I waited until the town went to sleep before slipping out of Gramps’ house and headed for the woods. It was full dark, no stars, and the shadowy streets flowed throughout the town like satanic veins in the quiet night. Once I reached the graveyard, I parked the scooter and walked the rest of the way between the labyrinth of gravestones, past the pet sematary, until I approached the woods.
Julian once said this town had a way of causing the mind to bend, to mix what was real and what wasn’t. Had it been real? Had we kissed in the Devil’s Playground only hours before?
For close to an hour, I walked along the forest floor in my pajamas with my beating heart in my stomach, a tingle still on my lips, reminding me it had to be real. But I had to see him—needed to see him. Under the moonlight, the sullen breezes had morphed into a bully, yanking leaves off the branches, spreading horror throughout the woods. Branches ripped at my clothes as my feet shuffled across the forest for a sign of Julian.
The eerie call of an owl echoed above, and my eyes darted up, seeing the way the white tree trunks slashed through the darkness and into the sky.
I stumbled back when my foot caught under a fallen log, and my back hit a bare chest. I snapped my head back, my heart like a drum when I faced the person who always seemed to be there.
“You’re here,” Julian said, his words dancing in my hair. He lifted me upright, and when I turned, his brows jumped in a panic. “What are you doing here, Fallon? You can’t be here!”
I tucked my hair nervously behind my ears, remembering why I was here but too embarrassed to say. “I wanted to see you,” I admitted, my heart going a million miles per second. A shiver spread over me being within his reach, and I took a step closer to erase it. “I needed to see you again. We kissed, and it was …” I shook my head, words lost on me. I’d seen the way regret moped inside the oldest spirits—a ghost within a ghost. Death didn’t end the suffering; ghosts were haunted too. And if I didn’t say these words, I knew this would be a moment I’d suffer from. I had to get it out. I had to tell him. “I want to kiss you again. I want it all,” I confessed, then paused so suddenly, chin high and shoulders back as if I embodied a world of confidence. I sucked in a breath. “Do you want me the same way I want you?”
With a pained expression, Julian’s gaze touched over my face as he took a step back.
I took a step forward. “Julian?”
“How do you do that?” he blurted. “How do you just say whatever you want? You can’t. You can’t just kiss me like you did. You can’t just do and say whatever it is you want. It’s stupid and reckless and …” He shook his head and tore his eyes away, turning his ear to the trees as if he could hear the whispers of the answers he was seeking, his eyes squinting as if in deep thought before they slammed back into my own. “What am I supposed to do?”
“It’s said and done, and I don’t take anything back.”
Julian’s features softened, and he took a step toward me and laid his hands over my shoulders. Then up the length of my neck. And through my hair. He opened his mouth to speak, but something in the distance caught his attention. My gaze followed his before our eyes returned to each other. “It’s too dangerous out in the open like this. Come with me.”
Julian grabbed my hand, and together we walked deeper into the woods. His steps were quick and quiet and secretive, effortlessly weaving through the trees as if the map of the forest was imprinted on his soles. Anticipation hummed along my skin, having no idea where he was taking me. Every so often, Julian looked back as if his stare could hold and protect me. It catapulted an icy wave of nostalgia into my bones.
Train tracks crossed our path, and we followed them to an abandoned train car when he let go of my hand and hopped up on the wobbly platform. Julian held out his hand, and I hesitated at first, scanning the small and dark space and the door that could trap us in. It was nothing but a hollow, metal bin on wheels with four walls. All darkness.
“Please,” he moved his fingers, his hand stretched out for me to take, “I’ll be in here with you the whole time.”
My eyes dropped to his hand.
I’d come to the woods to find him, and here he was, standing over an unsteady train car platform with a steady hand and defiance in his eyes. He looked down at me, pleading for me to join him.
My hand linked to his, and he pulled me up.
Julian anchored his gaze to mine, and the platform teetered to a standstill. “There aren’t many places I can take off my mask and be myself,” he explained, his shoulders tensing under his black coat as if he were nervous. He unlinked my folded arms from my chest and held my hands in his. “I want this too, but I want it to be with me and not some wretched Heathen.”
My heart ruptured. Those words, they crawled and wrapped their arms over my heart. Until a few hours ago, a boy named Roger was the only boy I’d ever kissed, and it was only because of a dare at a party. The senior class only had invited me for their entertainment, calling me a circus act because I was a freak.
I licked my lips and swallowed. “Okay,” I said with a nod, my skin heated.
Julian pulled the train car door, and it rolled shut. The sound bounced off the steel walls. It was pitch dark, and I froze in place, waiting for him with shallow breaths.
“Julian?” I whispered. My eyes bounced around, seeing nothing but black.
Trapped, trapped, trapped.
“I’m right here,” he said, and I felt his fingers on my cheeks.
Julian, Julian, Julian.
I bit my lip. “Okay.”
He walked me backward against a wall, and I felt his cold breath first. It tingled over my lips like a warning. He remained there, hovering, testing the waters. My mouth drew over his, and our noses brushed.
I brought my fingers to his face, noticing his mask was gone.
Julian was without his mask! and exposed. I squeezed my eyes shut, holding back the blend of intensity and emotions filling the room, filling us, wondering how someone could only be free in the dark. I fanned my finger over his long lashes, the slight curve of his nose, his high cheekbones, his bottom lip, along his jaw, picturing his face in my mind. And Julian let me, sinking his face into my hands, seeking more as if it were the first time anyone had ever touched him like this.
The tips of my fingers touched every inch of his face. And touching Julian was like touching neon, invigorating yet forbidden. He leaned his hips into me, and I moved my hand to the back of his neck, threading my fingers through his soft, thick hair, seeing nothing but darkness but feeling him all around me. They were not the same.
His nose brushed mine again, then again. Then his mouth coasted over my lips. Our breaths quickened, and I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Julian …” his name hummed inside me like a chorus, and he pressed his cheek to my own, his breath on my neck, in my ear, he surrounded me like the abyss of a shadow––everywhere and nowhere enough, inside every corner of my soul even I was too scared to venture. A deep moan rattled in his chest when he dropped his palms to the wall, and the vibrations, him, it all plunged into me.
He was so loud and bold and free now.
He grabbed my jaw and slid his palm down my throat, his mouth guiding mine to open.
Then he thrust his tongue into my opened mouth with sweet and slow agony.
And I sank, sank, sank, and faded into his kiss. His taste was nocturnal. His touch, an eclipse. Every sweep of Julian’s tongue, every desperate and eager touch, coursed an electric and addicting feeling, one I wanted to chain-smoke. I had no idea if I was doing this right, but I submitted, letting go and letting him have me.
He pulled my top lip between his, sucking when he growled, his chest echoing against mine as we sank together. He kissed me as if he had been searching, as if he found a piece of himself again within me. A thing he’d lost somewhere along his way.
“I know…” he tried to get out, grabbing my neck and pushing his hands to the back of my head until they gripped my hair. “I know what’s”—he crushed his mouth to mine once more before letting off—“happened to me, why it’s like this with only you.” His voice was coarse and raw as the very moment.
“What?” I breathed out, and his mouth slid across my jaw and over my neck as his hands slid down the length of my arms. Our tongues collided again, and I’d forgotten what it was he was trying to tell me as he kissed me madly, unraveling me, serenading me, tasting me, dizzying me.
“Lunaticus,” he panted into my mouth. “When the moon has struck you, it’s called lunaticus … and you struck me. Hard.” He kissed me even harder, threading his fingers with mine as the taste of poisoned apple still ghosted over his tongue. When he pulled away, he dropped his forehead to mine. “Something’s come over me, and I need to have you.”
Lunaticus.
I pushed off his coat, and he helped me. He lifted my tank over my head, and then his own. One by one, the clothes came off, and I didn’t think. I couldn’t! I was utterly lost to him and this need rushing inside me down to the space between my legs. His thumbs grazed over my breasts as his tongue swept against mine. I should have been embarrassed, but I wasn’t. My back arched into his touch, and his mouth was everywhere, kissing across my collarbone and my breast before finding my mouth again.
My fingers landed over the button on his slacks when I fumbled, having no idea what I was doing but knowing I needed him too. Julian’s mouth never separated from mine as he took over, working the button and zipper and sliding his pants down his thighs.
And he melted against me, his manhood pressing into my stomach, and I withered away as he pinned me against the steel wall, half-naked in the dark, my body trembling.
Julian’s hands clasped around my pajama shorts and slid them down along with my panties until they hit the floor, and he rolled them off the heels of my feet. I felt his lips on the crescent of my hip bone. He moved against me, around me, with me as if he could see all of me in the dark.
“What’s this?” he asked, feeling over the patch on my skin.
“I’m a virgin,” I blurted, then bit my lip, punishing myself for letting it slip because it made me sound so inexperienced. Not only was she a freak, but she was also a virgin. “It’s a birth control patch to help with my anemia and … mood swings.”
His fingers froze on my skin. “You’re a virgin?”
My mouth went dry, and I swallowed. “Yeah.”
“Okay,” he simply said, and his mouth moved over my hip, to the center of my stomach, to the tenderness between my thighs. My eyes bulged, and heat rocketed up my flesh. I gripped his hair until he stood and loomed over me. “For now, you’ll stay a virgin,” he added, his heavy breathing hitting the top of my head. Julian grabbed the back of my neck before he dipped his mouth to mine, making me dizzy all over again.
“Have you ever been touched before?” he asked, his lips and words and breath bouncing off me as his hand slid up between my jittery thighs.
I didn’t know how I was standing as my legs were like water and my insides like fire. I bit the inside of my cheek and shook my head, the anticipation as deafening as his presence. “No.”
Then his two long fingers swiped through my center as he sucked my top lip. A gasp spilled from my mouth onto his, my eyes squeezed, my body tingled and weakened and awakened. I needed more, and I gripped his sides, pulling Julian closer, wanting him to explore me, consume me, and pull me to the brink.
He pushed his tongue inside my mouth, swallowing my whimpers as the pad of his fingers stroked the sensitive places only I’d touched. “Do you like what I’m doing, Fallon?”
“Yesss…” I shuddered as his hard-on pressed into my belly.
I lifted my hand and wrapped my fingers around his member, and he was warm and hard in my hand … and something else. Something pulsing, like a heartbeat. My hand traveled up and down his length, moving the tips of my fingers over his thick head. A shredded sound left him, and he kissed me deeper as he slipped a finger lower, drawing heavy circles over my entrance. I stroked him, allowing instinct to take control. It felt so natural, being here with him. To be doing this at all.
I was touching him as he was touching me. Together, we explored each other in the darkness, falling into a desperate rhythm of rhapsody.
Julian growled, grabbed my thighs, and lifted me, folding me into him and slamming my back against the wall. His shaft slid across my wetness, and I broke apart into tiny pieces, seeing stars in this dark place with him.
The friction of us lit a passionate fire, every nerve-ending exposed and reaching new heights. The tips of his fingers stroked me, driving me wild. My head rolled back as he moved me, grinding my wet center against his length, his moans deep and thick.
We lost ourselves in the craze, and my legs started to shake, clenching around his waist. Julian’s fingers dug into my bottom, having complete control over me and guiding my sex against his but never entering. His other hand grazed and pressed and kneaded my entrance, and I couldn’t come down from this climb. And he let go of my ass to tug on my bottom lip.
“Come with me,” he spurred as if he were saying, “Come with me, and I’ll show you everything no one else will. Come with me, and I will tell you things no one else will tell you, I’ll give you everything, feed all your forbidden thoughts, things you never knew you wanted.”
Julian ran his tongue up my lips once before latching his mouth to mine when a whirlwind of sensations exploded within me. My nails pierced his scalp as he exhumed my orgasm from me as if it were my soul.
His grind turned precise and deep, my sex sliding up and down his length. He slammed his palm over the steel wall beside my head, sending a vibration inside the train car.
Warmth seeped over my skin as he came, his finger dragging up inside me, petting the places no one has been before him.
My head threw back—my body in spasms. I was overrun and flying, gripped and freed, possessed and pardoned, all in a single breath that I could hardly take. Julian kissed my throat as I pulsed around his finger.
Afterward, I dropped my head into the curve of his neck and tasted nature and woods and twilight on his skin.
Our chests heaved together, and Julian held me for a moment until our breathing slowed, and his palm drifted up and down my back as he buried his face in my neck too.
“You’re so quiet when you come. You’re like a whisper,” he said into my hair. “I’ve tried to ignore it, but I can’t. No matter what they say, you were always mine, and you always will be.”
I didn’t understand the words he was saying. The tap of his pulse in his neck hit my lips, running rabid with his words with me in his arms.
I closed my eyes, reminding myself it had to be the poison. The poison was making him say all the things, do all the things, and eventually, this night would pass, and he would disappear again.
“I can’t believe we did that. I’ve never done anything like that before.”
We were both sitting on the edge of the train car, my head in his lap, his hands in my hair. Julian’s mask was back on, as were our clothes, and the September winds felt like ice against my heated skin.
“Me either,” he said through an exhale, then looked down at me and shook his head as if in amazement.
“You don’t do that stuff often?” I didn’t know why I asked but wished I hadn’t. Did I want to know?
His gaze lifted to the woods as he skipped his fingertips down my neck in deep thought. “Never. What we did was different. I’ve been involved in intercourse for rituals, yes, but that was all it was. The Heathens are the only ones born with magic from my coven. But I’d never done anything without my mask before. Never gave more than my body, until now.” Julian was calm, sedated, his words lazy and patient as if he were drugged. Yet, he’d said it without emotion and more of a simple fact, a duty, and my heart felt his. “They can take parts of me, but I refused to let them have all of me.”
“Then, why me?” I asked, his words not making sense based on what we had just done. Even though we didn’t have sex, it still was something. Or had that only been a small piece of him too? And if so, would he ever be willing to give me everything?
Julian’s chest caved. He hung his head and looked down at me, resting his palm over my stomach under my tank. The stars cast little light over his flushed ivory skin. His wild black hair was damp from the heat firing between us earlier, a glow gleaming off the tips down to his hairline. I waited with a held breath for him to tell me that what he did with me was a mistake because he was intoxicated from Mina’s drink, and I was only a strange girl he’d found in the woods at the right time.
“Because when you look at me, you see me. It’s different with you. You make me forget the mask is even there,” Julian said, telling me, instead, he was the strange thing in the woods. He was the freak, not me. “I’m going to break this curse,” he added in a whisper. “I have to.”
For a long time, we sat in the train car listening to the night under a comfortable silence between us. I’d always imagined being with someone as strange and weird as me, and yet how beautifully bizarre the story would be, falling for Julian Blackwell—one of the monstrous things who made the woods their hiding-place, yet looked at me as if I were a mosaic masterpiece. There was no doubt I was equally terrified and intrigued by him, one of the cursed Hollow Heathens.
Terrified … because he could very well destroy me.
But I was sure to be destined for a grotesque love my grandchildren could tell their grandchildren about, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, wasn’t I? The kind of stories Marietta had told me. The kinds of stories written about creatures everyone feared the most, yet loved painfully without limitations. Because freaks like us deserved the strange and the weird. A love so severe.
“I want to show you something,” Julian said.
I sat up before he popped onto his feet. The train car moved when he jumped down with a loud thump! over the earth, then turned to grab my waist.
Once my feet hit the ground, Julian was off, running through the woods. My eyes fixed on his magnificent form, the stars outlining his silhouette as it passed under the cascade of moonlight.
I took off after the Heathen who wore his soul, chasing him wherever it was he wanted to go. Julian’s hands slid over the skin of the trees as he glided through the naked forest, allowing it to soothe him, guide him, nurture him.
We chased each other in the deep dark woods until he led me to a tree he called “the upside-down, half-heart tree,” where he lifted me and sat me in the bend.
I clung on to the white bark of the trunk as he gazed up at me, wonder passing through his silver irises as I smiled down at him. Julian tilted his head to the side for a moment, then looked up at me through thick and heavy lashes.
Afterward, we balanced over fallen logs, and Julian walked backward with such stealth, his hands behind his back, eyes on me.
His eyes were always on me.
“Do you like fixing cars?” I asked him, carefully planting one foot in front of the other.
“Yes,” his answer laconic.
I jumped off once my feet reached the end of the log. “Why?”
He thought for a moment, looking up at the canopies. When his eyes settled back on mine, he said, “I don’t really know why. I just do, I suppose.”
Then we laid under the moon where he showed me the constellations, pointed out Orion’s belt, the dippers, and told me the story of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.
We did all these things before we stumbled upon a hidden greenhouse. Glass windows of all sorts, shapes, and sizes made up the walls, and behind the glass, vibrant deep and dark colors reflected off the night. White flowers bloomed from vines that wrapped around the pillars, and I followed Julian around the structure.
“What’s this?”
Julian rubbed a petal between his fingers. “When I was a boy, Phoenix and I built this for my mother. It’s her night garden. She owns the apothecary in Town Square, and this is where she grows her medicine,” he explained, but I already knew of his mother, Agatha. I’d met her on my first day.
“Ipomoea alba,” he said and plucked a white flower from the vine and turned to face me. He swiped my hair from my face and tucked the flower behind my ear, his eyes sticking to mine. “There’s an entire world that wakes after nightfall. The moonflower only opens up under the light of the moon.” My breath held in my chest as his fingers lingered on my cheek, as if he were telling me so much more. As if there were more meanings planted between his words.
Together, we spent our time in a way the rest of the world had forgotten. Unhurriedly, slow. Free to be ourselves. Free to roam. Free to wander. We kissed in the tree’s shade until the sun rose, and he kissed me once more after, neither one of us wanting our night to end.
On our walk back to the funeral home, where my scooter was parked, the threatening sun spilled into the pre-morning darkness. The building to the funeral home was in our line of sight, and Julian grabbed my hand and turned me to face him.
“Hey.” He squeezed my hand with the same look he’d given me plenty of times before he was about to rip my heart from my chest. I turned my gaze away, unable to look him in the eyes. The poison had left his system, and he was about to take it all back. “Fallon, I’m a private person. What happens when we’re together, I don’t want anyone else to know. Even if things were different, if I weren’t cursed, and you weren’t … friends with Sacred Sea. What happens between us, I never want to share it with anyone else.”
“I don’t wanna share it with anyone else either,” I agreed. “So, what do we do from here?”
“We keep it in the dark.”