It’s a neat trick trying to climb the ladder to my tree house holding Creamsicle popsicles from the ice cream truck, but Ethan and I manage. I suck in a deep, happy breath once we’re up on the balcony. It’s just big enough for Ethan and me to sit side by side with our legs dangling over the edge in the twilight.
The definition of perfect in my book.
And then it starts to rain, big, fat drops that plunk down on us. I lift my face up and close my eyes, drawing in that warm almost sweet scent that drifts up from the earth. “Petrichor.”
Ethan hasn’t drawn away from the rain either and raindrops run like tears down his face even as he smiles. “What?”
“That smell when it rains.” I inhale deeply again, silently prompting him to do the same. “When everything is clean and wet and new. It’s called petrichor. It’s a perfect word for a perfect thing.” I open my eyes and he looks all prismatic through the droplets weighing on my eyelashes and suddenly I shiver, a full-body tremor.
“Are you cold?” He draws one knee up, ready to stand and search for something inside the tree house for me.
I catch his hand instead and urge him to stay. His eyebrows pucker the slightest bit gazing at where our hands still touch. I kind of expect him to pull away. It’s not that Ethan and I never touch, but it’s usually messing around, maybe the occasional brief hug. Not quiet and still in the rain.
He doesn’t pull away. And when I tap the back of his hand, he turns it over to curl his fingers around mine.
Petrichor-laced air rushes into my lungs making me feel the good kind of dizzy, the good kind of shivery. I think he knows I’m going to do it even before I do because when I lean toward him, he leans too.
Our lips are shy when they meet and somebody’s forehead bumps into the other’s but we don’t pull back, we—both of us—press forward. He tastes bright and sugary sweet, a Creamsicle kiss that makes me smile against his mouth because I know that’s what he’s tasting too. I finished my popsicle long before him, so his lips are still chilled compared to mine, and there’s sweetness in that too, the warmth and the cold, the rain dripping into our kiss.
That heat all surges to my cheeks when the kiss ends, and Ethan scrambles away from me.
He’s moving toward the ladder before I hear it, that too-noisy muffler and the slamming door in his driveway. And then it’s more than rain on my cheeks, because even kissing me, Ethan had been listening for her, ready to leave.