''I'm going to kiss you,'' he whispers, and he takes my bottom lip between his. His hand grazes my throat, gentle and light.
I fist his shirt, pulling him closer so his head tilts, his tongue touching the roof of my mouth.
My hands slip under his s...
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chapter seventeen
Greyson runs.
It takes me a second to piece it together: he jumped from his window, he hit the ground, and then—left.
It's the middle of the night and he's sprinting away from home.
With my heart in my throat, I stumble into the hall, still fighting the effects of sleep, and practically fall down the stairs to the front door. I clumsily put on my black runners and flee the empty house.
I book it down the concrete steps and to the edge of the lawn. My legs pump wildly, coming down hard on the cracked asphalt.
I have no plan other than to get to him.
Greyson's form turns a corner at the end of our street, his white shirt glowing faintly under the streetlamps.
It's dark, but I let the streetlights guide my feet and let my gut tell me where to go next.
After ten minutes of sprinting, my lungs burn. They scream for a rest just as my throat screams for water.
My legs give out. I stumble to a halt, hands on my knees, heaving wildly in the middle of the road.
I'm at a dead end. On either side are houses like mine, small and slightly run-down in this working-class neighbourhood. The houses are dead, no lights or movement inside.
Ahead of me is a large expanse of field that leads to the park Grey and I used to play at when we were kids. It's where we found those sleds.
I really hope that's not where he is, but my gut is pulling me into the large, dark open space.
Still breathing hard, I wrap my arms around my torso, the black pyjama set not doing much to warm me in the lower nightly temperatures.
Toward the centre of the grassy expanse, a small playground lives in a ring of wood chips. The closer I get, the more the smell of the old, half-melted plastic has my stomach churning. It's a million childhood memories that ended in one fateful night.
There's a silver double slide. The two lanes fall five feet to the ground together, the metal glinting faintly in the moonlight.
Greyson's back is fitted to one of the slide's lanes, shoulders stuffed in the metal ridges, legs bent, and feet planted on the ground. He's gazing up, eyes dead fixed skyward, even if he knows I'm here.
I walk the rest of the distance, stopping before the metal slide and carefully take the space beside him, back to metal, eyes to the stars and half-moon.
The sky is a deep and clear blue-black velvet colour, stars pinned to the dark fabric like twinkling diamonds. The month of May might just have more to contribute than its seasonal yellow weeds. This spring night sky is...something else.
