Ghosts?”
“No.”
“Vampires?”
Beck made a face, nose screwing up. I had to fight the wave of attraction that came over me, and the sharp amount of how badly I wanted to kiss him. “Those are the ones that suck your blood, right?”
I kicked at his ankle, but my toes met with the grass instead. “You know, you playing dumb doesn’t make you seem cooler.”
“But it makes you seem smarter.” He spoke with a lazy smile, one that seemed to touch the centers of his eyes. In the soft summer sun, he looked much paler than I first realized, his wheat colored hair curling over his ears and into his eyes. We sat out of reach from each other, and it was probably a good thing. “Anyway, who believes in creatures like that? Have there been any reportings of them?”
I lifted my palms up. “I’m just trying to see where you stand is all. What about bigfoot?”
Beck took a glance at his shoes. “You’re just making things up now.”
“Aliens?”
He looked at me. “Aliens?”
I rolled my eyes at his faked confusion. “Creatures from outer space, dummy. Little green people with three fingers, big heads, big eyes.”
Now he snorted, leaning back on his palms and kicking his feet out. I watched as the grass threaded through his parted fingers, little green spikes against pale skin. Again, I noticed the silvery scars lashed across his knuckles, slightly raised and jagged. “They’re green? How do you know they’re not blue? Or magenta?”
“Oh, because Hollywood says they’re green,” I told him, leaning forward, “and Hollywood is never wrong about anything.”
Those soft lips lifted into a smile, the corners catching on the happiness that simmered in his eyes, spilling out onto the rest of his features. “What about you? Do you believe in aliens?”
I edged closer to him, feeling his foot brush against the bare skin of my calf. “I don’t believe we’re the only beings in the entire universe, no. But little green men? Not so sure about that.”
Beck’s eyes looked up to the sky, tracing the blue and the white of the uneven clouds. “Yes, there would most definitely need to be women, too. Who else would preserve the race?”
Closer, I came closer. “Maybe in alienkind, the men have babies. Like seahorses.”
“It’s possible,” he allowed, still not looking. “Or maybe they clone their children.”
“Wouldn’t that be something,” I murmured, my knees beside his, sitting back on my knees. With a tentative touch, I reached out and brushed his knuckles. “What happened to your hands?”
Beck glanced down, too, watching me trace his fingers. He didn’t answer for a moment, and I had the strangest feeling he was attempting to come up with a lie.
I withdrew my hand and pressed it against his mouth. His incredibly warm, soft mouth. “Don’t,” I told him. “If you don’t want to answer, you don’t have to. I’d rather you be quiet than lie.”
“I wouldn’t lie to you,” Beck said from behind my hand, making me lower it. His eyes were serious, though I saw him struggle to keep the levity we held a moment ago. A thrill washed through my veins at the idea that I was beginning to be able to read him. Maybe not as clearly as I would’ve liked, but clear enough. He lifted his hand, looking at the marks. “These are from lashings. Where I’m from, if we’re disobedient, we get lashed across our knuckles.”
“You have a lot of them,” I observed, trying not to imagine a small Beck with something cracking across his hands.
For the first time ever, I saw Beck smile and it was filled with bitterness and contempt. It looked wildly strange on his face, almost like I sat with a stranger. Not scary, not alarming, not in the least, just very, very off-putting. “It took me a while to learn, I suppose.”
In an impulsive moment, I ducked my head and kissed his knuckles. A quick peck, really nothing at all, but heat crept up from my neck anyway. “I’m sorry that happened,” I said, unable to look him in the eye. Instead I focused on the grass, crushed from our weight.
Beck shifted forward, reaching up and tracing his fingers across my jawline. A feather touch, so light that it made me shiver. “Everything happens for a reason,” he said.
“Everything?”
“I’d like to believe so.”
I couldn’t help but make a face, thinking of my parents. “What about death?”
“If we didn’t have death, we wouldn’t have new,” he replied simply, fingers slipping slowly down my throat. “If there’s no loss, there’s no gain, not really. Sometimes we need to lose to be able to stand on our own.”
Lose something—someone—to be able to stand. He wasn’t wrong in that respect. The loss of my parents forced me into adulthood a year early, in a way I’d never imagined. I bit my lip, struggling to push the thought down.
Beck touched the spot where my lip crinkled from my teeth, voice going soft. “Whoever you’ve lost, I’m very sorry.”
“My parents,” I told him, still not looking at him, and hated how my voice shook. No, I wasn’t ready to talk about this. Not yet. I couldn’t open myself up only to have him running. “It—it’s okay.”
A flash of heat flooded through me, melting away all the ice creeping up, as Beck pressed his mouth to the center of my forehead, gentle and reserved. It wasn’t a romantic gesture, but one of compassion and tenderness. His words ghosted across my skin. “It’s not, but that’s okay, too.”
“We’ll talk about it someday,” I told him, finally looking up. The sun behind him glowed like a halo, and reflected in his purple gaze. “We’ll talk about who we’ve lost, how much it hurts, but not today.”
He wrapped his fingers around mine and squeezed, a reassuring touch. “You won’t lose me,” he said, looking deep into my eyes. “I’ll be right here.”
