That’s when I know I’ve lost.

“Your father said—”

“Don’t ever begin a sentence with ‘Your father said.’ He’s nothing.”

Mara ignores me. “He said you can’t help but want me. That it’s like a side effect. I’m not a choice for you. I’m a—a compulsion.”

I shrug, as if the thought doesn’t wound me the way it wounds her. I don’t want to believe it. I can’t believe it. “I don’t believe anyone can help who they love.”

“What if you could?”

“I wouldn’t want to.”

She pauses, unsure. “Would you risk it, if you were me?”

I already did. “I trust you enough to let you make your decisions for yourself. I wouldn’t make them for you.”

“I don’t believe you,” she says plainly.

“You keep hearing and believing that I’m going to die if we stay together. But when? Has your fortune-teller told you that?”

She is silent.

“Maybe I will and maybe I won’t, but if I do, it isn’t because of destiny or fate—it’s because everyone dies someday. We get one life, Mara. You might live forever and I might die tomorrow, but right now we’re both here. And I want to spend the time I have with you.”

She looks up at me, and I can tell she’s going to say something mean. “You didn’t want to last night.”

“Wrong. I did want to. But considering I gave you a lethal injection not twenty-four hours ago, I thought you might not be in the mood.”

A smile flickers on her lips. I move closer. “I don’t know how to make you understand what you do to me. Just thinking about kissing you is enough. Feeling your tongue against mine. The way you taste. The sounds you make. Everything. I’ve wanted you so much, for so long, but in the way you want things you’ll never, ever have. Like no matter what I do, you’ll always be just out of reach. But when you kiss me? It’s like I’m on fire.”

Her breath catches, but I’m not quite sure why. Her face is unreadable.

“I want to touch every part of you,” I go on, because if I flinch now, it’s over. “I want to touch you now,” I say, and close the distance between us. I wrap a curl of her hair around my finger and give it a little tug. She shivers. “Maybe I didn’t have a choice in the beginning because I didn’t understand what I was choosing. But I do now. I know now. You are what happiness means to me. And I would rather have today with you than forever with anyone else.”

I can tell she wants to believe it, and I pray that she does, because I don’t think I can stand to lose her. I can’t let her go. Not yet. I take her face in my hands. “We will do this while we can, and when we can’t anymore, I will remember the feel of your mouth on me and the taste of your tongue and the weight of your hands on mine, and I will be happy.” I whisper against her skin, “If you choose me.”

72

THE CHOICES YOU MAKE WILL change you.

The words appeared in my mind, unbidden. I’d chosen Noah before, and I wanted to again, now that we both knew who and what we were. I didn’t care if it changed me. I did care about how it might change him.

“You make me happier than I deserve,” I said thickly. His touch, his scent, his everything was distracting me.

Noah smiled. “Then why do you look so sad?”

My hope for him, his mother’s hope for him, was that he would help create a better world. Without you, he can.

“I have no right to want you,” I said, unable to hide my bitterness.

“You have every right. It’s your choice. It’s ours. We don’t have to be what they want.”

But we were.

“We can live the lives we want.”

Could we?

Noah took off his necklace and held it out in his palm. He’d chosen. I closed my eyes and tried to remember his mother’s face, my grandmother’s words, but it was useless. All I could see was him.

I shook my head. “I tried so hard not to love you.”

“Well, you’re a failure, I’m sorry to say.” He kissed me on one cheek.

“No, you’re not.”

“No. I’m not.” He kissed the other.

“You know, when I met you, I thought you had everything. A perfect life.”

“Mmm.” My neck.

“I thought you were pretty perfect too.”

He stopped, went still. “And now what do you think?”

I didn’t answer at first. “You didn’t have what I thought you had. I think part of you must have always known how fragile your life really was, if you were willing to risk it for me.”

He shook his head. “You don’t get what you give me.”

I wanted him to say it. Needed him to say it. “Tell me.”

“It’s like you’re a mirror, and you show me who I want to be, instead of who I am.”

I closed my eyes.

“When I look at myself, I see nothing,” he said. “When you look at me? You see everything.” I felt his fingers in my hair, on my neck. “I need to be the person I am with you.”

“You’re that person all the time.”

Noah’s expression was uncharacteristically open. Earnest. He meant what he was saying. Believed it. “Maybe sometimes we can only see the truth about ourselves if someone shows us where to look.”

I didn’t need Noah to see the truth about myself—I found it on my own. But he needed me to see the truth about him.

“Maybe we are codependent,” he went on. “Maybe we are f**ked up. Maybe I’m stupid and you’re trouble and both of us would be better off alone.”

“Maybe?”

He ignored me. “I don’t care. Do you?”

The list of what he would lose with me was longer than what I could give him. But no. I didn’t care.

Noah had seen me scarred and broken, dirty and limp, covered in blood and wearing someone else’s smile. He didn’t cringe or flinch or hide. He knew who I was, he’d seen what I’d done, and he knew what I would do to him someday too. But he was still here. I would be a fool to let him go, and I was many things—a liar, a criminal, a murderer—but I was not a fool.

You can be seen and not loved, or loved and not seen. Noah loved me, and saw me. But more than that, he chose me. I couldn’t give him forever, even though he deserved it. I couldn’t keep him safe, even though I wanted to. But I could give him today. Tonight. And I would try to give him tomorrow, and every day after, for as long as I possibly could. It wasn’t enough for me, but it was enough for him.

I tilted my head up and asked, “What would you do if I kissed you right now?”

He pretended to think about it for an obnoxious amount of time before saying, “I would kiss you back.”

I’d been surviving on crumbs for so long—thoughts of him, memories of us. But now, with him here and close and willing, I realized I’d been starving.

I wrapped my hands around his neck and kissed him softly. His hand grazed the hem of my shirt, and when I felt his skin on mine it was like a storm beneath his fingertips, the rolling of clouds, the snapping of lightning. All at once it was too much and not enough, and I arched against him and kissed him harder, roughly.

You think it can’t get worse than wanting someone and not having them, but it can. You can want someone, have them, and want them more. Still. Always. You can never get enough.

We broke apart to breathe, our foreheads still touching. He didn’t say he loved me. He didn’t need to. I could feel it in the way he pressed my palm against his neck. His eyes were closed, and my heart turned over. He needed me too.

What had happened would always be part of us, but we’d survived it. We were still here. The curtain would fall on us eventually, but I would fight to keep it up as long as I could. For now it was just us, together, and there was nothing in our way.

Still, I heard David’s words replay themselves in my mind, in his voice, as I led Noah back into the house and up the stairs.

“He wouldn’t love you if you weren’t what you are.”

But I am what I am. And he does.

73

NOAH

I KNOW WHAT I CAN do to a girl with a word, a look, a touch. And I want to do them all to her.

MARA

I PRESSED MY LIPS TO his throat, and he tilted my chin up, my face aside. He whispered wicked things against my ear.

I grinned, and unbuttoned his shirt.

NOAH

I KISS HER SOFTLY, TWICE. then her head tilts, dips, and her mouth closes over my heart. As she kisses my burning skin, a shock shudders through me.

Mara is the one I never knew I was waiting for, and as long as she’ll have me, I will never let her go.

MARA

I SHRUGGED HIS SHIRT FROM his shoulders, and he lifted mine from my chest. We shed everything until skin met skin.

And then Noah Shaw showed me why he had the reputation he had.

I shivered at the delicious sting of his jaw as he trailed kisses down the dip in my navel, at his fox smile as he painted me in feeling. Soft, muted, dreamy colors first—ochre and umber and rose with his tongue. My breath caught, and I needed—I needed—

“Hurry,” I pleaded.

“Slowly,” he said.

NOAH

I THRILL AT HER RISING, aching, swelling sound as I draw out every torturous kiss. Her muscles tighten and tremble and she grasps the sheets and I glance up, needing to see her face.

She is wild. And I have never seen anything more outrageously beautiful in my life.

But then she threads her hands into my hair and pulls.

MARA

AS I DREW HIM UP against me, into me, there was a pinch of scarlet.

“Are you all right?” he asked, his voice gentle in a way I’d never heard.

I breathed “Yes” as the color softened and faded. I pulled him closer.

NOAH

I SLIDE MY HANDS UP her back, and her ankles lock around my waist and she takes me in with those fathomless eyes. We are connected: hands, limbs, mouths, bodies, souls. I have never known this.

Mara kisses me and it is sugar on my tongue and champagne in my blood; I want to drown in her taste and scent and sound. Hers is the body electric; she is the high I’d been chasing but never caught until now.

MARA

NIPPING. PULLING. TEASING. TASTING. HIS strokes were slow, intricate, as they blended and feathered and blushed me into something radiant. The colors glossed and glazed into something bold and bright.

NOAH

EVERY TOUCH COMPOSES A NEW, unheard measure; I am hypnotized by the texture and timbre of her notes as they trill and turn and beat and slide. The sheets are our world, and in them she is finite and infinite, beautiful and sublime, bound in my arms and boundless at once.

I move and her scale lengthens, stretches, rhapsodic and gorgeously violent as her eyes grow dark and threaten to close.

“Stay with me,” I nearly growl, trying to bite back my desperation, my fear that she’ll slip away. I never want to stop looking at her from here. “Stay.”

They flutter open—she’s still here, still her. “I need to hear you,” she begs in that voice, and I can’t refuse her¸ not anything, not now, not ever. But the words that come aren’t enough for this. For her. So I speak in a language she doesn’t know.

Je t’aime. Aujourd’hui. Ce soir. Demain. Pour toujours. Si je vivais mille ans, je t’appartiendrais pour tous. Si je vivais mille vies, je te ferais mienne dans chacune d’elles.

I love you. Today. Tonight. Tomorrow. Forever. If I were to live a thousand years, I would belong to you for all of them. If I were to live a thousand lives, I would want to make you mine in each one.

MARA

THE WORLD DISTILLED TO ONLY the sound of us as we both stretched out on the edge of the world.

The colors shone, burned through. Sienna and crimson and gold, and I swallowed my name from his mouth and he kissed his from my lips, and I was incandescent as I tripped into—

NOAH

BLISS.

The echo of her pleasure hits my blood and takes me with her. Mara is unstrung, unbound, unleashed in my arms.

Finally.

MARA

AFTER, I LAY AGAINST HIM. Our heartbeats synchronized, and I twined around him like moss on a limb. I was soft in his grasp and he was so solid and warm and real against my cheek. My smile wouldn’t fade, but the colors began to. Violet to cobalt, then indigo, then black.

NOAH

THERE IS NO SILENCE, BUT the timbre of her sound does change. Grace notes, sweet and blue, sweeping, sliding, falling. I know what they mean.

“Stay,” I whisper into her damp, curling hair, as if it’s the only word I know. “Stay with me.”

But her eyes flutter and shut.

I can’t close mine. Mara falls asleep to “Hallelujah.”

EPILOGUE

DAWN CREEPS IN THROUGH THE curtains, staining the backs of my eyelids red. I blink once, twice in the near darkness, then stretch. I inhale the scent of Noah’s shampoo and smile as I reach over in bed to pull him closer. My hand closes around a piece of paper, though, not his hair.

I prop myself up on my elbow and yawn, scanning the room for evidence of Noah. When I don’t find any, I turn on the bedside lamp. His bag is here, and his clothes are in them—not strewn around like mine. We were supposed to be leaving New York today, and it looked like he’d already packed. That wasn’t unusual. But not waking up to him beside me was. I bite my lower lip, remembering his mouth on it last night, and draw back the sheets to look for my clothes. The note flutters to the ground beside me. I pick it up.

Couldn’t sleep, went for a run. Back soon. Prepare yourself.

xxxxxx