He put the key in the door.
It fit.
He turned it.
The lock popped up.
A smile was working over his mouth, though there was no
one to see it. Especially because there was no one to see it.
Ronan sank into the driver’s seat. The vinyl was infernally hot in the sun, but he just filed that information away. It was yet another sensation that made the moment real instead of a dream. Slowly, he ran a finger around the thin steering wheel, rested his palm on the slick gearshift.
Gansey’s heart would stop if he saw Ronan Lynch right here. Unless the key didn’t work in the ignition.
Ronan put his feet on the clutch and brake, inserted the key,
and turned it.
The engine roared to life.
Ronan grinned.
On cue, his phone buzzed as a text message came in. He slid
it out of his pocket. Kavinsky.
my new wheels will blow you away. see you tonite @ 11.
An hour later, Noah let Blue into Monmouth Manufacturing. The sun had made the space vast and musty and lovely. The warm, trapped air was scented with old wood and mint and tenthousand pages about Glendower. Although Gansey had been gone only hours, it suddenly seemed longer, like this was all that was left of him.
“Where’s Ronan?” she whispered as Noah closed the door behind her.
“Making trouble,” Noah whispered back. It was strange to be here without anyone else: speaking felt a little forbidden. “Nothing we can do anything about.”
“Are you sure?” Blue murmured. “I can do a lot of things.”
“Not about this.”
She hesitated by the door. It felt like trespassing without Gansey or Ronan here. What she wanted was to somehow stuff all of Monmouth Manufacturing inside her head and keep it there. She was struck with anxious longing.
Noah held his hand out. She accepted it — it was bone cold, as always — and together they turned to face the huge room. Noah took a deep breath as if they were preparing to explore the jungle instead of stepping deeper into Monmouth Manufacturing.
It seemed bigger with just the two of them there. The cobwebbed ceiling soared, dust motes making mobiles overhead. They turned their heads sideways and read the titles of the books aloud. Blue peered at Henrietta through the telescope. Noah daringly reattached one of the broken miniature roofs on Gansey’s scale town. They went through the fridge tucked in the bathroom. Blue selected a soda. Noah took a plastic spoon. He chewed on it as Blue fed Chainsaw a leftover hamburger. They closed Ronan’s door — if Gansey still managed to inhabit the rest of the apartment, Ronan’s presence was still decidedly pervasive in his room. Noah showed Blue his room. They jumped on his perfectly made bed and then they played a bad game of pool. Noah lounged on the new sofa while Blue persuaded the old record player to play an LP too clever to interest either of them. They opened all of the drawers on the desk in the main room. One of Gansey’s EpiPens bounced against the interior of the topmost drawer as Blue withdrew a fancy pen. She copied Gansey’s blocky handwriting onto a Nino’s receipt as Noah put on a preppy sweater he’d found balled under the desk. She ate a mint leaf and breathed on Noah’s face.
Crouching, they crab-walked along the aerial printout Gansey had spread the length of the room. He’d jotted enigmatic notes to himself all along the margin of it. Some of them were coordinates. Some of them were explanations of topography. Some of them were Beatles lyrics.
Finally, they regarded Gansey’s bed, which was just a barely made mattress and box spring on a metal stand. It sat in a square of sunlight in the middle of the room, turned at an angle as if it had been driven into the building. Without any particular discussion, they curled on top of the blanket, each taking one of Gansey’s pillows. It felt illicit and drowsy. Only inches away, Noah blinked sleepily at her. Blue crumpled the edge of the sheet against her nose. It smelled like mint and wheatgrass, which was to say, like Gansey.
As they baked in the sunlight, she let herself think it: I have a crush on Richard Gansey.
In a way, it was easier than pretending otherwise. She couldn’t
do anything about it, of course, but letting herself think it was like popping a blister.
Of course, the opposite truth also seemed self-evident.
I don’t have a crush on Adam Parrish.
She sighed.
Noah, his voice muffled, said, “Sometimes I pretend I’m like him.”
“What part?”
He considered. “Alive.”
Blue draped an arm over his cold neck. There wasn’t really anything to say to make being dead better.
For a few sleepy minutes, they were silent, nested in the pillows, and then Noah said, “I heard about how you won’t kiss Adam.”
She turned her face into the pillow, cheeks hot.
“Well, I don’t care,” Noah said. With quiet delight, he guessed, “He smells, right?”
She turned back to him. “He does not smell. Ever since I was little, every psychic I know has told me that if I kiss my true love, he’ll die.”
Noah’s brow furrowed, or at least the half of it that wasn’t buried in pillow. His nose was more crooked than she’d ever noticed. “Adam’s your true love?”
“No,” Blue said. She was startled by how quickly she had answered. She couldn’t stop seeing the dented side of the box he’d kicked. “I mean, I don’t know. I just don’t kiss anybody, just to be on the safe side.”
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 not 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 than 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.”
Nothing was fair.
“I’d say okay,” she replied.
She only had time to see him smile faintly. And then he was gone.
She rolled onto her back in the middle of the suddenly empty bed. Above her, the rafters glowed with the summer sun. Blue touched her mouth. It felt the same as it always did. Not at all like she had just gotten her first and last kiss.
