Top Secret: The Alice Anderson Files

Sunshine

Alice Anderson was the type of girl who liked making out.  Closets, back seats, behind the self-sustaining generator she designed in the eighth-grade, you name it.  Alice loved kissing.  Usually even more than people that she ended up doing it with.

Usually.

But of all the places where Alice Anderson had kissed people, the lake was her favorite.  There was a patch of grass, hidden behind long, furling cattails that sank into the water.  She liked it because she could lay back and look up at the stars.  He liked it because he could hear the trickling of the water rolling off the rocks.  This spot, he knew, belonged to them.  She'd never brought anyone else.

He could smell spring in the air, flowers blossoming against the chill that bit at his skin.  The grass on this part of the mansion's grounds was always soft, soaking in every bit of that misty lake. He let his hand run through the blades, not wanting to forget a single thing—not a single moment that he spent with her leaning up against his chest.

Her hand slid over the back of his, rough and battered.  He let his fingers weave between each of hers, smoothing over her calluses and cuts.  Her hands were always so torn up.  "What are you doing?" she asked.

He smiled.  Her voice always made him smile.

"Finn," she snapped.  He could hear her smiling too.

"What do you think I'm doing?" he teased, pulling her hand up to his lips.  Her skin got softer the farther up he went.  Hand.  Wrist.  All the way up to her arm until he got to her shoulder and could kiss the crook of her neck.  She giggled like it was the dirtiest thing they'd ever done when they both knew that it was far from.

She reached across and graced her hand along his cheek, turning him towards her until she could kiss him back.  She was good at it.  Great.  Like everything else she did, she had practiced it until she'd gotten it just right.  She knew just how to move—just how to pull away and start again.  It drove him crazy, as if every single one of his nerves were being brought to life for the very first time.

She started to turn more towards him and he could feel her as she moved.  He felt her torso turning, stealing the heat away from him.  He felt the way that she couldn't get enough and started to turn even farther, holding either side of his face until she was completely turned around, facing him with a leg on either side of his own.

Her lips strayed from his, wandering along his jawline.  He didn't want her to stop as she pulled away to say, "I could kiss every last one of your freckles."

"I've got a lot of those," he whispered, his hands somehow ending up around her waist.  Running along her hips.  

"I've got a lot of time," she said back, kissing his forehead. Kissing his nose.  Kissing every part of him where the little brown spots ran wild.  "Finn O'Reilly, it's like I'm kissing the stars when I'm with you," she told him, pecking at every possible inch.  Her eyes were closed and she wasn't keeping track of her words.  "I don't think I'll ever be able to count them all."

This was the part he liked the most.  Not the kissing or the cuddling or the way her hands ran through his hair—though he had to admit that those bits were quite enjoyable.  But it was her words that really did him in.  The things she muttered along his skin while she was stuck somewhere between him and the heavens.  Alice never talked dirty.  She spoke sweet.  Beautiful, poetic ramblings that only sometimes made sense, like she was falling hard and falling fast.  Too fast to even worry about which words worked and which didn't.

Maybe that was why he liked kissing this particular girl so much.  Maybe it was because she was smart enough to write verses and adventurous enough to be on top of him as she did.  Maybe it was because she kissed him like an actual person and not like some mangled up rag doll accumulating dust in a deep dark corner of the world.  Maybe it was because, when he kissed her, he could close his eyes, and she could somehow make him forget that things wouldn't look any different when he opened them again.