Winterwood

“It’s a bone moth,” I explain. If he won’t tell me his secrets, I’ll tell him mine. “It’s been following me.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was there the day my grandmother died. And now it’s back.” Tears well against my eyelids, and they break down my cheeks before I can stop them—the weight of everything slamming through me. They fall to the floor and soak into the wood—becoming a part of the house. A sadness that will live in the grain of the wood forever.

Oliver moves across the room to only a foot from the bed, and the gravity of him so close makes it hard to breathe. But he doesn’t sit beside me, he doesn’t touch me—he doesn’t want to hurt me. To split me in two, to make me shudder away from him in fear. “A moth?” he asks.

“It’s a death omen,” I say, my voice on the verge of breaking. “It means death is close, it means it’s coming—” I wipe away the tears from my cheeks, and I wish he would reach out for me; I wish he would pull me into his arms and I could sink into his chest. I wish I could close my eyes and make everything dark and listen only to the sound of his breathing in my ears. But he doesn’t and my eyes dip to the floor, feeling like I might be sick. Like the room is tilting off axis and I don’t know how much longer I can keep from tipping over. From shattering completely. A glass girl made of glass shards. Who cries glass tears.

I stand up from the bed to feel the hard floor beneath my feet, to ground myself to something, and I walk to the window.

Oliver moves slowly, standing beside me, and I try to see what’s really there: I try to see all the things he’s buried deep, kept just out of reach. “Tell me the truth,” I say, I plead, each word a knife. “Tell me what happened at the cemetery, at the lake. Tell me if you killed him.”

The question is so sharp in the air that I can see the whites of his eyes expand and my heart wants to cave in. Little bursts of fear exploding in my mind.

He opens his mouth—about to speak—and suddenly I’m terrified of what he’s going to say. What he will admit. I shake my head and move closer to him. I want to take the words back. I want to stuff them down into my throat. I don’t want to know what he did. I don’t want the room to tip upside down when the truth leaves his lips—when his confession drops to the floor and shatters like too-thin glass.

“Wait,” I say, holding a hand up to stop him from speaking. I breathe and he breathes, the seconds swelling like a balloon about to pop. “Don’t say anything.”

He looks hurt, like he doesn’t understand.

“If you tell me,” I say, the words breathless on my lips, “I know it will change everything.” My teeth clamp down. “If you tell me, you can’t take it back.”

He steps toward me, his dangerous, perfect, awful green eyes melting in with the dark room.

“And I don’t want to be afraid of you,” I say. The worst kind of afraid. The kind that won’t let you sleep, that burrows in so deep that even bone moths steer clear of such things. Such memories. Such awful deeds. Max is dead and Oliver went into the woods and all the boys were at the lake that night. All of them were there and maybe it wasn’t an accident, maybe they all played some part, maybe they’re all to blame.

And there’s no way to make it right.

“You’re not afraid of me now?” he asks, inhaling deeply.

“No.”

He watches me in a way that makes my heart swim, loosened in my chest—my lungs caught mid-exhale. He looks like someone stuck in a place he doesn’t belong, a spike of fear running through his center—he looks as wild as the wilderness beyond the window.

Maybe it’s the look in his eyes: of desperation, of restlessness. Like every second is a clock counting down. Tick, tick, tick. Something stirs inside him, something neither of us can escape.

He shifts forward and presses his lips to mine.

His fingers find my collarbone, gentle like snowflakes caught in hair, and I kiss him back. I kiss him before my heart swells up into my throat. Before I crack open and become a puddle who used to be a girl. I kiss a boy who’s been to the farthest, deepest edge of the Wicker Woods and returned, who tastes like the violent winds that settle over the lake in winter. A boy who is more forest than flesh.

I press my fingers against his shoulder, his chest, searching for his heartbeat. Touching all the places I’ve wanted to a hundred times before. I need to know if he’s real. Or if the woods have made him something else, soil and stones. He kisses me softly at first, and then with an ache inside him, his hands against my ribs—pressing, pressing, as if he were leaving little bruises where his fingertips rest. Maybe for all the same reasons. To be certain I’m real. To see if I taste like memories, like winter, like the forest that nearly killed him.