Chapter Text
Noah wasn’t non-existent for very long after their kiss.
Probably.
To be fair, it was hard to tell time when he was nothing.
The summer heat was still at its daily peak when he managed to claw himself back into reality. The sky was still cloudless. And, most importantly, Blue Sargent was still there.
She’d curled in on herself next to the space he’d vanished from, balled up to hug her legs. Her breathing was slow, heavy, intentional, and controlled. He’d never seen her trying not to cry before.
The black spikes in her hair had made a pit trap of Gansey’s pillow. He spooned up behind her, slotted his knees up into the nook of her skirts, and patted the points with his open palm.
Her spine jolted straight, thrusting her back against his chest in surprise. She sucked in a rushed, shocked breath.
“Boo,” he whispered, as shorthand for, ‘Please don’t be mad at me.’ He curled an arm around her waist, tucked his nose into her hair, and felt unworthy. Whether he’d meant to do it or not, disappearing after kissing someone for the first time seemed kind of rude.
But Blue smiled and unfurled anyway, twisting towards him. She burrowed in against his collar bone, affirming his renewed material state with a nuzzle. He patted the newly exposed spikes that had been suffocating in the pillow, too. Feeling the soft points against his palm grounded him in simple ritual: It was a clear, crossable line that divided Time Without Blue and Time With Blue Again.
“You scared me,” she whispered. Her fingers tangled into his Aglionby jacket, holding on.
“Sorry,” he said. “That’s what happens with dead people, I guess. We’re scary.”
Blue snorted a little laugh, her body fluttering in his arms. She took her face out of his shoulder to shake her head.
“That’s not the reason. Thanks for coming back.”
“Where else would I go?”
Blue said nothing, and curled herself against him, head back on his shoulder. Noah wanted to kiss her again. And again after that, and again, and again forever until everything else fell away. He settled for taking her hand and lacing their fingers together, tucking their joined palms against his unbeating heart.
They lay there in Gansey’s bed, holding each other, Blue’s energy welling between them like a little lake. She made him into a sweet ache of endless desire. He was a fever of wants with Blue, a cluster of suffocating wishes that never managed to die in the choke. He was doused longing that simmered still. Repression dangling by a thread.
Because it’s not like Noah wasn’t aware that he was barely more than a mirror. He reflected. That was it. When nobody was looking into him, he was almost nothing. But he was a mirror that remembered what it had seen, and what it had shown. And of all of his many reflection images (Ronan-Noah, Adam-Noah, Gansey-Noah - Noah-Noah didn’t exist), he loved being Blue-Noah the most.
The warmth of her living body and the munificent summer day were almost making him forget there was anything lacking in him, though. He had been so heartbrokenly sad before them. The same gray, lonely day had unwound again and again while he waited through corrosive, tedious years to be found. He had felt so empty then. Now, he just felt Blue.
They lazed together, saying nothing, limbs tangling. The noon sun loitered across the floor. The room smelled of yellowed paper and unharvested mint.
“You’re actually really good at that,” Blue said at last. “You’re a good kisser.”
“Really?” he asked, doubtful.
“I think so. Not that I have anything to compare it to. But it was nice, like I said. It was really good.”
He nosed her cheek and closed his eyes. Her eyelashes fluttered against his skin. Blue sighed, contented and mournful. He resisted the urge to bring her knuckles to his mouth.
“Good,” he said simply, and wished the single word was enough to carry all that he was feeling. “That’s what I wanted you to think.”
For some hazy stretch of time, they burrowed into each other. He tucked his forehead against her crown. It was too close to stare at her, but he did it anyway. Her living, beating heart pounded against his conspicuously silent chest. Her breath came in warm puffs that mulled the space between them. He could spend the rest of forever lingering in this moment if time would let him. Just the two of them right here.
“Can I kiss you now?” Blue whispered.
Her soft voice shattered their calm. Noah sucked in a sharp, unneeded breath.
“What?” he whispered back, a little frantically.
She peeked up at him from the ruins of their lazy, peaceful quiet.
“You kissed me. I mean, we kissed each other, but you‘re the one who started it. You kissed me first. So,” She thumbed the corner of his shirt collar absently, “can I kiss you this time?”
This time, this time, this time, throbbed in Noah’s head to replace his absent pulse. Surely it would have been racing if he were still alive. He swallowed. He burned.
And then he chose (as if he could make any other decision) to give the answer that led to the most gratifying moment of his existence.
“Sure. If you want to. You can kiss me. Fair is fair.” He even said it without his voice shaking. He reached out to tuck an errant spike behind her ear in an act of misdirection to hide his own need.
A smile quirked her pretty lips. She fanned her fingers across his chest, and energy flowed into him through her fingertips, sparking like a thousand static shocks. His beinghood flared against her open palms.
She tipped towards him. He mirrored her. Her grin became an invitation against his ready mouth.
He let her move first, waited for her to transform the kiss from a chaste brush of lips into a suggestion. She kissed slow, moving leisurely until she caught his lower lip between hers. He tilted to deepen it, she met him half-way, and then Monmouth Manufacturing and everything else in the universe was dissolving.
Noah felt the capsaicin burst of Blue’s power burn against his lips. Her kiss lit him up. Her tongue slipped past his teeth, and he followed her lead, shoving forward, all in. Suddenly, they were kissing the same way Ronan peeled out during a drag race. The hot slide of it blazed down his spine to settle low in his belly and burn there.
This was a state of being he could almost accept if he couldn’t be alive, he realized: The way she made and unmade him. His existence waxed and waned with her presence and her touch. She scarred over all the cavities in him that had rotted away. She infused him with a breathlessness that came from something more than just not breathing.
Blue sunk back into Gansey’s bed with him, hands in his hair, luxuriating. Noah followed, looming over her, totally unable to even think of letting this kiss go. He leaned into her, treasuring her lips, her tongue. The last few gaps of personal space between them were disappearing. They were chest to plush chest. His hands found her hips and he pressed closer, closer, wanting beyond rationality to be within her entirely, to sink into her body until they were one thing, fused into a single creature, a mutual possession.
He shifted, she arched up into him, just a little, and pleasure shuddered through him. He mindlessly pressed his hips against her perfect thigh, savored the heat that seeped through his body for the first time in years, and then rocked his hips back so he could do it again. The second press was even better, and the little sound he made in the back of his throat was wholly unexpected.
Blue gasped against his mouth, breaking them apart at last.
The kiss was lost. Blue stared at him, her mouth a tempting o, still wet and full, and Noah starved for more. He was leaning back towards her, and then his mind caught up to why the kiss had ended in the first place.
His hand flew to his mouth.
Oh God. Oh God. He had humped her leg. He was hard, hard from Blue’s kisses, and he had just rubbed his hard dick up against her leg without even asking, and it had felt so good, so so good that he-
“Sorry,” he gasped, twisting away, giving her room when he wanted the opposite. “Sorrysorrysorry, I didn’t mean to do that, sorry.”
He squirmed away from her, making space between them, penitent.
“It’s okay.”
Blue nudged herself back, too, creating a polite gap where their bodies had just been entwined. Noah made a deeply pathetic noise, and hated the sound of it. He had no right.
“Seriously, Noah, it’s fine. That’s what’s supposed to happen after awhile. Isn’t it?”
Noah shrugged, barely resisting the urge to diffuse into the leyline. He had been so out of line, losing himself in their kiss like that. If she’d allowed it, he would have rocked against her leg until he came in his pants.
Blue sat up, tucking a leg under herself. She smoothed out her layered shirts and corrected an unruly spear of hair. He stared up at the sunrise blush rising up over her cheeks, until she caught him looking and he had to pretend to stare at Gansey’s mint plants instead.
“Have you ever,” she asked carefully, “done more than just kiss?”
Noah flopped to his side and dropped his face into the pillow for a moment. Not disappearing was becoming a Herculean task.
“I don’t know,” he said at last, and it was the truth. Noah swallowed and tried not to lose coherence over why she could be asking. “I don’t really remember everything, about when I was alive. Not a lot, anymore. Just some flashes. There’s certain moments. Stuff that comes and goes. But nothing like that. No… Other girls or anything.”
“Then that’s a ‘No,’ right? Even if it happened, if you don’t remember it, that doesn’t really count.”
Noah withered at that. If not remembering something from when he was alive meant it didn’t count, then most of his life counted for almost nothing. He’d lost almost everything of what he’d been as a person, and the rest was rotting away a little more day by day. What counted for Noah Czerny?
But she didn’t mean it like that, and he knew it. He tried to let the pain fade, too.
“I guess. Yeah. It’s a ‘No.’”
For a moment, silence. Just the muffled sound of insect chatter. Then Blue’s clear, sure voice: “I would try it with you, you know. If you were curious.”
He launched out of the pillow to gape at her. She turned her shy smile towards the window, looking away from him.
“You kissed me. Fair is fair.”
Noah swallowed, stared, felt grateful she wasn’t watching whatever was going on with his face.
“This is a lot more than kissing, though,” he finally managed.
It was Blue’s turn to shrug.
“Not that much more.”
“It kind of actually is! We’re talking about sex.” His voice dropped into a whisper at the ‘s,’ word. “Like wedding night, trust-you-with-my-body stuff. Your first kiss is already like-“ Noah returned his face to the pillow for a moment, shaking his head in the downy folds while he gathered his thoughts, like he could actually possibly talk himself out of wanting it. ”Why would you want your first time to be with me? Like, seriously, you have to think about it and be actually totally sure. Because- You don’t mind losing your virginity to a dead man? And not- not like-“
“If you say Adam or Gansey, I’m walking out of here.”
He was actually going to say ‘someone you could have a real relationship with,’ but Blue’s expression had gone sharp and venomous. Noah snapped his mouth shut. He’s tripped on the raised root of Blue’s strong sense of self that Gansey was constantly trying and failing to avoid.
“Virginity is a social construct, Noah. Having sex with you isn’t going to change me as a person. Having my first kiss with you didn’t change me as a person, either. It’s just bodies touching, and I get to decide what it means for myself. Why should sex be such a huge deal to me, when somebody is going to die if I kiss them? This is less intimate for me. I already did my highest stakes thing with you. So why not? If you want to, I’d do it, because I want to.”
There was no way he was going to even try to argue with her about that. Noah was dead, not suicidal. Instead, he carefully tiptoed his fingers across the bed and linked their hands together as a silent peace offering.
“Sorry,” Blue conceded finally, squeezing a little apology into his palm. “I was kind of intense. But I mean it. Let’s just not make it weird, okay?”
“I would never make it weird,” Noah told her emphatically.
“But you want to?” she asked, and for a fleeting moment, she seemed almost bashful.
He nodded.
“I want to. I really, really want to.”
He could kiss her again. He could kiss her right now, and then erased the gap and-
Blue nodded back and started inspecting their joined hands.
“Can you- I mean, do you think we need-,” She looked away, worrying her bottom lip. Then she shook her head, looked back, met his eye and said, “We need to buy condoms.”
“I don’t think we have to. I don’t… Oh my God,” he groaned, tipping his head back for a moment to find his words and his courage. “Okay, this is weird, but I don’t, um, shoot, anymore. I’m a closed system, I think. Nothing comes in, nothing comes out.”
“Fine, but I’m not taking chances. No condom, no sex.”
She squared her shoulders and raised her chin, like she expected him to argue with her. Noah wouldn’t dare, even if he’d wanted to.
“No condom, no sex,” he confirmed, and gave her a weak thumbs up.
“Okay. Let’s go.” She flipped her skirts back down over her knees. They’d crept up high on her thighs when he’d pressed himself up against her.
“What, now?”
“Yeah, now. Now is all we’ve got. Adam and Gansey are back on Monday. And I don’t even want to know what Ronan’s doing.”
“You seriously don’t,” Noah agreed. He watched her make little corrections to her complicated multilayered outfit, and ached with fondness. “Okay. So we’re doing it now. Where are we going?”
Blue pondered this. The detail of where condoms specifically came from in Henrietta wasn’t something either of them had needed to think about too seriously before.
“A gas station? No, a grocery store. Maybe a Walmart.”
Noah thought about traveling past fifteen aisles under the sickly big box fluorescence in search of condoms.
“Not a Walmart,” he insisted.
“Grocery store, then.”
They loped down the stairs together and out the door with purpose. Blue took her bike by the handlebars, shifted it into position and swung her leg over. Noah obediently climbed onto the pegs, balancing himself with his hands on her shoulders. Her spikes tempted him, and he tried and failed to resist the urge to nose through them, eyes closed. She smelled like anise and sage and rosemary, richly spiced but not sweet.
She tipped her head back to look up at him. He almost kissed her again. He felt like he was constantly on the brink of kissing her, now that he’d done it once.
“What’s that thing Gansey says? When we’re about to do something crazy?” she asked.
“Excelsior,” Noah recited.
“Yeah,” Blue said, knocking her kickstand up. “That.”