Fallen - Lauren Kate [79]
His fall took her so much by surprise, she accidentally lost her own balance and landed in a tangled heap on top of him. Daniel was flat on his back, looking at her with wide eyes.
She should not have told him that. Here she was, on top of him, and she’d just divulged her deepest secret, the thing that really defined her as a lunatic.
How could she still want to kiss him so badly at a time like this?
Her heart was pounding impossibly fast. Then she realized: She was feeling both of their hearts, racing each other. A kind of desperate conversation, one they couldn’t have with words.
“You really see them?” he whispered.
“Yes,” she whispered, wanting to pick herself up and take it all back. And yet she was unable to move off Daniel’s chest. She tried to read his thoughts—what any normal person would think about an admission like hers. “Let me guess,” she said glumly. “Now you’re certain I need a transfer. To a psychiatric ward.”
He pushed himself out from under her, leaving her lying practically face-first on the rock. Her eyes moved up his feet, to his legs, to his torso, to his face. He was staring up at the forest.
“That’s never happened before,” he said.
Luce got to her feet. It was humiliating, lying there alone. Plus, it was like he hadn’t even heard what she said.
“What’s never happened? Before what?”
He turned to her and cupped her cheeks in his hands. She held her breath. He was so close. His lips were so close to hers. Luce gave her thigh a pinch to make sure this time she wasn’t dreaming. She was wide awake.
Then he almost forcibly pulled himself away. He stood before her, breathing quickly, his arms stiff at his sides.
“Tell me again what you saw.”
Luce turned away to face the lake. The clear blue water lapped softly at the bank, and she considered diving in. That was what Daniel had done the last time things had gotten too intense for him. Why couldn’t she do it, too?
“It may surprise you to know this,” she said. “But it’s no thrill for me to sit here and talk about how thoroughly insane I am.” Especially to you.
Daniel didn’t answer, but she could feel his eyes on her. When she finally got the courage to glance at him, he was giving her a strange, disturbing, mournful look—one in which his eyes turned down at the corners and their particular gray was the saddest thing Luce had ever seen. She felt as if she’d let him down somehow. But this was her awful confession. Why should Daniel be the one to look so shattered?
He stepped toward her and leaned down until his eyes were gazing directly into hers. Luce almost couldn’t take it. But she couldn’t make herself budge, either. Whatever happened to break this trance would have to be up to Daniel—who was moving closer still, tilting his head toward hers and closing his eyes. His lips parted. Luce’s breath caught in her throat.
She closed her eyes, too. She tilted her head toward his, too. She parted her lips, too.
And waited.
The kiss she had been dying for didn’t come. She opened her eyes because nothing had happened, except for the rustling sound of a tree branch. Daniel was gone. She sighed, crestfallen but not surprised.
What was strange was that she could almost see the path he’d taken back through the forest. As if she were some kind of hunter who could pinpoint the rotation of a leaf and let it lead her back to Daniel. Except she was nothing of the sort, and the kind of trail that Daniel left in his wake was somehow bigger, clearer, and at the same time, even more elusive. It was as if a violet glow illuminated his path back through the forest.
Like the violet glow she’d seen during the library fire. She was seeing things. She steadied herself on the rock and looked away for a moment, rubbing her eyes. But when she looked back, it was just the same: In just one plane of her vision—as if she were looking through bi focals with a wild prescription—the live oaks, and the mulch beneath them, and even the songs of the birds in the branches—all of it seemed to wobble out of focus. And it didn’t just wobble, bathed