As Black as Ebony Read Free Page B

then Lumikki would have to lie, and she didn’t want to lie to Sampsa.
    No, she would have to make it through the night alone. Then she would have to find out as soon as possible who put the letter in her pocket. She’d have to do that alone too.
    Lumikki had thought she wasn’t going to be so alone anymore. She had thought wrong. Suddenly, she felt that familiar emptiness and desolation filling her inside. She was always alone, in the end. Lumikki stared at the stanzas of the poem, unable to read any more.
    Just then a deep, crisp scent of pine forest surrounded her and a warm hand gently brushed her neck.
    “Edith Södergran. Are you reading our poems without me?”
    Lumikki knew before she turned to look over her shoulder. She knew before the voice and the words. She knew from the smell and the touch.
    Blaze.
    He stood sideways behind Lumikki. Smiling. Real. He looked maybe a little more like a boy than he had eighteen months earlier. His hair was shorter and lighter, and there was a new calm and self-assurance in his posture, but otherwise he was exactly the same. Those ice-blue eyes were the same, and Lumikki sank into them instantly like breaking through a frozen crust as thin as thought and plunging into the black lake beneath.
    A storm of emotions washed over Lumikki. She wanted to curl up in Blaze’s arms as close as she could and tell him everything about the letter and how afraid she was and what had happened in the past year and all the longing and loneliness and dreams and black thoughts and ask him to protect her and save her from solitude and evil and take him home and tear off all his clothes and her own and get tangled up with him on the floor and kiss and kiss and kiss and press every hungry inch of her skin against him and burst into flames and forget herself and the world and that they were two different beings because front to front they were one, as seamless as could be with no boundaries, and Lumikki wanted to burn and burn and burn without fearing the fire for once.
    Lumikki swallowed. A tremor ran through her. She couldn’t speak.
    “It’s nice to see you. Wanna go get coffee? Or are you busy?” Blaze asked as if it were perfectly natural to chat like normal people.
    “No,” Lumikki managed to say.
    “Good. Should we go upstairs to the cafe?”
    “No. I mean we can’t go get coffee.” Blaze stared at Lumikki, a little confused, but then he smiled mischievously.
    “We can do something else if you want to.”
    With trembling hands, Lumikki put her book back on the shelf and pulled her knitted cap down over her ears.
    “No, we can’t. I’m busy. I can’t see you. Now.” Lumikki heard the words coming out of her mouth, haltingly, breathlessly.
    “Okay. Well, some other time then. Is your phone number the same? I’ll call or text you.”
    Blaze’s voice was warm and composed. Don’t, Lumikki should have said. That was what she wanted to say. But she also didn’t.
    “I have to go. Bye.”
    Lumikki’s legs wanted to run out of the library, as fast and as far as possible away from Blaze. But she forced herself to walk. Briskly and purposefully. Without looking back.
    Not until she was outside in the fresh air did Lumikki realize she should have said she was dating someone.
    She hadn’t said it though, because after diving into the burning ice water of Blaze’s eyes, she had forgotten that fact completely.

I love you.
    Three words that are so easy to say but so hard to mean. I mean them. I breathe each word and they become a part of me. I say them to you and they become a part of you. My love moves into you. It makes you burn even more beautiful, strong, and radiant.
    I make you brighter than the brightest star of the nighttime sky.
    You become mine, completely. As was always meant to be. Because it is your fate. And mine.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9

Sister, sister, sister, sister.
    The word pounded in Lumikki’s head, as it always did now when she was visiting her parents in