Disclaimer: Still not mine.
BAZ
Snow is kissing me. Everything is on fire and the world is ending and Simon Snow is bloody kissing me and maybe I don't need to die anymore. His lips are warm—nothing to the heat all around me, the fire's hot roar of breath, but warm—and they feel better than I ever imagined them feeling and he tastes like sugar and butter and Simon Snow is bloody kissing me Aleister almighty.
We put out the fire and my momentary madness with it, and then Snow bloody finds me a deer. When I make it back to the car, my joke about performing an evil ritual falls flat, and all I can think of when Snow doesn't laugh is sin. Which part does Snow think might have been Satanic? The kissing? The helping me feed? The gay part? The vampire part? Which part of me is he now rejecting? Does he feel dirty, wrong? Is it my fault? Does he wish he could undo what we just did? Does he feel like he hardly knows himself anymore? (I feel like I hardly know myself anymore. My mother died killing vampires—and I just had my first kiss.)
For all that in some ways we barely know each other at all (is he gay?), in some ways we know each other better than anyone. So he sees through my attempts at banter, sees how fast my mind is working and how much self-loathing there is beneath the surface, and says, "Don't."
"What?" I ask.
"Think. Whatever you're thinking. Stop."
And I start to unwind, start to relax, just a little, and let myself be with him. Be with the boy I've wanted to be with for nearly my entire adolescence.
We make it to the house, and I get us some food, because I know it's possible to prolong any encounter with Snow if you offer him food, and I never want this to end. We talk and we laugh and it feels almost normal, like we could be friends or something, and it's the most magical thing I've ever experienced in my whole life, even more so than the first kiss, because there's something pure about this. There's no desperation. I don't have to wonder if he's just doing this to save my life. Either of us could terminate the encounter. And neither of us does.
I don't bank on him wanting to kiss me again. That would be too much to ask. But somehow he does, and his mouth is on mine, and I don't know if this is earth or heaven, sin or salvation, or if any of that is even real. He got rid of his cross, which means . . . something. Maybe it means that he's not judging me as evil anymore. That would be nice.
We kiss and we kiss and we kiss, until dawn starts peeping through the curtains, and then he falls asleep in my arms, which is madness even beyond what's normal for him, and oh is it ever magical.
