Seconds later I heard the door shut, and the house fell into silence. But to me, in this moment, the house sounded like it was screaming.
Pushing the hair from my face, I slumped down on the overturned mattress, then leaned my back against the wall. For minutes, or it could have been hours, I stared at nothing. My room was dark save for the light from a small lamp in the corner of the room that somehow had survived my rage.
I lifted my eyes, and they settled on a photo hanging on the wall. I frowned, knowing I hadn’t put it there. My mamma must have hung it today when she unpacked my room.
And I stared.
I stared at Poppy, only days before we left, dancing in the blossom grove, the cherry blossoms she loved so much in full flower around her. Her arms were stretched to the sky as she twirled, her head tipped back as she laughed.
My heart clenched at seeing her this way. Because this was Poppymin. The girl who made me smile. The girl who would run to the blossom grove, laughing and dancing all the way.
The one who told me to stay away from her. I’ll stay away from you. You stay away from me. We’ll finally put us to rest…
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave her. She couldn’t leave me. She needed me and I needed her. I didn’t care what she had said; there was no way I was leaving her to endure this alone. I couldn’t if I tried.
Before I could over-think it, I jumped to my feet and raced to the window. I took one glance at the window opposite mine and let instinct take control. As quietly as possible, I opened my window and climbed through. My heart beat in tandem with my feet as I pounded across the grass. I stopped dead. Then with a deep breath, I placed my hand under the window and pulled up. It moved.
It was unlocked.
It was as if no time had passed. I climbed inside and gently closed the window. A curtain was in the way, something that wasn’t there before. Silently pushing it aside, I stepped forward, stopping as I drank in the familiar room.
Poppy’s sweet-scented perfume, the one she’d always worn, hit my nose first. I closed my eyes, chasing away the heaviness on my chest. When I opened them again, my eyes fell to Poppy in her bed. Her breathing was soft as she slept, facing me, her body illuminated only by the dull glow of her nightlight.
Then my stomach dropped. How the hell did she think I would ever stay away? Even if she hadn’t told me why she cut me off, I would have found my way back to her. Even through all the hurt, pain and anger, I would have been drawn back, like a moth to a flame.
I could never stay away.
But as I drank her in, her pink lips pursed in sleep, her face flushed with warmth, I felt as if a spear had slammed into my chest. I was going to lose her.
I was going to lose the only reason I lived.
I rocked on my feet. I struggled to cope with the thought. Tears fell onto my cheeks, just as an old floorboard creaked beneath me. I squeezed my eyes shut. When my eyes opened, it was to see Poppy staring at me from her bed, her eyes heavy with sleep. Then, clearly seeing my face—the tears on my cheeks, the grief in my eyes—her expression morphed into a mask of pain, and slowly, she opened her arms.
It was instinctive. A primal power that only Poppy held over me. My feet dragged me forward at the sight of those arms; my legs finally gave out as I reached the bed, knees hitting the floor, head falling into Poppy’s lap. And, like a dam, I burst. The tears came thick and fast as Poppy wrapped her arms around my head.
Lifting my arms, I wrapped them—iron-tight—around her waist. Poppy’s fingers stroked through my hair as, shaking, I fell apart in her lap, tears drenching the nightdress covering her thighs.
“Shh,” Poppy whispered, rocking me back and forth. The sweet sound was like heaven to my ears. “It’s okay,” she added. It struck me hard that she was comforting me. But I couldn’t stop the pain. I couldn’t stop the grief.
And I held her. I held her so tightly I thought she would ask me to let go. But she didn’t, and I wouldn’t. I didn’t dare let go, in case when I lifted my head she wasn’t here.
I needed her to be here.
I needed her to stay.
“It’s okay,” Poppy soothed again. This time, I lifted my head until our eyes met.
“It’s not,” I said hoarsely. “Nothing about this is okay.”
Poppy’s eyes were shining, but no tears fell. Instead, she tipped my face up, one finger under my chin, and she stroked down my wet cheek with another. I watched, not breathing, as a small smile began tugging on her lips.
My stomach flipped, the first sensation I had felt in my body since the numbness that followed her revelation had overtaken me.
“There you are,” she said, so quietly I almost missed it. “My Rune.”
My heart stopped beating.
Her face melted into pure happiness as she pushed the hair off my forehead and ran her fingertip down my nose and along the edge of my jaw. I stayed completely still, trying to commit this moment to memory—a photo in my mind. Her hands on my face. That look of happiness, that light shining from within.
“I used to wonder what you looked like, older. I wondered if you had cut your hair. I wondered if you had grown taller, changed in size. I wondered if your eyes had stayed the same.” The side of her lip twitched. “I wondered if you had grown more handsome, which seemed impossible to me.” Her smile fell. “And I see you have. When I saw you in the hallway last week, I couldn’t believe you were there, standing in front of me, more beautiful than I could ever have imagined.” She pulled playfully on my hair. “With your bright blond hair longer still. Your eyes as vibrant a blue as they’d ever been. And so tall and broad.” Poppy’s eyes met mine, and she said softly, “My Viking.”
My eyes closed as I tried to chase away the lump in my throat. When I opened them, Poppy was watching me like she always did—in complete adoration.
Rising higher on my knees, I leaned closer, seeing Poppy’s eyes soften as I pressed my forehead to hers, as carefully as if she were a china doll. As soon as our skin touched, I drew in a long breath, and whispered, “Poppymin.”
This time it was Poppy’s tears that fell to her lap. I pushed my hand into her hair and held her close. “Don’t cry, Poppymin. I can’t stand to see your tears.”
“You mistake their meaning,” she whispered in return.
I moved my head back slightly, searching her eyes. Poppy’s gaze met mine and she smiled. I could see the contentment on her pretty face as she explained, “I never thought I would hear you say that word to me again.” She swallowed hard. “I never thought I would feel you this close to me again. I never dreamed I would feel this again.”
“Feel what?” I asked.
“This,” she said and brought my hand to her chest. Right over her heart. It was racing. I stilled, feeling something in my own chest stirring back to life, and she said, “I never thought I’d ever feel fully whole again.” A tear fell from her eye and onto my hand, splashing on my skin. “I never thought I’d regain half my heart before I…” She trailed off, but we both knew what she meant. Her smile dropped and her gaze bored through to my own. “Poppy and Rune. Two halves of the same whole. Reunited at last. When it matters most.”
“Poppy…,” I said, but couldn’t fend off the whip of pain cracking deep inside.
Poppy blinked, then blinked again, until all her tears were gone. She stared at me, her head dropping to one side, like she was working out a difficult puzzle.
“Poppy,” I said, my voice husky and coarse. “Let me stay awhile. I can’t … I can’t … I don’t know what to do…”
Poppy’s warm palm landed gently on my cheek. “There’s nothing to do, Rune. Nothing to do but weather the storm.”
My words became trapped in my throat and I closed my eyes. When they opened again, she was watching me.
“I’m not scared,” she assured me confidently, and I could see that she meant it. One hundred percent meant it. My Poppy. Tiny in size but filled with courage and light.
I had never bee
n more proud to love her than I was at that moment.
My attention dropped to her bed—a bed that was bigger than the one she had had two years ago. She seemed too small for the large mattress. As she sat in the center, she looked like a little girl.
Clearly seeing me looking at the bed, Poppy shuffled back. I could detect an edge of wariness in her expression, and I couldn’t blame her. I knew I was not the boy she waved goodbye to two years ago. I was changed.
I wasn’t sure I could be her Rune ever again.
Poppy swallowed, and after a moment’s hesitation, she patted the mattress beside her. My heart raced. She was letting me stay. After everything. After everything I’d done since I returned, she was letting me stay.
Making to stand up, my legs felt unsteady. The tears had stained my cheeks, grated my throat to soreness, and the grief, the surreal revelation about the pain of Poppy’s illness … it had left a residual numbness in my body. Every inch of me broken, patched back up with Band-Aids—Band-Aids over open wounds.
Temporary.
Futile.
Useless.
I toed off my boots, then climbed onto the bed. Poppy shifted to lie on her natural side of the bed, and I, awkwardly, lay on mine. In a move so familiar to us both, we turned onto our sides and faced one another.
But it wasn’t as familiar as it once was. Poppy had changed. I had changed. Everything had changed.
And I didn’t know how to adjust.
Minutes and minutes of silence ticked by. Poppy seemed content to watch me. But I had one question. The one question I had wanted to ask her when the contact stopped. The thought that had burrowed inside of me, turning dark for want of an answer. The one thought that made me feel sick. The one question that still had the potential to rip me apart. Even now, when my world couldn’t shatter anymore.
“Ask me,” Poppy said suddenly, keeping her voice low so as not to wake her parents. Surprise must have shown on my face, because she shrugged, looking so damn cute. “I may not know the boy you are now, but I recognize that expression. The one that’s building up to a question.”
I ran my finger over the sheet between us, my attention focused on the movement I was making. “You do know me,” I whispered in reply, wanting to believe that more than anything. Because Poppy was the only one who ever truly knew the real me. Even now, buried under all this rage and anger, after the distance of two silent years, she still knew the heart underneath.
Poppy’s fingers moved closer to mine in the neutral territory between us. The no-man’s-land that separated our bodies. As I watched our two hands, straining for each other, but not quite reaching, I was engulfed with the need to get my camera, a need I hadn’t felt for a long time.
I wanted this moment captured.
I wanted this picture. I wanted this moment in time, to hold onto forever.
“I know some of your question, I think,” Poppy said, pulling me back from my thoughts. Her cheeks blushed, deep pink spreading over her fair skin. “I’ll be honest, since you’ve returned, I don’t recognize much. But there are times that there are glimpses of the boy I love. Enough to inspire hope that he still lies in wait underneath.” Her face was determined. “I think, above anything, that I want to see him fight through what has him hidden. I think seeing him again is my biggest wish, before I go.”
I turned my head away, unwilling to listen to her talk about leaving, about the letdown I was, about the fact that her time was running out. Then, like a soldier’s act of courage, her hand breached the distance between us and her fingertip grazed over mine. I turned my head back around. My fingers opened at her touch. Poppy ran her fingertip along the flesh of my palm, tracing the lines.
The hint of a smile came on her lips. My stomach sank, wondering how many more times I would see that smile. Wondering how she found the strength to smile at all.
Then, slowly retreating to where it had lain before, Poppy’s hand grew still. She looked at me, patiently waiting for the question that I still had not asked.
Feeling my heart race in trepidation, I opened my mouth and asked, “Was the silence … was it only about … your illness, or was it … was it because…” Images from our final night flashed into my brain. Me lying over her body, our mouths pressed together in slow, soft kisses. Poppy telling me she was ready. Us losing our clothes, me watching her face as I pushed forward, and afterward as she lay in my arms. Falling asleep beside her, nothing left unsaid between us.
“What?” Poppy asked, wide-eyed.
Taking in a quick breath, I blurted, “Was it because I pushed too far? Did I force you? Pressure you?” Biting the bullet, I asked, “Did you regret it?”
Poppy tensed, her eyes glistening. I wondered for a minute if she was about to cry, confess that what I had feared these past two years was true. That I hurt her. She put her trust in me and I hurt her.
Instead, Poppy rose from the bed and knelt down. I heard her pulling something out from underneath. When she rose to her feet, in her hand was a familiar glass mason jar. A mason jar filled with hundreds of pink paper hearts.
A thousand boy-kisses.
Poppy carefully kneeled on the bed, and tipping the jar in the direction of the nightlight’s glow, she opened the lid and began to search. As her hand swilled around the paper hearts, I tracked the ones that traveled past the glass on my side. Most were blank. The jar was coated in dust—a sign it hadn’t been opened for a long time.
A mixture of sadness and hope stirred inside me.
Hope that no other boy had touched her lips.
Sadness that the greatest adventure of her life had come to standstill. No more kisses.
Then that sadness cut a hole right through me.
Months. She only had months left, not a lifetime, to fill this jar. She would never write the message on a heart on her wedding day like she wanted. She would never be a mamaw, reading these kisses to her grandchildren. She wouldn’t even live out her teens.
“Rune?” Poppy asked when new tears fell down my cheeks. I used the back of my hand to wipe them away. I hesitated to meet Poppy’s eyes. I didn’t want to make her feel sad. Instead, when I glanced up, all I saw on Poppy’s face was understanding, an understanding which quickly changed to shyness.
Nervousness.
In her outstretched hand was a pink heart. Only this heart wasn’t blank. It was full, both sides. This heart’s ink was pink, practically disguising the message.
Poppy pushed her hand further out. “Take it,” she insisted. I did as she asked.
Sitting up, I shifted into the path of light. I focused hard on the light ink, until I could make out the words. Kiss three hundred and fifty-five. In my bedroom. After I made love to my Rune. My heart almost burst. I turned the heart over and read the other side.
I stopped breathing.
It was the best night of my life … as special as special can be.
I closed my eyes, yet another wash of emotion flowing through me. If I had been standing, I’m sure it would have brought me to my knees.
Because she loved it.
That night, what we did, it was wanted. I hadn’t hurt her.
I choked down on a noise that was slipping up my throat. Poppy’s hand was on my arm. “I thought I’d destroyed us,” I whispered, looking into her eyes. “I thought you’d regretted us.”
“I didn’t,” she whispered back. With a shaking hand, a gesture rusty from too much time spent apart, she pushed back the fallen strands of hair from my face. I closed my eyes under her touch, then opened them when she said, “When everything happened…,” she explained, “when I was seeking treatment,”—tears, this time, did slip down her cheeks—“when that treatment stopped working … I thought of that night often.” Poppy closed her eyes, her long dark lashes kissing her cheek. Then she smiled. Her hand stilled in my hair. “I thought of how gentle you were with me. How it felt … to be with you, that close. Like we were the two halves of the heart we always called ourselves.” She sighed. “It
was like home. You and me, together, were infinity—we were joined. In that moment, that moment when our breathing was rough and you held me so tightly … it was the best moment of my life.”
Her eyes opened again. “It was the moment I replayed when it hurt. It is the moment I think of when I slip, when I begin to feel scared. It’s the moment that reminds me that I’m lucky. Because in that moment I experienced the love my mamaw sent me on this adventure of a thousand boy-kisses to find. That moment when you know that you are loved so much, that you are the center of somebody’s world so wonderfully, that you lived … even if it was only for a short time.”
Keeping the paper heart in one hand, I reached up with the other and brought Poppy’s wrist to my lips. I pressed a small kiss over her pulse, feeling it flutter beneath my mouth. She drew in a sharp breath.
“No one else has kissed your lips but me, have they?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I promised you I wouldn’t. Even though we weren’t speaking. Even though I never thought I’d see you again, I would never break my promise. These lips are yours. They were only ever yours.”
My heart stuttered and, releasing her wrist, I lifted my fingers to press them across her lips—the lips that she had gifted to me.
Poppy’s breathing slowed as I touched her mouth. Her lashes fluttered and heat built in her cheeks. My breathing quickened. Quickened because I had ownership of those lips. They were still mine.
Forever always.
“Poppy,” I whispered, and leaned toward her. Poppy froze, but I didn’t kiss her. I wouldn’t. I could see that she couldn’t read me. She didn’t know me.
I hardly knew myself these days.
Instead, I laid my lips on my own fingers—still over her lips, forming a barrier between our mouths—and just breathed her in. I inhaled her scent—sugar and vanilla. My body felt energized simply from being near her.
Then my heart cracked down the center as I moved back and she asked brokenly, “How many?”
I frowned. I searched her face for a clue to what she was asking. Poppy swallowed and, this time, she placed her fingers over my lips. “How many?” she repeated.