Page 130 of A Dead Girl's Guide to Living
But now there was. And I was here—on some wild, halfway-across-the-country haunted road trip with Dove. Magnetic, free, captivating Dove, who kissed me last night like she’d done it a million times before, who moved with a confidence that said she was familiar with discovering another person’s body, and who looked at me like she could see all of me at once.
And I was—I was this clumsy mess of inexperience and nerves. I felt stupid. Virginal. Suddenly so far out of my league that I stopped walking entirely.
As if in sync with my steps, Dove twirled around and paused. Liv kept going, lost in her own world.
“You okay?” Dove asked, walking the few steps between us and stopping in front of me. A light sheen of sweat covered her forehead, and a few strands of hair were stuck to her skin.
I nodded—too quickly. “Yeah. Totally.”
Dove smiled at me, her brown eyes bearing heavily into mine. “Bad liar, Ellis Langley.”
I bit my lip and turned my gaze out over the valley, suddenly feeling so young and naïve. So new. So far behind on life. Once again, I was alarmingly reminded that my first judgment of Dove had been so wrong it was almost laughable by now.
I’d thought so much of myself when I’d compared us, and had been forced to eat my own humble pie regularly.
“You kind of glow in the sun, you know,” Dove murmured.
I turned back to her just in time to feel her brush a piece of hair from my cheek, tucking it behind my ear. The contact sent shivers of delight down my spine, her fingers soft and warm against my temple.
“I noticed it back at the car museum,” she added. “At first, I was annoyed at how effortlessly good you looked all the time.”
My breath caught, and a surprised laugh escaped me as I looked into her eyes. “Effortlessly good?”
“Oh yeah,” she said softly, that dazzling grin on her face as she toyed with the hem of my T-shirt. The space between us was nearly nonexistent now.
I swallowed.
She gave my shirt a gentle tug, and I moved forward willingly, shelving all the fears that had been swirling in my mind. When her lips met mine in a soft, tentative kiss, something inside me steadied. Her lips tasted like sun and salt, and the fingers that had been toying with my shirt brushed lightly against the skin of my waist.
Jesus, I liked kissing Dove Marley.
When she pulled back, she smiled, that mischievous glint shining in her eyes with something softer lingering behind it.
“That was to give you a break from whatever mental crisis you were going through,” she murmured, tapping me lightly on the nose.
A choked laugh escaped me, and the tension that had been clinging by a thread in my chest finally evaporated as I searched her eyes.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
She shot me a wink and took my hand, giving it a gentle tug. “Anytime.”
We walked hand in hand, and soon we spotted Liv up ahead, paused in front of some drawings, standing still. As we neared her, Dove gestured with her free hand to a marking.
“Okay, that one totally looks like a uterus,” she said. “Do you think people mapped their cycles?”
I snorted a laugh, and Liv cracked half a smile.
“I wonder if they knew how long these would be here,” I murmured, tugging out my phone and preparing to capturesome content. Dove let go of my hand, and it immediately felt cooler—more bare—as she did.
“Do you think they knew that hundreds of years later, people would still be looking at their drawings?”
Dove adjusted her sunglasses. “No idea,” she murmured. “Maybe it didn’t matter, though, really. Maybe they just wanted to leave a mark. Have evidence that they were here, that they existed.”
“That’s all humans ever really do, isn’t it?” Liv murmured, still not looking at us as her eyes traced the carvings. “We try not to disappear. Ever.”
There was something in her tone that pulled me up short. It was absent and unguarded—none of her usual flippant or sarcastic energy anywhere.
“Even after we die, we get buried and have a giant-ass stone saying we were here,” she continued. “Or plaques. Memorials. We have this irrational fear of being forgotten, like it matters anyway. Why does being remembered matter so much when we’re not even here?”
