Chapter 5: Rule Four

The boathouse smelled of cedar and gasoline and old canvas.

Henrik sat me on an overturned canoe, flipped on one bare bulb, and knelt in front of me with a white plastic box.

"Hold still."

"I am holding still."

"You're vibrating."

He tore open an alcohol pad with his teeth.

The first touch stung so badly that I hissed and grabbed his shoulder.

"Sorry," he said, and he didn't sound sorry at all.

He cleaned the cut with small careful dabs, his face a few inches from mine.

I could see the scar through his eyebrow and a fleck of gold in one green eye.

I could see how his mouth was set when he was concentrating.

I had memorized that mouth when I was nineteen, and it had never once gone out of date.

"You didn't have to do all that on the ice," I said.

"Do what?"

"Stand between us."

"Yes, I did."

He pressed a butterfly bandage to my lip and held it there with his thumb.

"She hit you, Bee."

"I'd have hit her back."

"I know you would have."

His thumb didn't leave my mouth.

The boathouse got very quiet, only the wind outside and the ice ticking against the dock.

His eyes dropped to my lips and stayed there.

My heart was doing something athletic.

"Rule two," I said, hoarse.

"Nobody's watching."

"Then rule two doesn't apply."

"Henrik."

"Tell me to stop," he said.

I grabbed the front of his quarter-zip and pulled him up into me.

The kiss wasn't gentle.

It tasted of blood and mint and five years.

His hand fisted in the back of my hoodie.

I wrapped my legs around his waist.

He made a low rough sound against my mouth that I felt in my knees.

He lifted me by the thighs and backed me against the wall, and a paddle fell over somewhere.

His mouth was on my jaw, my throat, the spot under my ear.

My hands were up under his shirt, and his skin was hot, and every muscle I touched was harder than I remembered.

"Astrid," he said into my neck.

"Say it again."

"Astrid."

"Astrid? Henrik?"

We froze.

Elsa's voice came across the snow, bright and wobbling.

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