I lunge forward. “Are these—?”
“Chocolate with peanut butter chips,” he finishes for me.
I keep staring at his lips, but I slide open the baggie. “I love these! My mom always made these.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“You told me once.”
He sits down with me and before I can get too heart fluttery he pulls out a cookie and lifts it toward my mouth, teasing me. “Do you want it?”
I open my lips. He slides the cookie in a little bit. I chomp down. It melts on my tongue. “It is sooo good.”
He laughs and leans back. He whispers, “You know we’re not supposed to eat back here.”
I swallow. “We are totally naughty.”
“Absolutely.” He bites into my cookie. “So there’s this annual dance in a couple of weeks.”
“The Winter Ball,” I interrupt. “There have been signs up everywhere.”
“You want to go?”
I think about it for a half second. “Will you dress up?”
He nods.
I move forward so my hands are flat on the towel and my face is much closer to his face. Something inside my chest warms up like a nice kind of heartburn and I say, “And will we slow dance?”
He nods again. His bottom lip turns in toward his mouth for a second, just disappears and then comes back.
Stretching out my spine so my lips are nearly touching his I say, “And will you press yourself against me and we’ll move really close together and then your hand will stretch out across the back of my head and your fingers will wrap into my hair and then . . .”
He doesn’t nod. He just tilts his head down, moves his fingers into my hair, and his lips touch mine in a forever kiss. His lips are soft and hard all at once. His breath mixes with my breath. Everything inside of me whooshes out. It’s just him and me and books and cookies.
“Is that what you want?” he asks when we finally break away.
I breathe in deep and then lift my lips to his ear. “That’s what I want.”
“And if I promise you that will happen, you’ll go to the dance with me?”
I sit back on my heels. “That and if you promise not to go patrolling alone.”
For a second he freezes, then he smiles and crosses his arms in front of him. “You are a pain, a royal pain in the—”
“But that’s why you love me, right?”
He tosses another cookie at me. “That and because you give me an excuse to make cookies.”
I catch the cookie in my left hand. “Good reasons. And do you want to know why I love you?”
“Because I am a fantastic cookie maker?” He breaks his cookie in half and puts it in his mouth.
“That’s part of it,” I admit. I nibble on my own cookie. I swallow. “But not all of it.”
A crumb falls onto his jeans. I brush it off for him as he says, “You’re making me wait for it, aren’t you?”
“Okay. I won’t torment you.” I cross my legs and smile at him. “I love you for the way you care about everyone, for how stubborn you are, for how you love Issie and Devyn.”
He leans down and kisses my forehead and then each of my eyelids. They are tender, these kisses. They are light and true. “I love you too, Zara.”
“I am so, so glad,” I sigh out. And I am.
The rest of the day is pretty uneventful. Nick works at the hospital after school and Issie and Devyn are at French Club, so I go running by myself. We’re allowed to run outside again because boys are no longer going missing. The school had stopped outdoor track practice for a while because Jay Dahlberg and the Beardsley boy were abducted by pixies. Nobody knew that it was pixies, they just knew boys were disappearing from the woods. Even now, only a few of us know what actually happened; everyone else thinks it was a serial killer.
Each time my foot hits the ground I hear my stepdad’s laugh. But running on snow, even hard-packed Maine snow that’s been flattened by snowmobiles, is just not as cool as running the streets of Charleston, my hometown, where it’s warm and smells like flowers, even in the winter.
Bedford is nothing like Charleston. My mom sent me up here because I couldn’t deal with my stepdad’s death. It was hard to get adjusted. There are about six thousand year-round residents here and the ocean is a cold menace that roars beyond the peninsula. Everything is trees and dirt and cold, at least in winter. I’ve never seen it in spring. Right now the bare branches of trees look like drowning arms reaching up for help. I stare and stare at the bark and see the shapes of spirits there. The dark knots where limbs used to be remind me of screaming mouths.
Still, I zip past the trees that line the track, swerve up the hill behind Bedford Building Supply, and keep following the trail. I’m thinking about how Devyn better not like Cassidy because he and Issie are so meant to be together. I’m thinking about how everyone in the universe seems to know this except Devyn. And that’s when I hear it. The sound is muffled but it’s definitely human.
Mrphh . . .
Little spider feelings prickle along my skin.
“Crud.”
I stop. I listen. I pull out my cell phone, punch in 9-1-1 but don’t hit Send. Because, seriously? What would I say?
Hi, operator/dispatcher person. This is Zara. I’m by the railroad tracks just past BBS and I think I hear something and I’ve got this prickly skin feeling. It’s like, um, well . . . I think it means the pixie king is nearby.
But that can’t be true. Because the pixie king is trapped in a house on the other side of town, which means . . .
“I’m imagining things,” I announce.
Mmrph. Mrupph.
The sound is off to the left. My head jerks up. I scan the wood for tracks. There are no tracks. No footprints at least, but something catches my eye. I squat down and touch the snow. There’s dust, just a tiny bit of it. It glitters.
Okay. Not imagining things.
Pixie kings leave gold glitter in their wake. Regular pixies? Not so much.
The wind blows through the naked tree branches. One of them creaks like the pressure is just too much and it wants to break right off and plummet to the earth. I know that feeling.
Mrmph!
The sound is urgent and I know what it is. It’s a voice. It’s a muffled voice, which means that someone is probably in trouble. I press my speed dial for Nick. He’s at work so he doesn’t pick up. Cell phones aren’t allowed at the hospital. Right. Duh. His voice mail comes on.