Lips Touch: Three Times Read Online Free PDF Page B

her hair, and tied, untied, and retied the
green scarf, deciding at last to go ahead and wear it. She pulled on a pair of
jeans and a sweater and slid her grandmother's stiletto into her back pocket.
She had a cup of coffee and a cigarette, brushed her teeth three times to scour
away any yellow flavor, put on lipstick and then wiped it off, hopeful of
kissing and scowling at her own absurd hope, and she almost left the house. But
at the last minute she pulled off her clothes and stepped into a vintage dress
she'd bought at the thrift store and never worn. It was made of apple-green
kimono silk in a rippling pattern, with a mandarin collar and a row of big
black buttons all the way down the front. She stood in front of the mirror for
a minute, watching the way the silk slipped and shone when she moved her hips,
then she pulled on black boots and hurried out the door.
    Jack Husk was waiting for her in front of the Christmas tree farm,
and he whistled low when he saw her. "Great dress," he said, his eyes
sliding all the way down the row of buttons.
    "Thanks," Kizzy said, blushing just as deeply as she had
the day before, at school. She'd have to get used to him all over again, taking
small sips of his beauty as if it was too hot a drink to swallow all at once.
One shy glance revealed to her that Jack Husk wasn't
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    carrying his new school books but a picnic basket. "What's
that?" she asked.
    He held it up and smiled, mischievous as an imp. "Breakfast
picnic," he said. There was a checked blanket folded carelessly under the
basket's handles. "Care to join me?"
    "What, now! What about school?"
    Jack Husk shrugged. "I'm not such a huge fan."
    "Yeah, me either."
    "Good. Then you'll come with me." He held out his arm
for her in an old-fashioned, courtly gesture, and there was no question in
Kizzy's mind how she would be spending her morning. She hooked her arm through
Jack Husk's, laying her fingers lightly on the velvet nap of his sleeve, and
walked beside him, noticing as she turned that the old man's dog was not in his
place on the porch.
    "Everything go okay with the dog yesterday?" she asked.
    "Sure," he answered. "No problem. So, is there a
park around here somewhere?"
    Kizzy shook her head. "Just the cemetery."
    "Oh, well, that'll work. Yeah?"
    It was just ahead, behind a neat fence. Kizzy walked past it every
day, but she hadn't been in it for years, not since she was a child and snuck
there to listen to the snatches of ghost conversation that blew in on an icy
wind from the next world. It wasn't a Gothic cemetery; there were no mossy
angels weeping miraculous tears of blood, no crypts or curses or crumble. No
poets or courtesans were buried here; no vampires slumbered belowground. It was
only a collection of stone rectangles standing straight and ordinary. Even the
dead loitering here spoke of dull things, like the one who worried she'd left
the stove burning when she died.
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    But it didn't have to be some fabulous Parisian cemetery for the
idea of a picnic in it to bloom in Kizzy's imagination into something daring.
She imagined herself telling Evie and Cactus. A breakfast picnic in the cemetery with Jack Husk! Their eyes would bulge with glee and envy and they'd
want to know everything. They'd want to know if he'd kissed her. She stole a
glance at him and caught him looking at her lips, and she looked away, blushing
hotly, and found the voice to say, "Yeah, okay," in what she hoped
was a casual way.
    They went through the cemetery gate, arm in arm in their antique
clothing, and it was then that the ghosts, all of a sudden and with only a
flitter of grass blades for a warning, hit Kizzy like a maelstrom.
    Her skirt flared and twisted itself tight to her legs as a rush of
cold wind swept around her. It circled deasil, thrice, just like her
grandmother's ghost had done the day of her burial. But Kizzy felt a whole
swelling of ghosts around her this time, a tide; her grandmother might have
been there, but she wasn't alone.