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They're in Arkansas when everything finally changes.
Even though the autumn air is getting colder with each passing day, he takes her swimming in one of the waterfalls, tucked in a small, unique canyon, and it looks like a cascade of water gushing down from a rickety staircase. Underneath the falls is a shady grotto surrounded by towering cliffs, with the water so dark she doesn't notice a rough little rock at the bottom and comes out with scraped knees.
It's getting late; they say goodbye to the city by a 24-hour neon sign of the deli on the corner. In a small square they stop to look through the scope at Jupiter's glow, and she's studying his profile in the dark, every inch of his expressive face, completely mesmerised.
What once was just a seed, a whisper of a feeling, so frightening and exhilarating at the same time, finally gains clarity, because now, under the ink sky of Little Rock, she is struck with a longing to witness together how buzzing they both are, how candied, how calcified; because being with him feels like falling through a thousand floors.
He's always had a way of finding where she'd gone, so when he awakens in the depth of the night in their small rental condo with his palm pressed to the cold satin bed sheets, he knows. He has been staying in her room, because somehow being away from her in such a small living space feels wrong.
Rose steps out of the bath, completely exposed, to find him standing there in the mirrors, his trembling frame making four in her unfocused eyes; she inches closer to hold him, wrapping her arms around his waist. He pins her hard against the sink, whispering something unintelligible, but she can't speak, for the fear that he might let go is overwhelming her, so she lets him dry her naked body and lead her back to the bed.
She is shivering, and he pulls her closer to his chest. He smells of hazelnuts and something sweet, like those caramel apples he loves so much.
“Rose, talk to me, please,” he says in a broken voice.
“It hurts.”
“Show me where.”
She is guiding his hand to the side of her throat, just above the palpation of her pulse.
"Here," she whispers.
He reaches out to tilt her head back towards him, thumb slowly caressing the curve of her ear.
"We shouldn't have gone for a swim."
He's looking at her, and there's the kind of wolfish hunger, finality in his dark eyes that should probably scare her.
"No. I'm happy that we did. So happy."
Rose leans in even closer and inhales with a shudder as the tip of her nose brushes over his collarbone, her fingers skimming over the soft strands at the nape of his neck.
His hand has somehow moved lower, down to her thigh, and when his fingertips get to her scraped knee, Rose lets out a quiet hiss of pain. He gets up a little and reaches for her leg, turning it toward him ever so gently, before bringing the swell of her knee to his lips and barely grazing the raw skin with his tongue, sealing it with soft kisses.
With bated breath she props herself up on both elbows, waiting. He holds her gaze, before parting her knees and bending down to press his mouth to her neck, hands on her waist. Her legs close around his narrow hips, pulling him flush against her ribs, and he lets out a groan as his lips crash onto hers.
It's tentative at first, but quickly turns into something they both have no control over, a frantic daze, senses galore.
And then she's filled with him: his tongue that speaks her name, his skin that scalds her own, their hands buried in each other's tangled hair. She pulls back at last to look at him, admire his mouth, tender and swollen, and oh how he must be starving for it, because in a split second he's bruising her lips again, and there's a sound of the drums beating backwards, an excruciating, deafening echo, the sound of their racing hearts, the cadence of their desperate, shaky breaths, repeating again and again, reverberating in their weightless limbs until the contours of their bodies are erased.
Remember when we left that deli and walked into the night? By the 24-hour neon light I saw that the freckles on your arm were a body of stars in the sky and they matched mine. I kept it to myself, I was so overwhelmed. But in the morning light when I watched your sleeping body breathing, I finally understood.
P.S.
Rose,
Back at your mum's there was an old "New Scientist" issue, and as much as the simple fact that she even owns one blows my mind, it wasn't as astounding as the article I'd found in that joke of a magazine, written by someone who claims to be an actual doctor of physics. Let me read it out to you:
The way I understand it, travel into the past would require a complete restructuring of the universe. Time is really just a snapshot of physical changes around us. The more things change, the more quickly time can be said to move. To reverse time would be like restructuring every atom in the universe to duplicate the previous state.
And I just want to say, before you call me rude, I do respect these people, I really do. After all, you and I are blessed, we have a time machine, and they don't. At least they invented marriage by proxy, which is bloody brilliant, because it allows us to continue our travelling without stopping for a second, and... Yes, sorry, forgot to tell you, Rose. We're married now. You can easily blend in with the rest of the folk as a proper Christian who doesn't live in sin; all thanks to me, and to those humans who invented marriage, planes and maps, electricity and penicillin. Music! The greatest invention of mankind. If I start nattering on about music, we would definitely need to reverse time, because we'd be here forever. But what they said about atoms and duplicating, well, I would gladly do it for you, I would recreate every single cell in the universe for you, and together we would be Pygmalion and Galatea, because I would carve out those atoms with my bare hands.