The kiss was like a smell of Christmas cookies that embalm the house, down to its dreariest corners, and make you forget about the rain.

All weekend, Sara slept with the crushed Snickers beneath her pillow, like a weird tooth fairy tradition.

"This is ridiculous," she said, as if maybe to hear the words would break the spell. "I'm being ridiculous."

But she couldn't help the joy that filled her at the sight of the gleaming plastic.

In moments such as these, it was hard to deny it.

I'm falling in love with Michael Scofield.

Head over heels.

Romeo and Juliet.

Well, she thought. Really, more like Ophelia and Hamlet.

The closer she got to Monday morning, the harder it got to conceal her excitement. Even her father got suspicious, half a frown above the screen of his phone. No teenager is that excited to go back to school.

"Everything all right, Sara?"

"What? Yes."

Frank squinted at her. Before she could help herself, she was babbling—exactly when did she become such a lousy liar?

"Just excited about rehearsal. You know, the play. Hamlet."

"Oh, yes. I'm very eager to watch you perform."

Sara did not let that throw her off. She had been cast in school plays since she was a little girl, and so far, Frank had promised to attend all her shows, and made it to a grand total of zero.

His thumb twitched over his phone—she could tell he wanted to go back to scheduling a meeting or whatever else he was doing. Before phones made it possible for Frank to bring his work home, it used to be files, stacks of papers that Frank never forgot to take with him at the dinner table. How Sara used to hate those. Felt more alone with her father than she did by herself, reading a book or doing homework.

Now, though, she could really use the invisibility cloak that had kept her father from noticing her throughout her childhood.

But Frank did not go back to his phone. His eyes appraised her, for a long time, as if Sara had turned from a little girl to a seventeen-year-old sometime since he had last looked up.

"Is there anything you want to tell me?"

Sara's jaw loosened at his honesty. Forthrightness was not the Tancredi MO. Passive aggressive, ignoring the elephant in the room—sure.

But not this.

She was so disarmed and startled that the words almost came out.

I met someone, I'm in love, all the songs make sense now.

"No," she managed.

Before she had time to regret it—not seizing that window to bridge the gap between them, to grab the thin rope he had tossed at her in the abyss where affection should be—Frank nodded his head. There was such a look of relief on his face, as he started typing on his phone, that Sara didn't know whether to feel happy or sad that she had turned invisible again.

…

By the time she got to school, her excitement had turned solid, a huge ball of nerves that made her bounce instead of walk, and brought her heartrate to a fever pitch. Her first class was history.

At this point, she couldn't even say why she needed to see Michael so much. Couldn't make sense of the fact that looking at him sounded like an activity, ten times as interesting as school usually was. I'm not going to moon over him while we're in class. Sara was never that girl, one day in her life. Yet she was mooning over him right now. Had mooned over him all night.

All she knew was, the sight of him would appease her, as it always did.

When she got carried away in a rehearsal, when nervousness threatened to shake her voice. Michael's eyes—so quiet—would ease her back to solid ground, like a safety net all made of gemstones.

She trotted through the halls, forbade her feet to break into a run. Then froze dead in her tracks as she entered the classroom.

Michael was there, all right.

He sat at the table they shared, eyes toward the ground.

She wasn't sure what about him struck her. What smashed it into her that his weekend had been very different from hers. Every line on his face looked cut out of iron. The slant of his hands, joint on the table, the angles of his cheekbone and jaw and the curve of his scalp, bent in a downward slope. She could make him out, but not see him.

Something was wrong.

She knew, immediately.

It wasn't any rational thing. Like, why wasn't he compulsively checking the door to see if she'd come in? Why hadn't he waited for her outside the classroom so they could touch, finally, so she could wrap him into her arms and breathe in the raw-Michael smell of his body?

"Uh, scuse me?"

Sara realized she'd frozen dead in her tracks. Halfway through the door, one foot into the classroom, one foot out.

Now she'd torn her eyes off Michael, she could see Gretchen and the girls, in their usual seats, smiles cutting into their cheeks.

Professor Pierce was looking at her, too.

"Getting used to the stage, Little Miss Actress?" Gretchen said, in that voice she used for mockery. Always on the safe edge of cruelty, because the best mean girls never sounded mean. "You miss being the center of attention already?"

Sara's face felt hot enough to fry eggs on.

Professor Pierce cleared his throat, not unkindly. "Why don't you sit down, Miss Tancredi?"

"Sorry," she said, and etched toward her seat. Her heart still hammered against her ribcage, but now, it pulsed through an ocean of warm clay, everything soft and murky and pointless.

Michael still hadn't looked at her.

The past forty-eight hours swam up her throat, a taste of bile and anger.

I don't do that, Michael. I don't spend a whole weekend thinking about a boy. I don't stay up all night because I kissed someone and my whole body feels like it's been touched by a star.

She dropped on the seat, next to him.

What else could she do? The whole class was staring at her.

His proximity made every nerve-end in her tingle with want. Oh God. Suddenly, she was lying in bed again, eyes wide open. The kiss had been worse than if she'd drank an ocean full of coffee. Thinking about his face, his beautiful neck, the way his eyelashes brushed against her cheek when she held his face in her hands.

The past two days had felt long enough to kill her.

Not being able to text him, to talk to him, to see him except behind her closed lids.

And this whole time, he'd been alone, in his apartment, wishing he could take it back. It was plain from how he avoided her eyes. He wished it all back.

A ball of shame crawled down her throat.

Idiot.

Yet she couldn't help looking at him. Professor Pierce started the class. They'd moved on to the Salem witch trials. Sara didn't catch a word of it.

Michael hadn't even opened his notebook or taken out a pen.

His silence, the coldness of his whole behavior hurt. But he was hurting, too. She could tell, from how he had shut her out—from how he had metamorphosed since the kiss. From fire to ice.

No. He's always been ice. Even when he's Hamlet, and he speaks the line in half-crazed grief, 'I loved Ophelia'. Ice. There is no room for fire in the deserts of his eyes.

"Michael?" she whispered, with her lips only.

Under the table, she moved her hand closer to his. Inch by inch. So he'd see her coming. The fear of rejection swelled up her chest. If he jerked away from her, or pushed her hand off, she didn't know what she'd do.

But his pain hurt too much, like a bone jutting out of her own flesh.

He didn't move.

The rough fabric of his jacket brushed against her fingertips.

"Professor."

She started at the sound of Gretchen's voice.

"Yes, Miss Morgan?"

"I've just got to say, I know it's like, the popular thing nowadays to really feel for the so-called witches of Salem. Of course," Gretchen drawled. "These girls didn't deserve to die or anything."

Sara shuddered. She could picture Gretchen's ravenous grin, glistening with lip-gloss.

"Still, I don't think we're looking at the whole picture."

Professor Pierce exhaled, patiently. "What do you have in mind?"

"Well, for starters, no one talks about how these girls who got killed were, like, attention-seekers."

Lisa and Nika chuckled. They hung out with Gretchen enough to know, as Sara did, that if she hadn't been in front of a teacher, "seekers" is not the word she would have used.

"I mean, all those fits of hysterics, all that gossiping about so and so? Sure, it was mean White patriarchs who burned the witches. But there wouldn't have been any burning if us girls hadn't turned and told on each other. Right? If we hadn't behaved like attention-craving lunatics, if we'd just had each other's backs, no one would have dragged us on a pyre."

"Where are you getting at, Miss Morgan?"

Sara swallowed.

Don't look at her.

She could feel Gretchen's eyes, bubbly-blue, ice-cold, drilling into her back.

"Well, just that we shouldn't forget whatever men will do to women they can't control—it's not as bad as what women will do to other women. If they betray us. Isn't that worth its place in history books?"

A pinched expression on Professor Pierce. "That's an interesting theory."

"I'm glad you think so."

Sara realized her hand had fallen away from Michael. For what remained of the hour, she didn't dare move. When the bell rang, he bolted to his feet. His speed surprised her. He had been sitting so much like a statue, she almost forgot he could move.

She went after him, shouldering through crowded halls. "Michael!"

He didn't turn, but froze on his way out the door. They'd reached the short-cut toward gym class, a corridor nobody used because of the weird smell. For some reason, blame it on the paint, the rot in the walls or whatever, but this place always smelled like something burning.

"Would you look at me for God's sake?"

Sara didn't know she was angry until the words passed her lips. Her hands were fists, pressing into the pockets of her jeans.

Michael stood still, for a moment, then pivoted, so stiff she didn't quite know how he was moving.

The force of his gaze knocked the breath out of her. The first science textbook she opened had this picture in it of the milky way. Sara remembered thinking nothing could be more beautiful. Spirals of shimmering pink and white and blue that made you feel like a speck of dust. Not insignificant, the way God made her feel, the few times she tried to believe in him. But lost into the infinite significance of everything.

As Michael turned to face her, his eyes were two pieces of black space, and she was thrown into gravity, a tiny piece of meteor orbiting around the sun.

"Do you hate me or something?" she said.

He seemed not to hear her. Now that he was looking at her, she could see every inch of him was concentrated on—what? She didn't know exactly. But he was focused, deeply focused on keeping it together, and perhaps he couldn't be bothered to answer her.

Well, fuck that.

"I asked you a question, Michael."

Silence. Every second that he didn't speak was a whip slashing down the raw flesh of her heart. Beating in the palm of his hands. Ever since the kiss.

She thought of the chocolate bar tucked under her pillow and she wanted to die.

How could I be so wrong?

The butterfly feel of his lips on her lips. His nose against her cheek. The rasp of his stubble when she reached for the back of his head.

The way she felt when she opened the first page of a book. You never know when it's going to be that good, that it'll suck you in so you can't put it down, that all you'll do is read for the next three days, until you've binged it to the last page. That's what kissing Michael felt like. Only so much better. The instant she felt the wetness of his mouth on hers, she felt it. A whole universe waiting inside Michael, a world she was just discovering and yet, that she knew by heart, that she just knew she could make her way around blindfolded, hands tied.

She had felt a connection with Michael, much sooner than that.

But in that kiss, in that world, she knew that they could drop the masks. That they could be each other, put down the roles of Hamlet and Ophelia.

"I don't—I don't hate you, Sara."

She sucked in her bottom lip until blood filled her mouth.

After what they shared, after she felt he had opened up a whole uncharted galaxy before her eyes—that's all he had to say to her?

"I'm not—I don't think I can do this."

"Right."

"Kiss you."

She laughed. It took her by surprise. Frightened her. Sara didn't usually deal in anger. When she was upset, she forced herself to calm down, waited for it to pass. Her mother taught her that.

Whatever battle raged inside Michael still seemed to take up much of his focus.

"You know what?" she said. "I think that's pretty fucking unfair."

He blinked. Not at the swear word, probably, so much as the crack in her voice.

"You know I had a life before you showed up, right? It may not have involved boys all that much. But it was fine. Then you—you just come smashing into it, out of the blue. You stare at me, and you talk to me, and you're you. You say things like your hair smells like cherry blossoms, and you make it so easy to have feelings for you, and then you just—you disappear behind a fucking wall, and I can't get through. You won't let me through, Michael. What's wrong with you? Who do you think you are that you come tossing rocks at my window in the middle of the night and kiss me and just cut me off like this? Oh God."

She caught her breath.

The torrent of words wanted to keep going, and there were awful things in there. When she stopped thinking for a second she'd want to disappear into a hole for letting it all out.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Michael, I know this is hard for you. I know you lost your parents. But I lost a parent, too. I don't—God. Just… Do you ever think for a second of what you do to me? What this—does to me?"

He watched her. Quiet as a picture.

No one in the whole world, never mind a teenager boy, should be this quiet.

"No," he said.

There was no shame in his voice, yet she heard how shaken he was. How serious.

"You're right. Somehow, I—I never really think about anyone but myself."

She squashed the need to play the nice girl, to stop him in his stride. The way he said it was so real.

He shook his head. "I mean, I think about you. All the time. I just—I think about how you make me feel, and how great you are. I think about what you smell like when you hold me. I think about how scared I get when you—when you say you love me. And since we kissed, I haven't been able to sleep. I've been thinking of my mom. The last thing she told me. Of how safe I felt, before the accident, how I never questioned her love was forever and I belonged in the world, and home existed. But—"

His eyes darkened.

"Then it all burst into pieces. All the love I knew in the world was just snatched away. Lincoln hated me, and I got by, alone. I learned to be alone, Sara. And I never unlearned that, I suppose. Ever since, I—I looked after myself. Only myself."

She licked her lips. "Then, you're not angry?"

"At you? Why?"

"Uh—for calling you a selfish bastard?"

"You didn't phrase it like that." He pondered. "But I suppose I am selfish."

Graveness returned to his eyes, and she held back from touching him. She wanted to steer him away from the hell he had been stuck in this weekend. Whatever dark waters he had waded in, alone—always alone—she wanted to hoist him back to the surface. To her.

Maybe she'd be selfish, too, if she'd had no one to take care of her. No one but books. No one to put clothes on her back or food in her plate, to give her all the things she took for granted.

Yet she had had no one to really love, too. She knew how the absence of love felt crippling, how sometimes you just wanted to scream, and let the avalanche of love pour out of you, because if you kept it inside, you felt it was just going to rot and poison you.

"Please," she said. "Tell me the truth."

"I always do."

"Then talk to me."

He looked into her eyes. "I'm so afraid."

"To lose me?"

"To love you."

She took a step back. Breathless, like he had just speared a sword through her chest.

"To belong again. To rebuild that sense of safety and happiness. To have it again, and feel it's not just me against the world. To care."

He laughed. It sounded surreal, like something breaking, like something broken. She had never heard him laugh like this.

"God, I am selfish. Do you know I almost left town?"

An egg all made of liquid ice cracked over her scalp. "What?"

"I thought I'd leave this place, and be alone again. That you'd be safer like this." He shook his head. "But that's a lie. I'd be safer. I'd be safer if I didn't have to rebuild all those things that died in the car with my parents. I'd be safer if I could be by myself, and not love you, and not feel like a bone had snapped inside me when you leave the room. I'd be so much safer, Sara."

Though her mouth was open, no words would come out.

You almost left town?

She planned on saying that, and wanted to toss something at him, for the way he'd said it. Like it was nothing. While she obsessing over his beautiful face, his beautiful hands, his beautiful neck, all weekend, he had been ready to dump her, without a word of goodbye?

But really, she was very much stuck on the love part.

"You're right," he said again. "I've been acting like this is all about me. Like I'm the hero of my own tragedy, and you're Ophelia—but you're not. I don't get to just live in my brooding thoughts and leave you like Hamlet does, because he's all caught up in the death of his father."

"I—"

He took her hand.

Her heart plummeted down her stomach.

"Let's build it."

"What?"

"The world," he said. "It's all made of glass, and fragile, and exposed to bad weather. It's the stupidest thing in the world, like growing a limb that anyone can take a hammer to and destroy. Let's do it anyway. What if Hamlet and Ophelia had said to hell with tragedy, to hell with revenge and madness? What if they'd just eloped together and lived?"

"That would have made for terrible writing."

"Terrible," he said. "Let's do it."

She eyed him. Though he sounded cool, there was a kind of excitement in his eyes she'd never seen. Not even when she kissed him.

"Are you still afraid?"

"Terrified."

"What's changed?"

"Nothing."

"Is it—" she paused. "Is it because I said you were selfish? Are you just trying to do this for me?"

"No. No, I do plan on doing a lot of things for you, and make room for you into every choice. But right now it's still very much a selfish motivation. This is what I want. You. You're what I want, Sara."

He tightened his palm around hers.

"I want to run. I want the safety of not caring about anyone in the world. But I want you so much more. Let's just be together, and not let anything get in the way. If that's what you want."

She grabbed his face and put his mouth on hers.

A million lightyears away, the school bell rang. She kissed him and saw stars, planets aligning, as they both floated down the milky way.

…

End Notes: I know it's been a long time, but I've been in such a dark writing mood this summer, "Anything" and "Kidnapped" were all I could go for. I'm really getting back into this fic though. Please share your thoughts in the comment section!