Closing the door of my room behind me, I lean back against the solid oak for a moment, catching my breath. My heart is still skittering. I glance at the mirror and looking back at me is a wide-eyed, bedraggled, drowned wreck of a girl. My hair stands out around my head in a sodden tangle, my face is a pale moon. My makeshift toga is soaking but, thanks to Hero’s enthusiastic wrapping, at least it is not transparent.

“It was just a kiss.” I surprise myself by saying the words aloud into the empty room. They seem to linger in the air. My voice is firm, convincing.

Still. I raise my fingers to my lips again, and the pale girl in the mirror does the same. That kiss. It was as if all that strange crackling tension between Ben and I was the gunpowder leading to that inevitable explosion. I had no idea, no idea that it would be, could be, like that. I wonder if it always is. I wonder if Ben is as startled as I am or whether that was just another kiss for him with just another girl.

Mechanically I begin to undress and change into my nightgown. I towel my hair and do my best to untangle it, scraping it up and away from my face, then I get into bed and hide under the covers like a child.

I can’t go back down there tonight. I’m too full of it all. I think if I see Ben now then I might burst. When Hero calls softly through my door I pretend to be asleep.

In the distance I can hear the revelry continuing in the kitchen, the odd squawk of laughter or shout of excitement. The rain is still drumming outside, against the earth, against the pine needles. There’s a music to it that sings through the window and I listen to it for a long, long time before I finally fall asleep.

Chapter Twenty-Four

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The next morning, I wake feeling groggy. When I throw open the shutters I am greeted by another perfect sunny day, and it’s almost hard to believe that the rain really came last night.

Almost, but not quite, because the air has that sweet, stripped-clean feeling about it, that freshness that only comes after a storm. I take a deep breath of it, enjoying the green smell of the hills. I stand for a moment, looking unseeingly at the view, thinking again of Ben’s lips on mine. I am only brought back to my senses when the sound of birdsong sends me lurching for my binoculars. I am relieved to see that the kiss hasn’t completely scrambled my brain. Again, I fail to catch a glimpse of the bird that’s been eluding me.