Page 74 of Losing Wendy
CHAPTER 29
The wind whirls through my hair, whipping it into my face as Peter launches us skyward. The stars are out tonight, painting streaks of light across the sky as we race toward them. It’s stunning up here, and exhilaration fills my chest, opening my lungs from their usual constricted position as we soar up and up and up.
We’re so high now. High above the troubles and fears and aches and pains that compel me on the ground below. If I peer hard enough, I can see the speckles of light glowing from the reaping tree. Can see the stretch of sand where I pound my feet into the ground to stomp out the pain.
Peter tightens his powerful arms around me, and we leave them all behind, until they’re fading speckles on the shore. Just as small and indistinguishable as one grain of sand from the next.
Light streaks around us, the colors of the painted night sky filling my head, my eyes, my chest, my everything, until Peter and I swim in a world of color, one that’s only our own.
This is his world, I realize. The world above the ground, the world of escape and joy and bliss and…
And laughter.
That’s the sound coming from my lips. Free and joyous andbursting from my lungs that have held it captive for so long. I’m laughing, and the sound is so unfamiliar to me, it’s like hearing music for the first time. The plucking of a harp string to a soul that’s never tasted the depths of its tremors.
I’m laughing, and the sky is swarming with color.
I’m soaring.
Rather, Peter is soaring, and he’s taking me with him, allowing me to taste the chill of the air as it whips against my face. It’s not that I haven’t flown in his arms before. But the night he stole me away from the clock tower, I’d just witnessed my parents’ deaths.
No.
I won’t think about them now.
Not when, for the first time since my mother told me my body belonged to the shadows, my lungs swell to their capacity. No weight bears against my chest, squeezing me until I can’t get a full breath of air.
Up here, my feet don’t touch the ground, and there’s a weightlessness to me that’s intoxicating.
There’s something about Peter that’s intoxicating, too.
I’d forgotten when I grabbed his hand the effect his fae glamour has upon me. The way it seeps into my veins like brandy into the bloodstream, filling me with a buzzing, limitless warmth.
I’d forgotten, but I’m glad I forgot.
Because once, just this once, I want to let myself feel this. I want to drink up the blissful attraction that is Peter and not deprive myself of the intoxicating sensation just because I’m afraid.
“You’re beautiful, Wendy Darling,” says Peter, whispering something wonderful into my ear, his cheek grazing mine as he does, undeterred by the Mark against my skin.
“You can hardly see me the way I’m turned away from you,” I whisper back.
“I don’t have to see you. I feel you.”
I laugh, this time nervously. “That’s hardly the same thing.”
“I’m not talking about this,” he says, stroking my belly where he has a firm grip on me. “Or this,” he says, burrowing his face into myneck so that his lips almost graze my skin. “I’m talking about you. About the aura you’re putting off.”
“Humans don’t have auras.”
“Not the boring ones,” he says, gently amused. “You, though—you’ve got that little bit left in you.”
“Perhaps it’s from communing with the shadows,” I say.
“Perhaps.”
I’d say I want to drown in how it feels to be tucked into Peter’s chest, to stare down at the ground far below us and feel my toes tingle with that pleasant numbness. Like my feet have fallen asleep, but without the pain.
There was a time in my life where I’d have let myself drown in a sensation like this.