The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(68)

Being dead made Noah more open-minded than most, so he didn’t bother with doubt. “Is it when or if?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, if you kiss your true love, he’ll die,” he said, “or is it when you kiss your true love, he’ll die?”

“I don’t get what the difference is.”

He rubbed the side of his face on the pillow. “Mmmmsoft,” he remarked, then added, “One’s your fault. The other one, you just happen to be there when it happens. Like, when you kiss him, POW, he gets hit by a bear. Totally not your fault. You shouldn’t feel bad about that. It’s not your bear.”

“I think it’s if. They all say if.”

“Bummer. So you’re never going to kiss anyone?”

“Looks that way.”

Noah rubbed the smudge on his cheek. It didn’t go away. It never did. He said, “I know somebody you could kiss.”

“Who?” She realized his eyes were amused. “Oh, wait.”

He shrugged. He was maybe the only person Blue knew who could preserve the integrity of a shrug while lying down. “It’s not like you’re going to kill me. I mean, if you were curious.”

She hadn’t thought she was curious. It hadn’t been an option, after all. Not being able to kiss someone was a lot like being poor. She tried not to dwell on the things she couldn’t have.

But now — “Okay,” she said.

“What?”

“I said okay.”

He blushed. Or rather, because he was dead, he became normal colored. “Uh.” He propped himself on an elbow. “Well.” She unburied her face from the pillow. “Just, like —”

He leaned toward her. Blue felt a thrill for a half a second. No, more like a quarter second. Because after that she felt the too-firm pucker of his tense lips. His mouth mashed her lips until it met teeth. The entire thing was at once slimy and ticklish and hilarious.

They both gasped an embarrassed laugh. Noah said, “Bah!” Blue considered wiping her mouth, but felt that would be rude. It was all fairly underwhelming.

She said, “Well.”

“Wait,” Noah replied, “waitwaitwait.” He pulled one of Blue’s hairs out of his mouth. “I wasn’t ready.”

He shook out his hands as if Blue’s lips were a sporting event and cramping was a very real possibility.

“Go,” Blue said.

This time they only got within a breath of each other’s lips when they both began to laugh. She closed the distance and was rewarded with another kiss that felt a lot like kissing a dishwasher.

“I’m doing something wrong?” she suggested.

“Sometimes it’s better with tongue,” he replied dubiously.

They regarded each other.

Blue squinted. “Are you sure you’ve done this before?”

“Hey!” he protested. “It’s weird for me, ’cause it’s you.”

“Well, it’s weird for me because it’s you.”

“We can stop.”

“Maybe we should.”

Noah pushed himself up farther on his elbow and gazed at the ceiling vaguely. Finally, he dropped his eyes back to her. “You’ve seen, like, movies. Of kisses, right? Your lips need to be, like, wanting to be kissed.”

Blue touched her mouth. “What are they doing now?”

“Like, bracing themselves.”

She pursed and unpursed her lips. She saw his point.

“So imagine one of those,” Noah suggested.

She sighed and sifted through her memories until she found one that would do. It wasn’t a movie kiss, however. It was the kiss the dreaming tree had showed her in Cabeswater. Her first and only kiss with Gansey, right before he died. She thought about his nice mouth when he smiled. About his pleasant eyes when he laughed. She closed her eyes.

Placing an elbow on the other side of her head, Noah leaned close and kissed her once more. This time, it was more of a thought than a feeling, a soft heat that began at her mouth and unfurled through the rest of her. One of his cold hands slid behind her neck and he kissed her again, lips parted. It was not just a touch, an action. It was a simplification of both of them: They were no longer Noah Czerny and Blue Sargent. They were now just him and her. Not even that. They were only the time that they held between them.

Oh, thought Blue. So this is what I can’t have.

Not being able to kiss whoever she fell in love with didn’t feel so different from not having a cell phone when everyone else at school did. It didn’t feel very different from knowing she wasn’t going to be studying ecology abroad for college, or going abroad period. It didn’t feel very different from knowing that Cabeswater was going to be the only extraordinary thing about her life.

Which was to say that it was unbearable, but she had to bear it anyway.

Because there was nothing terrible about kissing Noah Czerny, apart from him being cold. She let him kiss her, and kissed him back until he pulled back on an elbow and clumsily wiped away some of her tears with the heel of his fist. His smudge had gotten very dark, and he was cold enough that she shivered.

Blue gave him a watery smile. “That was super nice.”

He shrugged, eyes doleful, shoulders curled in on themselves. He was fading. It wasn’t that she could see through him. It was that it was hard to remember what he looked like, even while she was looking at him. When he turned his head, she saw him swallow. He mumbled, “I’d ask you out, if I was alive.”