I was Emery Winthrop.
And Emery Winthrop?
She’d realized her crush on Reed Prescott wasn’t as small as she’d thought.
It was an itch inside my heart.
I wanted to rip my flesh and tear him from my system.
/bōlt/
To hold together
To separate by fleeing
Bolt is a contronym—a word that is opposite itself. If you bolt something, you hold it together. If you bolt, you separate by fleeing.
Bolt is a reminder that words were made by humans, and sometimes, humans make mistakes.
Mistakes are powerful, not because they have the power to ruin your life, but because they possess the power to make you stronger.
The worst mistakes make the greatest lessons, and those who learn them… bolt.
It’s your journey to figure out which bolt.
Emery, 18; Nash, 28
Starless nights rarely descended upon Eastridge. They reminded me of golden tigers—one-in-a-million, striking, intoxicating. Like golden tigers, they seemed bigger, as if the emptiness of the sky meant I could fill more space.
Reed had once informed me that starless nights were a sign secrets needed to be shared. The abyssal darkness provided protection, and he’d said, if I was going to tell a secret, it had to be under an empty sky.
We were nine, and Timothy Grieger had given me a secret Valentine’s day card Reed begged me to show him. I did, sneaking into the tree maze in the backyard and handing it to him with my cheeks flushed red.
Until we’d realized it was too dark to read it under a half-hidden moon without stars.
We ended up leaning against the Hera statue in the center of the maze as I told him what the card said from memory. It was one of those fill-in-the-blank, store-bought cards, where the first five lines had been typed out and all Timothy fucking Grieger had to do was figure out the last word, and he’d written “poop” in brown crayon beside a picture he had drawn of, of all things, a briefcase.
Dear Emery,
I love you more than pretty birds
and all the words.
I love you more than clear blue skies
and fresh apple pies.
I love you more than poop.
Love, Timmy.
Poetic.
He’d even spelled my name right.
It seemed fitting that, all these years later, a starless night numbed my fingers as I decided to spill my biggest secret to Reed.
If you want to date a boy Dad doesn’t own, you’d have to leave the state, I reminded myself as I snuck my way from Dad’s mansion to the servants’ quarters.
The chill of the North Carolina winter taunted me, nipping at my bare arms. Like it was trying to tell me something. Maybe even stop me.
I lifted my phone and reread Reed’s text again, twice to be sure.
I broke up with Basil. For real this time.
Hope spun threads of excitement and anticipation through my body, and I ignored the rest—the part of my brain that told me to turn around, to preserve us because once I professed my love for him, I couldn’t take it back.
We would never just be friends anymore. Either he felt the same way and we became a couple, or he didn’t and something ugly and awkward would cloud whatever remained of our friendship.
Don’t worry, Emery. You know what you’re doing. It’ll be worth it.
Plus, I’d never possessed an aversion to risk. I jumped first and dealt with the consequences later. Only this time, I had too much to lose. Anxiety tied a chain around my legs, weighing them down with each step I took.
Toska.
Lacuna.
Kalon.
I muttered unique words that made me happy, keeping my voice low. I shut my phone off in case it rang inside Reed’s house. Because I had no pockets, I slid it into the Prescott’s wooden mailbox, the same mailbox Reed and I had once watched Hank Prescott make.
Reed’s dad had let us paint it. It ended up a royal blue with the Duke logo on Reed’s half and black with wilted, gunmetal roses on mine. Betty had pretended to love it, while Hank laughed, patted my head, and said I was something else.
Tucked beside a purple heart pergola, the Prescott’s tiny three-bedroom cottage seemed ant-like compared to my parents’ mansion. I slipped my key into the back-door lock and turned it as quietly as possible. The door creaked and so did my steps as I slithered through the kitchen and crept into Reed’s room, ingrained memory of the cottage allowing me to navigate it without light.
Are you sure about this?
I could almost hear Reed asking me that, his smooth accent dipping its way past my ears and into my heart. He was ever so cautious, the one to watch my back as I leapt. And he always caught me.
Always.
Countless scraped knees and a constellation of faded scars told tales of childhood adventures on my body, but they didn’t speak of the golden-haired boy who stood beside me for them all, even when Mother sneered at him and made jabs about his secondhand clothing as if she couldn’t pay the Prescotts what they deserved to make in the first place.
(If Dad ran the house rather than Mother, I bet Reed would never wear used clothes again and I could eat more dinners at the Prescott’s without feeling like I was taking something I shouldn’t.)
Bottom line—Reed had my back. The scar across Able Cartwright’s face proved that. It sent a secret thrill down my spine each time I passed Able in the halls of Eastridge Prep and saw it.
Being near Reed made my stomach quake like it’d been hit by an avalanche, and tonight, I was going to sleep with my best friend.
“Are you awake?” I winced. My voice had come out tentative, but the Southern drawl still filled the room louder than I’d intended.
I inched deeper into the small space and shut the door behind me, not bothering to turn on the lights. No sense in waking Mr. and Mrs. Prescott. Not a hint of moonlight filtered in past the black-out curtains, but I’d been in Reed’s room enough to reach his full-size bed in the center without missing a step.
“Wake up,” I urged, not quite knowing what I’d tell him when he did, indeed, wake up.
I’d planned a speech on the flight back from winter break in Aspen, but standing in front of Reed’s bed, it felt stupid. Like something one of Nash’s groupies would say to him after spending the night.
“You’re so sexy, Nash.”
“The things you do to me, Nash.”
“I think I love you, Nash.”
Reed and I would press our ears to his bedroom door, our cheeks tinged pink when we heard things we were too young to hear. After he sent them away (and he always did), they left in tears, and we would pretend we didn’t see them.
The sheets rustled as I sat on the edge of the bed and shook Reed’s shoulders a bit. He stirred, groaning before settling again.
“It’s me.” I exhaled all my uncertainty, closed the distance, and made my move, straddling his bare chest before he could speak. Pressing a finger to his lips, I spoke before he could, “Don’t say anything.” Don’t stop me. “Please. I just… I’ve been waiting too long. I want this. I want you. Now.”
He didn’t answer, so I shook his shoulders again and whispered, “Wake up.”