I didn’t stop touching my lips the entire day. When I went home and ate dinner at the table, my parents found me staring off into nothing as my smile broke free and my nails traced all the places he’d been. I could still feel him there. I could still feel him all around me, encasing me in our own little bubble of Alex and Natalie. It was almost as though we hadn’t been interrupted by one of our teachers and told to make our way home.

We’d walked to the bus shelter in an awkward silence, but I hadn’t missed the way he kept glancing at me and offering me a comforting smile. I was doing the exact same thing to him, too.

There were so many questions I wanted to ask. Who was that man? Did he hurt him often? Had he enjoyed our kiss anywhere near as much as I had? And more importantly, would we be doing it again any time soon?

I hoped so. I really did. After spending so long wandering down a path where I hadn’t really felt much of anything at all, I suddenly felt everything slamming into me at once. All my senses had been forced awake and now, after their long hibernation and reluctance to resurface, they were sharper than ever before. I could hear his voice whispering in my ear, feel his breath washing over my face, smell his skin, taste his kiss, and retrace every touch he’d left behind on my lips.

I couldn’t stop smiling.

“I recognise that look.” My mother’s voice drifted over to me from across the table, and it was only when I blinked in surprise and glanced around that I realised my father had left us alone in the room.

Despite the heartache she endured daily, my mum was one of the most beautiful women in the world. Rosanne Vincent’s sparkling blue eyes complimented her strawberry blonde hair perfectly, and she had an elegance about her that was more common amongst the women of the 1950s. When she passed through a room, everyone stopped what they were doing to stare, either in awe or in envy. She never demanded an ounce of attention; it just always happened to fall her at her feet whether she liked it or not.

As she rested her elbows on the table in front of me, her head tilting to one side, I tried not to think about how much Elizabeth had looked like her. My mum was her own person, just like I was and just like Dad was. I had to keep reminding myself to see them instead of my sister.

“Hey, Mum.” I smiled softly, dropping my hand away from my mouth to let it rest in my lap.

“Where have you been?”

“Today?”

“Just now,” she said softly, leaning even closer and dropping her voice as though she were about to tell me a beautiful little secret. “Or would you rather your prying mother not ask you such personal questions?”

I smiled brighter, unable to stop myself as Alex’s face flashed through my mind.

“Nowhere really. I was just thinking.”

“I could see that. I could see they were nice thoughts, as well.”

My fingers twitched to reach up to my lips again, but I somehow kept them from doing so. “I’ve had worse, I guess.”

She laughed softly, pushing herself up from her seat before moving around the table and whispering in my ear. “I like seeing you that way. It’s been too long. Whoever it is that’s giving you those nice thoughts, enjoy them. It’s your time now.”

Placing a soft kiss to the top of my head, she smiled against me, and her squeeze of my shoulders and a whispered goodbye had my heart pounding harder in my chest. There’d been so much time to reflect upon life in this house recently. It was as though we’d managed to create our very own language of silence, where remaining quiet was somehow more understood than any poem or verse we could have spoken or written.

I wanted to follow her and ask her how she felt the first time she’d ever been kissed by a boy. I wanted to chase her, grab her hand, spin her around and show her my brightest smile, filled with happiness, excitement, curiosity and nerves, but I couldn’t. I shouldn’t. I wouldn’t in this house. Not even on the brightest days, when the sun was shining through the windows and I could practically feel Elizabeth’s ghost shaking the guilt out of me, could I let go. It was better for me to keep my emotions under control.

I went about my evening chores with the same smile on my face the whole night through. I folded laundry, completed homework, washed the dishes, even offered to help my father clear out the grass cuttings he kept stored in the garage, but no matter how busy I kept myself, not once did the tingling on my lips fade.

It was only when I lay my head on my pillow and allowed my eyes to close on the day's events that the small thread of guilt that had my heart in its grip began to remind me it was there. It started slowly at first, like a wave of something loose around the edges of my calm. A gentle tickle against my skin. A niggle. An itch. A slow shiver up the length of my spine. The speeding up of the blood running through my veins. The quiet pounding in my chest that grew louder and louder and louder, until my eyes flew open all at once and my hand gripped the bed sheet desperately as all the memories of April 15th came flooding back.

Tomorrow.

She would have been gone a year tomorrow, and not even the most beautiful kiss from the most beautiful boy could ever have eclipsed the grief that suddenly began to make me feel like I was drowning in an ocean of agonising, paralysing despair.

Good God, I missed her.

Unsurprisingly, I opened up my curtains the next morning to a world filled with glorious sunshine. As if Lizzy would have had it any other way.

I’d expected to wake up in pain, but it ended up being even worse than that. I woke feeling nothing. Nothing at all. Not even a tinge of sorrow tainted my mood. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t sad. I was… numb – just not numb enough to be able to put on a smile for the rest of the world.

I dressed in some old jeans and a purple vest top, and left my hair to fall over my shoulders in any way it pleased. I had no desire to look in the mirror. Vanity hadn’t seemed important for such a long time now.

My parents embraced me with their knowing silence as I left the house to go to school that morning. A gentle kiss here, a soft sigh of sadness there. It was like we were all waiting for her to walk back through the door after a year-long trip around the world, only we knew that the waiting would never deliver what we wanted the most.

When I stepped out into the streets of Calverley and began to make my way towards the bus shelter, something felt different… off. Something hung in the air like a predator waiting to pounce, causing all the hairs on my arms to stand to attention. I didn’t have too long to worry about it, though. It would sound awfully cliché for me to say I felt him before I saw him, but it was the truth. The minute he slipped his hand into mine and squeezed it tightly as he fell in line beside me, I was suddenly safe again.

Alex didn’t acknowledge me in any way as we walked side by side to our bus shelter, and despite his hand in mine feeling like it had been made to fit there, I couldn’t help but stare down at the way our fingers linked together.

He was here for me again. He was making sure I was okay.

I swallowed down the small lump in my throat and looked up at his face, narrowing my eyes against the harsh, bright sky that highlighted his hair perfectly. Alex kept facing forward, not glancing my way as he navigated the streets for the both of us. How it was possible for me to remain so silent when I had so many questions running around in my mind, I didn’t know, but this was what Alex did. It’s what he’d always done since I’d met him, just twelve months ago. He quietened my mind. He took charge of my fear. He made the cold fall away and the warmth take over. He woke me up. He always woke me up.

“You’re holding my hand,” I eventually whispered as I stared up at him.

He didn’t answer right away, but I saw the small twitch of his lips as he held back his smile. When he eventually acknowledged me, it was just a simple nod of the head before he steered us to the right, down another road that was somewhere else, leading to someplace else. I could have been anywhere for all it mattered. He was all I saw.

“Thank you,” I said softly.

“For what?” he asked, his voice still a little tainted with sleep. “You don’t need to thank me for everything I do, Natalie. I do it because I want to.”

“I just…”

“There's no need to say anything at all.”

My fingers squeezed his tighter, and I allowed myself to look down at our hands once again before I looked back up into his eyes.

“But what if I want to say something?”

“Something other than thank you? You say that too much.” He glanced down at me from the very corner of his eyes, barely moving his head as the smirk on his face grew bigger.

“I'm aware of that. It’s a curse. A guilt thing.”

“A ‘not feeling like you’re worthy of anything anyone gives you’ thing.”

My pace slowed as I turned to him until we were both forced to stop and stare at one another. There was no hint of worry in his eyes, no hint of worry for what he might have just said. There was only certainty. It was what I liked about him the most.

“You know so much about me, even though we say so little to each other.”

“You say it like that's a negative.”

“It is... A little bit. I don't feel like I can keep anything from you.”

“It feels weird, huh?”

“Really weird,” I blew out in a breath. “But nice, too. I like… I mean… you. I like that you... It's not that I don't want you to... I’m grateful…”

“Don’t thank me, please.”

“I wasn’t going to.” I swallowed again, trying to blink away the sunlight and ignore the way my face scrunched up to fight it off. “I wasn’t going to,” I repeated. “I was just going to tell you that I like having you around. Even if it’s on the outskirts of each other’s lives. I-I like it. I like you. And…”

I didn’t get a chance to finish what I was saying. Alex’s hand rose to my cheek and before I could inhale a breath, he’d blocked out the sunshine completely and placed a gentle kiss against my lips. The tingling started instantly, my stomach tightening in surprise and want, but the rest of my body melted into him. We felt like magnets, this kiss so different from yesterday’s. It wasn’t urgent, breathless or forceful. This was soft, tender and filled with kindness.

When he pulled away, I rubbed my lips together and let my eyes stay closed for just a moment before opening them again.

“Happy anniversary, Natalie Vincent,” he whispered.

“Anniversary?”

Alex brushed a strand of hair away from my face, his eyes falling to it as he sighed and spoke at the same time. “The anniversary of everything changing for all of us. The anniversary of not letting the end of one good thing stop us from enjoying the beginning of another.”

I inhaled sharply, and the air caught in the back of my throat as time seemed to freeze completely. I was torn between the emotions that were roaring through me until I eventually let it go, allowed my shoulders to sag and my smile to break free. That's when I had to blink back the tears that were threatening to fall as I watched him, watching me like I was some kind of special.

“Are you a good thing, Alex?”

He leaned forward, his own grin growing wider as his eyes searched mine. “I'm the best you’ll ever have.”

Then he spun me around, coaxing a small shriek of unexpected laughter from me before he began to march the two of us forward at a ridiculously quick pace.

“Where are we going?” I asked as we walked straight past the bus shelter, and I spun around to watch it slip away from us while trying desperately not to fall over my own feet.

“You think your sister would have wanted you cooped up in school all day today like some kind of animal?”

“What?” I cried through a shaky laugh.

“You heard me! It's my duty to free you.”

“We’re not going to school?”

“Nope.”

“At all?”

“Not today.”

“We can’t ditch school. I’ve never ditched in my whole life.”

He never slowed, though, not even when I tensed my arm and tried to pull him back in the other direction. “It’s time to start living, Nat. You’re young, you’re free, you’re in the prime of your life. We both are.”

“Wait, Alex. I can’t–”

“Yes, you can.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

“No, no, I can't.”

“Yes, you can, yes, you can, yes, you can.”

“I really can’t!”

“You mean you won’t, but you definitely can.”

“Dammit, slow down.” I tried to sound cross or in charge of my own emotions, but the truth was I couldn’t hide the excitement in my voice no matter how much I tried. “Fine, but the least you can do is tell me where we’re going. What are we doing?”

“Nope, not today, Nat. You’re not in control anymore.” He spun around to face me so he was walking backwards as he held onto my hand. It was easy to forget how young he was when he looked at me that way. A whole world of experience and knowledge shone down on me from his eyes, like he’d been here before, or he knew answers to questions that the world hadn’t even begun to form yet. He was hypnotising, and the more sides of him I saw, the more sides of him I felt pressed against my skin, the more I wanted to fall under his spell completely. “This is my day to you. No questions, no expectations. Just you, me, the air we breathe and no scheduled plans. Let’s see what surprises await us.”

His grip on me tightened as he guided me to where he wanted me to go, and no matter how much doubt tried to claw its way into my mind, it was washed out completely by his touch. The touch that had total control over me, and the touch that I never wanted to let me go.

“Just one day.” I smiled.

Alex winked before he turned back around and fell in line by my side. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that look he was wearing, and something told me that no matter how many times I told him that it would just be for today, what I was about to enter into was going to be a much longer contract than I could ever have imagined.

I just couldn’t find it in me to give a damn about the consequences of any of it.

Not one single damn at all.