Page 64 of Creeping Beautiful

Inside our little house were dozens and dozens of mason jars filled with fireflies.

I gasped. And then laughed. And looked at him with so much love in my heart, I thought I might split in half.

“What did you do?”

“I made you a home,” he said, and his Louisiana accent drawled those words out just the way I liked them. So smooth. “Something childishly grown-up.”

I crawled across the platform and onto an old braided rug I knew came from the floor of his bedroom. And turned to face him.

He crawled up after me. Stalked across that floor on all fours with his blue eyes locked on mine. Until his hands were planted on either side of my shoulders and I could feel his stomach pressing and easing up along mine as he breathed.

He was grinning like a boy who was about to kiss his girl for the very first time.

We were so close. Just an inch or two apart when he stopped and just stared at me. And I stared back. His face was lit up with firefly glow, flickering shadows that softened him and made him deliciously hard in the same moment.

“I have one more thing for you,” he said.

I took another long breath, and let it out real slow. Because I knew he was gonna kiss me.

But he didn’t.

He backed up a little and reached over underneath a thick pile of the mosquito netting, and opened a cooler.

I giggled.

Because inside that cooler, tucked between millions of ice cubes, was a gallon of ice cream from the drug store. And he had waffle cones too. I leaned back on my hands, my stomach a mess of gorgeous misery from the anticipation of what was coming. I watched him scoop out the ice cream and fill up the cone and hand it to me. And when he did that again, to make himself a cone too, I memorized the muscles in his arms, and the curl of his blond hair along the top of his shoulders, and the way he kept stealing looks at me with those eyes that were the color of almonds in the shade.

Then he said, “Come on over here, Indie.”

And we scooted over to the edge of the platform and dangled our legs. The netting tickled my thighs as we gazed though it and watched the night as we licked our cones.

We talked. I told him about how I was in the ocean this time yesterday, sitting in a life raft.

He didn’t ask one question about that. Just smiled at me and told me how this time last night he was hanging the netting and bringing the rug up from his bedroom.

I forgot all about the kiss. I was that lost in him.

We licked our cones and laughed and joked. He sighed a lot. And so did I.

And right when I wasn’t expecting it, after our cones were all gone and we were settled and happy, he leaned over, looked at me as his fingertips brushed along the side of my cheek, and he said, “Close your eyes now, Indie. I would like to kiss you. And I want you to remember it in your mind’s eye when I do that.”

So I closed my eyes and almost lost my head in the two or three seconds it took for his mouth to touch mine.

At first it was a soft kiss. His lips were gentle and easy to kiss back. And then his mouth opened, and mine opened with it, and his tongue was cool and he tasted like mint chocolate chip.

We kissed for a long time. Just like that. Sitting side by side, with our bodies turned inward. One of his hands on my face and the other playing with my hair. My hands on his shoulder, drawing in his heat, and on his thigh. Poking my fingertip through the tattered hole in his jeans so I could feel his hidden skin.

Finally, we pulled back and smiled at each other.

And my life was perfect.

We stayed up there for hours just talking about things. What we would do tomorrow, and the next day. How we would spend the summer coming up here each night before bed. How he loved me and I loved him back.

And then McKay started calling my name from the house and we knew the night was over. Nathan said, “Now we have to let them go.”

And at first, I didn’t understand. But he picked a jar of fireflies and unscrewed the lid. Some of them were clinging to it and they flew off. But still stuck inside the netting. So they were fluttering and flittering around my head the way my stomach was fluttering and flittering when I climbed up here with Nate behind me, pressing his chest into my legs so I would know he would catch me if I fell.

We set them all free like that.