Malinda Lo

and tearing the article out beneath the table as quietly as possible. She knew she shouldn’t, but she had needed to have the picture in a way she didn’t consciously understand.

She couldn’t put into words why she had gathered these photos together, but she could feel it in her bones: a hot and restless urge to look—and, by looking, to know.

The words were spoken softly, but to Lily they sounded like firecrackers.

They looked at each other, Kath with her shy half smile and Lily with her earnestness, and there was such an unexpected feeling of openness between them—a flying kind of feeling, as if they had lifted off from the ground right then and there.

but Lily felt as if her thoughts must be written in plain English on her face. Are you like the girls in the book too? Because I think I am.

Lily still felt the ghost of Kath’s hand on hers.

She was both the same girl he’d met a decade ago and undeniably changed, and for the first time in a long time he felt a kind of ache for her. It wasn’t the yearning he would have felt as a young man long separated from his lover. It wasn’t a simple physical desire. It was thoroughly unscientific, this feeling that was overtaking him, as if his body was belatedly acknowledging how far apart they had been for so long, and his mind was finally catching up.
He had missed her.

She felt an exhilarating distance from the Earth, and yet a comforting closeness to these people she loved.

A warm tenderness bloomed inside Lily; it felt the way a bruise ached when pressed.

Rockets to the moon didn’t seem so far-fetched when Kath listened to her. She made previously unimaginable things seem possible.