A Lesson in Vengeance(75)

And what is this? I’m not sure I know the answer. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Ellis performs her work with the slow, determined care with which I imagine she writes her books, leaving me breathless and blinking up at her as she leans down to kiss me again.

“Not fair,” I say—accuse, really—and Ellis smirks into the kiss, reaching for my wrist to slip my hand down the waistband of her underwear instead.

She’s flush-cheeked and breathless once she’s finished, lifting her head to meet my gaze. This time when she kisses me, it’s languorous and warm. Then she shifts to kiss my throat, my sternum…and lower.

“You’re—”

You’re incredible. You’re inexorable. You’re merciless.

I don’t even have the ability to speak.

When you read about sex in books, it’s always described like a magical event, something sacred enacted through the profane: two souls joining on the metaphysical plane while two bodies entwine below. I had never understood that before now. But with Ellis it’s different than it was with the girls I’ve been with before—even Alex. Ellis is something new, and it feels like she creates and unravels me in the same moment, a sentence she writes and erases and rewrites, a product of her wants and imagination. I feel like she invented me.

I wonder if she feels the same.

After, I’m left limp and feverish, staring at the ceiling as Ellis shifts back up the length of the bed to settle her body next to mine. She trails a finger along my cheek, toward the corner of my mouth.

“There,” Ellis says, as if she’s accomplished a task. She kisses the place her finger just touched.

I coil in closer, and she smiles a small and careful kind of smile, a smile that conceals secrets.

We fall asleep together, Ellis’s arm thrown over my stomach and my face tilted in against her shoulder. And for once it is so easy to forget I’ve ever known anyone else.



* * *



—

Quinn leaves for Georgia two days before classes are meant to resume. It’s snowing when Quinn drives off, fat white flakes dusting the green roof of their Mustang, and within minutes the snow has covered the tracks the tires made on the drive, as if they were never there.

Ellis and I are never far apart now. She touches me frequently, as if still amazed that she can: her fingers laced with mine while we read, her hand slipping into my hair as she passes behind me in the kitchen. I’ve stopped finding her touch as unsettling as I did, although it hasn’t gotten less thrilling. I want to memorize the warmth of her skin, the way her eyes sparkle like smoke quartz when she laughs.

“No one has ever understood me like you do,” she told me after that first night we had together, tangled up in the sheets and awakening before dawn. I keep turning those words over in my mind, engraving them into the firmament of memory. I don’t want to forget this. No one understands Ellis Haley like I do. No one ever will.

I’ll have to go back to my own room tomorrow, when the other students return. But for tonight, again, I share Ellis’s. I lie beside her in the narrow bed and focus on the heat of her body, the weight of her arm around my waist.

But without her easy smiles and calm words, the walls close in. I keep thinking about the graveyard where Alex’s empty coffin was buried. I wonder if the book is back there now, covered under several feet of snow, with its pages gone soft and illegible. I wonder if Alex searches for me even now—if she’ll find me hiding here in Ellis’s room, hiding where I think I’m safe, and drag me back down into her hell.

The gentle respite of our week’s vacation has gone. The clock has started ticking once more, a second for every heartbeat.

I twist under Ellis’s arm, the dorm room bed small enough it knocks our knees together, and she mumbles in her sleep, rolling onto her other side. I curl up against her back, gazing at the nape of her neck and trying not to think about the sound the storm makes right outside her window—trying so hard not to wonder if that’s a figment of my imagination or if a girl’s voice carries on the wind, calling my name across the snowy hills.



* * *



—

Ellis comments on my insomnia the next morning, the pair of us sitting in the kitchen with tea and coffee, the sunlight outside reflecting white off the snow.

“Didn’t you sleep last night?”

I press both hands into my lap and stare down at my tea. I don’t want to see the look on her face right now: concerned, knowing. What we have together feels fragile, not even two days old. I want to seem better now. Sane.

“A little,” I say. “I had a hard time getting comfortable. Perhaps I shouldn’t have drunk some of your coffee last night.”

She grins. “Yes, well, that was your own mistake. You’re the one who stole my mug.”

A drop of relief trickles down my spine. Ellis is letting it go. She believes me. She doesn’t assume the truth: that I was up all night obsessing once again over witches and ghosts.

“What’s your plan for the day?” I ask.

“Write,” she says, perhaps predictably. “Maybe try to get a little reading in before the others get back. What about you?”

I keep gazing out the window. The trees are so thick, so icy, I can’t see farther than a few trunks deep. Past that the world blurs into gray fog. “I was thinking I might start running again…but it’s too cold today. So maybe I’ll be reading, too.”