The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, #3)

by Philip Pullman

Like two moths clumsily bumping together, with no more weight than that, their lips touched. Then before they knew how it happened, they were clinging together, blindly pressing their faces towards each other. “Like Mary said –” he whispered – “you know straight away when you like someone – when you were asleep, on the mountain, before she took you away, I told Pan –” “I heard,” she whispered, “I was awake and I wanted to tell you the same and now I know what I must have felt all the time: I love you, Will, I love you –” The word love set his nerves ablaze. All his body thrilled with it, and he answered her in the same words, kissing her hot face over and over again, drinking in with adoration the scent of her body and her warm honey-fragrant hair and her sweet moist mouth that tasted of the little red fruit. Around them there was nothing but silence, as if all the world were holding its breath.