the way his hands had ravished her body not ten minutes earlier, Daniel had seemed almost terrified to touch her.
Nothing could shake him from his daze. He kept murmuring the same thing over and over—“Something must have happened. Something changed”—and staring at her with pain in his eyes, as if she held the answer, as if she had any idea what his words meant. At last, she’d fallen asleep leaning on his shoulder, looking out at the ethereal sea.
When she woke up hours later, he was carrying her up the stairs back to her dorm room. She was startled to realize she’d slept through the whole ride back to school—and even more startled by the strange glow in the hallway. It was back. Daniel’s light. Which she didn’t even know if he could see.
Everything around them was bathed in that soft violet light. The white bumper-stickered doorways of the other students had taken on a neon hue. The dull linoleum tiles seemed to glow. The windowpane looking out on the cemetery cast a violet shine on the first hint of dull yellow morning light outside. All of it directly under the gaze of the reds.
“We’re so busted,” she whispered, nervous and still half asleep.
“I’m not worried about the reds,” Daniel said calmly, following her eyes to the cameras. At first his words were soothing, but then she started to wonder about something uneasy in his tone: If Daniel wasn’t worried about the reds, he was worried about something else.
When he laid her down in her bed, he kissed her lightly on the forehead, then took a deep breath. “Don’t disappear on me,” he said.
“No chance of that.”
“I’m serious.” He closed his eyes for a long time. “Get some rest now—but find me in the morning before class. I want to talk to you. Promise?”
She squeezed his hand to pull him to her for one last kiss. She held his face between her palms and melted into him. Every time her eyes flickered open, his were watching her. And she loved it.
At last, he backed away, and stood in the doorway gazing at her, his eyes still doing as much to make her heart race as his lips had done a moment before. When he slinked back into the hallway and closed the door behind him, Luce drifted off into the deepest sleep.
She’d slept through her morning classes and had awoken in the early afternoon feeling reborn and alive. Not caring at all that she had no excuse for missing school. Only worried that she’d slept through meeting Daniel. She would find him as soon as she could, and he would understand.
Around two o’clock, when it finally occurred to her to eat something or maybe pop in on Miss Sophia’s religion class, she grudgingly crawled out of bed. That was when she saw the two envelopes that had been slipped underneath her door, which set her back severely in her goal of leaving her room.
She had to tell Cam off first. If she went to the lake before the cemetery, she knew she’d never be able to make herself leave Daniel. If she went first to the cemetery, her desire to see Daniel again would make her bold enough to say to Cam the things she’d been too nervous to say before. Before everything had gotten so scary and out of control last night.