Lips Touch: Three Times Read Online Free PDF Page A

tufts. Anyone else
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    might have looked silly, but he looked like he was posing for one
of those fashion spreads in Rolling Stone magazine where bored,
beautiful people loll around like they're waiting for the bus in Purgatory,
usually with some nipple showing. "Well," he said, "I'd better
deal with him."
    "What are you going to do?"
    "Honestly? Give him a wide berth and slip around the back.
But I'll wait until you're gone so you can't see me scramble if he comes after
me."
    Kizzy laughed. "Maybe I'd better watch, you know, just in
case."
    Smiling the crooked smile, he said, "No. Go. Please. It's
unspeakably uncool to be seen dodging fat dogs."
    "Okay, then. See you around, Jack Husk. Be careful."
    "See you in the morning, Kizzy," he said, and Kizzy
felt, for an instant, as if her blood fizzed inside her like champagne.
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    Three Ripe as a Plum
    After dinner had been cooked and eaten -- scorn and all -- Kizzy
went to her room and closed the door. She sat on the end of her bed and looked
at herself in the mirror. Really
    looked. She was still wearing the green scarf, and
though her hair billowed out at the nape of her neck, wild and coarse as always,
it was captured flat around her face and hidden, not springing up in its usual
topiary way. The effect was to bring her face into focus, and Kizzy stared at
it for minutes, getting the feeling that something had happened to her since
the last time she had looked at herself, if indeed she ever really had.
    She saw proud cheekbones beginning to rise out of the thick husk
of adolescence. She saw a coy curl in the corners of her lips, lips that had practically touched Jack Husk's lips. Staring at her face, she began to fancy her outer
layer had begun to melt away while she wasn't paying attention, and something
-- some new skeleton -- was emerging from beneath the softness of her
accustomed self. With a deep, visceral ache, she wished her true form might prove
to be a sleek and shining one, like a stiletto blade slicing free of an
ungainly sheath. Like a bird of prey losing its hatchling fluff to hunt in
cold, magnificent skies. That she might become something glittering, something
startling, something dangerous.
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    Kizzy wanted to be a woman who would dive off the prow of a
sailboat into the sea, who would fall back in a tangle of sheets, laughing, and
who could dance a tango, lazily stroke a leopard with her bare foot, freeze an
enemy's blood with her eyes, make promises she couldn't possibly keep, and then
shift the world to keep them. She wanted to write memoirs and autograph them at
a tiny bookshop in Rome, with a line of admirers snaking down a pink-lit alley.
She wanted to make love on a balcony, ruin someone, trade in esoteric
knowledge, watch strangers as coolly as a cat. She wanted to be inscrutable,
have a drink named after her, a love song written for her, and a handsome
adventurer's small airplane, champagne-christened Kizzy, which would
vanish one day in a windstorm in Arabia so that she would have to mount a
rescue operation involving camels, and wear an indigo veil against the stinging
sand, just like the nomads.
    Kizzy wanted.
    She pushed back her shoulders from her usual sullen slouch and
made an effort to sit up straight. It felt unnatural; her sinews resisted. She
had a sudden terrifying thought that if she had waited, if she had gone on as
she was, her poor posture might have calcified like that. She might have
hardened into a slumped carapace of a person who would never, could never, throw
back her shoulders, walk tall, taunt vampires with her white throat, toss her
head in joy or disdain. She would have curled over herself like a toenail left
too long untrimmed. She flushed now, looking at her reflection, shoulders low
and calm, neck elongated, almost elegant, light moving over her green silk
scarf like a river, and she felt a sense of narrow escape in the ache of this
new posture. As if she could still become someone else.
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    Maybe Jack Husk had already