I knew the cliff we stood on because King had spoken of it often. It overlooked the caramel sanded half-moon of Entrance Bay from its farthest right corner and offered spectacular views of the snow-capped towering mountains across the ocean.
I’d never been there before. We’d talked about it a few times, but I respected that this was King’s special place with Mute, their haven away from home where they could hang out and do whatever it was boys did as they grew older. I could picture them easily there at the horrifying edge of earth, legs dangling over the abyss, shoving at each other when they laughed as if they weren’t suspended from a terrible height.
The grass was long and slightly damp as the weak light of the pre-dawn washed across the sky, but King led us through it to nearly the very edge before he let go of my hand to unearth a large blanket from the bag. He spread it out for us and then dropped to his knees to retrieve my well-worn copy of Paradise Lost, a thermos, a container of berries, and his current brown leather notebook.
“Sit,” he urged with that boyish smile I’d first caved into temptation for. “Watch the sunrise with me.”
I folded to the ground beside him and then giggled when he flopped down over top of me and wrapped me up in his limbs as if I was a present and he the ribbon. I curled my legs around his narrow hips and smiled into his face as he drew his thumb gently over my brows.
“What are you looking at?” I asked, tracking his eyes as they moved over my face. I counted the dips and craters of vivid blue in his irises and wondering if I had the topography of them memorized yet.
“Only girl I ever wanted,” he said somberly.
“I’ve never really been a girl to you.” I laughed. “I’m still eight years older than you even if it doesn’t seem like such a difference now that I don’t actually teach you.”
“Still teach me every day, babe. One of the reasons I love you. Because I got a curious mind that needs stimulatin’, and you’ve got a mind like a vortex, no matter how far down I go, you never end, and I get to keep on learnin’.”
“I’ll never get used to you saying things like that so easily. Such beautiful words spoken so confidently when you’re so young and such a man in every other way.”
His brow knotted, and one thick golden brow arched. “Tellin’ you the ways I love you isn’t manly?”
“I shouldn’t have said it that way. What I meant was, it takes so much courage and self-belief to give people pieces of their mind and soul the way you do, and you make it look so natural. Most men, alpha men especially I think, have trouble articulating their emotions because they worry it will make them look weak.”
King considered my words as he played his fingers over my hairline and down the side of my face. He was a tactile man, almost as expressive with his touch as he was with his poetry.
“It’s ironic, then, that they’d let themselves get caught up in what people could think and so they rob themselves of love and praise, the gift of givin’ it and havin’ it given back. That’s the real weakness.”
“I used to be like that,” I admitted, thinking of the women I’d been. The woman who was terrified of dating a rebel, of being involved in anything that might be perceived as wrong or risqué.
Now I couldn’t imagine a life colouring within the lines. Where was the fun or individual identity in that?
“Did you?” he argued casually, as if his words didn’t fundamentally shift my self-perception. “You were reluctant, babe, I’ll give you that. But you still explored your curiosity with me, still took a chance on a man who could’a fucked you over, and then when he didn’t, you gave yourself over to me in a way that was a promise. A pledge as solemn as a dogmatist gives his god.”
“I didn’t really have a choice in it. You utterly beguiled me.”
“There’s a choice in everything we do.”
And this was one of the many ways King proved to me every day that he was the most brilliant man I’d ever know. He had the soul of an ancient philosopher, a somber wisdom that didn’t seem borne of experience, but birthed from some inner peace he’d been inherently gifted with from some god or fate.
“Roll over,” he demanded, already flipping me onto my stomach.
I didn’t protest as his hands, rough from working at the garage, moved up my thighs, taking my dress with them until I was forced to lift up so he could take it off over my head. Naked but for the pale pink ruffled panties I wore, I lay in the cool air as the sun began to peek over the horizon and hummed as King trailed kisses up my spine, pressing one to each vertebra.