Spells for Forgetting(53)

“She hated you,” I said, before I’d even thought it.

Jake went still, his brown eyes narrowing on me.

“Both of you. You turned your backs on us and she hated you for it.”

I knew that each and every word would cut like an uneven blade. I wanted it to. Noah wasn’t lying when he said that Eloise had been family. They’d both loved her.

The brothers stared at me, speechless, and I turned on my heel, stalking back through the pub until I was pushing out onto the street. I pulled the cold air into my lungs, trying to cool the fire in my chest.

What I said was true. My mother had been like a sister to the Blackwood brothers. But when the town came for blood, they cut her loose.





Thirty


    TWO YEARS BEFORE THE FIRE


   AUGUST


We were sixteen, Emery just barely.

Her dad’s fishing cabin was on the east side of the island, and on clear nights you could see the city lights from the end of the dock. We would lie out there on a blanket, backs flat on the wood, and when the tide was high, we would dangle our legs over so that our feet touched the cold water.

I loved her long before that. I don’t really remember a time that I didn’t love her. But that summer was different.

Emery had shifted from the girl I’d always known into something else. She was quieter. She was, impossibly, more beautiful. Her laugh was shy and the things she wanted to talk about had changed. And when she touched me, her hands lingered in a way they hadn’t before.

It was a full moon. I remember that, because she lifted a finger into the air and traced it on the black sky. It was bright, its edges yellowed like old paper, and giving way to the color of warm copper. The blood moon.

She pulled off her white cotton dress and we jumped into the dark water like we had on many other nights. She hooked her arms around my neck, and I could feel her naked body beneath the surface, goosebumps covering the curves of her. The only bit of warmth was in the places that her skin touched mine, and I loved that feeling.

There were so many times when I thought that her existence just felt like an extension of mine. Like this part of me that lived outside of my skin. I’d watched in a kind of silent awe as her body changed in those years, and I wanted her all the time, but I’d never had her completely.

I pressed a kiss to her throat as she looked up at the moon. Her face was washed white with it, and she whispered, “Swear that you’ll love me forever.”

I almost laughed, because she knew that I loved her. But she looked down into my face, and she wasn’t smiling. She looked like she was going to cry.

“What’s wrong?”

“Swear it,” she said again.

The water lapped quietly against us as I studied her. “I’ll love you forever,” I said. “I swear it.”

Two tears fell in tandem down her cheeks, caught by the corners of a smile that finally broke on her lips, and I wrapped my arms around her so tightly that I couldn’t feel her breathing against me.

“I’ll love you forever,” she whispered. “I swear it.”

I didn’t know it was strange, because Emery and I had just always…been. I didn’t know that teenagers didn’t usually fall into that kind of love, or that there was anything unusual about us at all. I just knew that she felt like air to me.

That night, we sat in front of the fire, our hair still wet, and Emery had her cold feet tangled with mine to warm them. Our parents didn’t like it when we spent the night at the cabin, but I could already tell that Emery was going to fall asleep. I pulled the quilt up higher so that it covered her shoulder and she blinked, like she’d forgotten where she was.

She pushed herself up, swinging one leg over my lap, and she looked down at me with her hair falling around her face. I let my hands find her knees, sliding them up her thighs. The air was cold, but beneath her dress, she was warm.

She reached down between us to unbutton my shorts, and I kissed her when she came low, finding the band of her underwear along her hip with my thumb. I wasn’t cold anymore. The room grew hot around us, even though the fire was dying out, and I sat up, pulling her beneath me.

We found our familiar rhythm, hands moving in a pattern that they had a hundred times, but Emery slowed, going still. I pulled back to look at her, and her chest was rising and falling with deep breaths.

Her lips were wet, her eyes almost scared. “I want to,” she whispered. “Is that okay?”

It took me a moment to realize what she was asking. We hadn’t really ever talked about going all the way. It was just this unspoken thing we’d sidestepped before that night.

“Yeah”—I searched her eyes—“that’s okay.”

Suddenly, I didn’t know what to do. How to touch her. Like I’d forgotten everything in a split second. I watched as she pulled the dress over her head and the firelight moved over her olive skin like liquid.

“Are we doing this?” I spoke between heavy breaths, smiling.

The corner of her mouth lifted and she nodded, like she was admitting to a secret, and I came back down to her so she could fit herself against me.

Her hands moved down my back as she kissed me and I had the same feeling I had each time we stood at the top of the cliffs at Wilke’s Pointe. Like I could feel in every cell of my body the distance I was about to fall.