Meet Me in the Blue (Hemlock Harbor, #1)

by A.M. Johnson

wanted the right to touch him again. To reach over and hold his hand like we used to sometimes when we were kids. To rest my head on his shoulder and tell him I was lost. To ask him not to leave because I needed him now more than ever.

I thought maybe kissing could be okay if you knew someone well enough, knew them like you knew a best friend. Like how they smelled after a shower, or in the rain, and if they liked orange soda better than Coke. I thought sharing something like that would be okay.

“Tell me something I don’t know, something you’ve added to the list.”

searched their faces, but there was only one person I cared about, only one person I wanted to know again. Rook.

He rested his palms along my spine, and I perched my chin on his shoulder. It was like he’d never left, and there were a million-and-one stars to count, and the tip of his nose was cold.

I turned, any trepidation I had seemed foolish to me now, and pressed my nose to his temple. He snuck his arm around my lower back. We were kids again, watching the sun dip below the horizon. “We will be.”

Leaning back, I cupped his face in my hands, my thumbs wiping the moisture from his cheeks. His eyes were red rimmed, and I imagined mine looked the same. The flat palm of his hand rested against my chest. We searched each other’s expression, a quiet sort of armistice between us, breathing itself into our lungs, filling all those regretful spaces inside us with something more. Are we okay? We will be.

“I love you too,” he said, but it wasn’t like that. Like I love you. Those three words for him meant growing up together, camping, s’more sticky fingers, Magic the Gathering, and awkward teenage angst. They meant forgive me and I’m sorry and I missed you. We were years together and years apart, and somewhere along the way, in the loss I’d felt in his absence, the lines had blurred for me, and I wished like hell they had for him too.

“That day… I… Shit…” He stared down at our hands, his palm clammy. “I was heartbroken.” He drew a line along the side of my finger with the tip of his thumb. “I was in deep.”

I didn’t heed his warning, dusting the pad of my thumb along the line of his jaw and his eyes closed for one, two seconds, opening, half-lidded and sleepy. I should have stopped there, I should have pulled away, but I was in deep too. I thought I might have always been. His lips parted, a surrendered soft sound escaping his throat as I leaned in and pressed my mouth to his cheek, to the corner of his mouth, to the spot where the maple syrup had gathered.

He wasn’t the same boy I’d always known. Time and pain had changed him.

Loving Rook was effortless for me. Effortless because I’d always known. It wasn’t a maybe kind of thing, or a let’s try, it was years of hopeful smiles and subtle touches, disseminating each one and wondering if this time… just maybe… It was hours of talking in the dark shade of trees and knowing that this person, this one man, owned all of my secrets. All but one. And it was a million days of wanting to give him that secret, wanting to give him everything.

“I’m afraid to fall asleep. What if I forget he’s gone, and I have to remember all over again when I wake up? I feel like if I stay awake eventually it won’t hurt as much.” “I think it will always hurt, Luka.”

“Luka.” He leaned in, leaving less than an inch between our lips. “Luka,” he whispered my name again, and I shivered as his mouth claimed mine.

“I can’t promise sex will always be easy.”

“Luka…” A warm hand on the nape of my neck brought me racing back to the present. Rook’s lips brushed the shell of my ear as he folded his arms around my waist. I pressed my back into his chest and dragged the damp air and his woodsy scent into my lungs. “Are you hiding?”