Kissing the Untouchable

The voice came out of the dark, somewhere over my head.

Low, lazy, faintly bored. "There's a lady creep in your house." Me, facedown in a pillow that wasn't mine, in a bed I'd just been kicked out of: excuse me?

Let's get one thing straight, sir. This is my bed. Marty is my brother. Of the two people in this room, the creep is not the one who pays rent here. Although.

Squinting up at him from the floor, I had to give credit where it was due. The creep was, objectively, criminally goodlooking.

Which, in hindsight, should have scared me more than it did. Because that face belonged to the one person on earth I would never, ever be allowed to touch.

Chapter 1 The first time I ever touched him, I slapped him clean across the face. In my defense, I thought he was my pillow. Let me set the scene.

It was past midnight, I'd let myself into my brother's apartment, and I'd gone straight for the bedroom that used to be mine. Shoes off. Covers up.

Hand patting around the mattress for a pillow that, for some reason, wasn't where I'd left it. My palm found something warm instead. Soft.

With the unmistakable give of a human cheek. Crack. The sound landed before my brain did.

Then the mattress pitched, my stomach swooped, and a leg swept out of the dark and shoved me clean off the bed and onto the floor. A shape sat up against the window. Slowly.

It kept going up, and up, and in the dark it looked enormous, and for one crystalline second I was certain I'd become the cold open of a horror movie. I lunged for the lamp.

A hand closed around my wrist before I got there. Warm. Unhurried.

Not letting go. "Don't turn on the light." The voice was low and scratchy, like I'd hauled him out of the deepest sleep of his life. "I'm not dressed." Wonderful. A ghost.

A naked ghost. In my childhood bed. Tonight was going great. You're owed some context for how a grown woman ends up committing assault in the dark, so let me back up.

My brother, Marty, used to be famous. Talentshow kid, golden voice, couldn't hold still on a stage, a baby face that stayed twentytwo long past twentytwo.

He was huge for a couple of years. Then his label squeezed him until there was nothing left to squeeze, and Marty, being Marty, told them where to file the contract and walked.

He spent the next six years clawing his way out of the kill fee on his own and refused to touch a cent of family money.

At one low point he borrowed cash off me, in secret, to start a pig farm. It went exactly how you think it went. He lost his shirt.

The piglets nobody bought were, in fairness, adorable. I roasted and ate them. So. That's my brother.

Thirtyfive now, prime years gone, and right when the whole family had finally made peace with him coming home to take his seat in the company at last, he started acting up.

Booze and smoke on his clothes every time he came home. Some nights he didn't come home at all.

My mother cornered me about it, voice dropped low like she was handing off state secrets. "Star. Someone's gotten to your brother.

You're the only one he listens to." She gripped my arm. "Go. Check on him for me." In our house, when my mother speaks, you do not ask questions. You salute.

So there I was, creeping into my brother's place at an ungodly hour, braced for the worst. The smoke. The bottles. The party. The pretty girls draped over his furniture.

Instead I got darkness, a ticking clock, and not one single sign of life. So I'd relaxed. I'd climbed into bed.

You know the rest. "How'd you get in?" the ghost asked, like he was mildly curious and mostly still asleep. "I live here," I whispered.

A soft laugh. "And what are you to Marty?" "He's my brother." A yawn. "Prove it." Something about how completely unbothered he was, like I was a draft from a cracked window and not a stranger he'd just punted across a room, and all at once I stopped whispering. "He's my brother.

What is there to prove. Fine. Quiz me." "Marty's birthday." "...September. Eighth?" The dark went very quiet. Then he laughed again.

One low, unreadable sound that, for reasons I declined to look into, I felt somewhere under my ribs. He pulled out his phone.

The screen threw a thin blue light up the edge of his jaw, and I lost a couple of seconds I'm not proud of.

The call connected. "Hey." A beat. "There's a lady creep in your house." Me, still flat on the floor: excuse me? Sir. We are going to need to revisit some definitions.

This is my house. Marty is my brother.

And if we are handing out the title of creep tonight, I would like to formally nominate the naked man currently tattling on me from inside my own bed.

Chapter 2 My bedroom door flew open. A beam of light hit me in the face.

In the doorway stood my brother in his pajamas, hunched over, hair a catastrophe, brandishing a stick he'd clearly grabbed off the floor on his way in.

His eyes swept the room like a rat working a kitchen for crumbs. There was a real absenceofbrainactivity beauty to it. "Where's the creep?" Marty demanded. "Hi," I said.

He turned, got one good look at me, and his murderous glare collapsed into open confusion. Some moments need no words. It had been months since I'd seen him.

I'd have launched across the room for a hug, except the ghost still had my wrist and showed zero intention of giving it back.

So I stayed put and gave my brother my sweetest, chirpiest delivery. "Big bro." The stick lowered. He squinted.

A grin started to break. "Star?" I went even sweeter. "Big brother." He rose to it, full of feeling. "Star!" We had reached, I felt, the emotional summit.

Surely the ghost had now witnessed the unbreakable power of blood. The ghost was unmoved. Still halfasleep, honestly. "Hey.

She told me your birthday's September eighth." The room went still. I laughed, thin and guilty. "It's... it's not?

Big brother?" Marty's face shut like a door. "Never seen her before in my life. Throw the creep out." Cool. So there was love in this family. Just not a lot of it.

He hauled me up by the collar and out the door. In the shifting light I caught my first real look at the ghost's face. Skin pale as paper. Features cut clean.

Eyes lowered, lashes down, like something built specifically to lure souls out of bodies. Also, he really, truly was not wearing clothes.

I had just leaned in to survey the territory south of the collarbone when he caught me doing it. Stella. Eyes up. Too late.

I snapped my gaze north and landed, of course, directly in his. Great. Now I really was the creep.

While the ghost got dressed, I tugged my brother's sleeve out in the living room and switched to my softest, most repentant register. "My darling brother.

I swear on my life I will never get your birthday wrong again." Marty thawed half a degree. "How many times do I have to say it. August ninth. August. Ninth.

Are you or are you not my actual sister? What happened to your memory? Did it get—" "Eaten by my superstar brother," I said, pitiful. He cracked.

A snort, then a laugh, then a hand mussing my hair. My brother is the easiest man alive to manage. Call him a superstar and he forgets his own zip code. Matter closed.

My turn to stand up straight. I went grave. "Marty. Explain yourself. What is going on with you lately." His eyes drifted to a fascinating spot on the wall. "Hm?

What?" Selective hearing. Adorable. I went up on my toes, pinched his ear between two fingers, and turned up the volume. "Drinking. Smoking. Out all night.

Dragging strange men home. Hm?" He shushed me, and there was no conviction in it at all. His voice had gone small. "Don't be disgusting. What strange men.

That's Adrian's little brother. Just flew back from overseas with him." Adrian. Adrian.

The Adrian who, fifteen years ago on that competition stage, was one half of the internet's most beloved couple. With my brother. I clapped a hand over my mouth. "You two.

You rekindled it?" Marty arched a brow. "Rekindled what. The flame between Adrian and me has never once gone out." I opened my mouth to fire back.

That was when the ghost walked out of the bedroom. Chapter 3 Marty and I went quiet at the same time and looked at the ghost.

Plain white tee, black pants, and somehow they'd been arranged into something that belonged in a gallery. Tall. Broad through the shoulders, narrow at the waist.

Easily over six foot. No wonder he'd taken up that much of the dark. The skin really was that pale. Eyes dark and bright.

A halflidded kind of gaze that read as lazy and cold in the same breath. Like he still hadn't slept enough. High nose.

Thin lips, faintly pink, a small curve resting in one corner. ...Okay. This creep was a touch excessively goodlooking. I'd always known Adrian was a stunner.

He'd trended on his face alone back in his competition days.

It had genuinely never occurred to me that Adrian's little brother would also be handsome to an actively unreasonable degree.

If Adrian was the cleancut, allAmerican golden boy, his brother was the thing that lures you off the path and into the trees. And the thing in the trees hit hard.

My tailbone was still filing paperwork. I stared at the ghost. The ghost looked between me and Marty. Marty looked between me and the ghost. A few seconds curdled.

Marty cracked first, careful about it. "You two... nothing happened, right?" The ghost smiled, polite, and answered without a single flicker. "No." No?

He was gorgeous, sure, but punting me across a room was still a war crime. I sidled up beside him and lowered my voice. "You kicked me. And you played ghost to scare me.

Did you forget that part?" He tilted his head toward me, and the side of his face slid into view, and I did not want to blink. So this was youth. Skin you could pinch water out of.

Though I could not work out why there were a few faint red marks on it. "Stella." Low, cool, and at that exact second lazily, carelessly devastating.

We were close enough that it landed right against my ear. "Think about what happened right before I did anything." The sentence went down my spine and all the way to my fingertips.

It also shook something loose. I'd been too scared to think, back in the dark. But replaying it now: right before he kicked me, hadn't I patted something soft?

Something with an uneven, giveandresist texture, a lot like a human— Hold on. Had I slapped him? I looked at him, disbelieving. He happened to be looking right back.

I gave him a questioning face. He answered with the smallest dip of his chin, his eyes full of resignation and a sleepiness too thick to cut.

The confirmation landed, I choked on my own spit, and my face went up in flames. Dead asleep at an unholy hour, slapped awake by a total stranger. Fine.

The kick was, perhaps, not entirely unforgivable. I dropped my gaze and could not make myself lift it.

His stayed on me anyway. "Ri," Marty said. "You just got back, you're still on overseas time. Go on.

Sleep." The ghost glanced at me, a faint smile surfacing. "I'll take the couch, Marty." Guilt did my thinking for me. I reached out to give him a push. "You get the bed tonight.

No need to thank me." I swear on everything I own that I only meant to push his back.

But somewhere between the chronic sleep deprivation and the cardiac events of the evening, my hand landed with GPS precision well below his waist. With sound.

Exactly like some backalley letch working over a respectable woman. Marty's eyes rounded into dinner plates. I read his lips. They said: creep.

Chapter 4 I froze where I stood, body rigid, and looked down at my hand. It had now landed in the wrong place twice. This insubordinate pervert of a hand. I could live without it.

The ghost turned to look at me, eyes barely staying open, voice gone soft and slurred at the edges with sleep. "Stella. Don't hit me. I'll do whatever you want." ...

He had, clearly, misread the room. But that wasn't the important part. The important part was that I was, against all medical advice, falling for him.

A foxspirit that beautiful, this far gone with sleep. Who on earth was supposed to say no to that. The second the ghost was back in his room, Marty hauled me into the music room.

My dopey grin hadn't finished clearing off my face. He poked me in the forehead. "Stella. You took ten years off me back there.

Slapping a man's backside the first time you meet him. I was bracing for a fracture." "A fracture?" What did slapping a backside have to do with fractures. It wasn't cast iron.

The give on it had been, if anything, soft. Marty crooked a finger. I leaned in, fully on board.

He whispered, barely above a hum. "Orion has a condition." Three small words, and they hit my chest like a dropped anvil. I went instantly, bitterly philosophical. Of course.

Of course a man that beautiful came with a condition. Was it the overseas thing, all that freedom? Probably. With a face like that he'd have been swimming in options. Tragic.

So young, his shot at happiness already shot. Because who, realistically, signs up for a lifetime of strictly platonic with a creature like that.

Something you can look at and never, ever taste. I could have wept into my own hands.

I was midgrief when I glanced up and found Marty watching me, his whole face one enormous question mark. "What is that expression.

What did you just turn Orion into in your head." My sorrow cut out clean. So. There was still a window. Marty exhaled at me. "His condition is he can't kiss anyone. He runs a fever.

He's not built for much physical contact either, he goes into a kind of stress reaction." ...

There was a condition like that? "And if there is contact," I said. "What happens." Marty rubbed his chin. "Adrian says back in middle school some kid messed with him on purpose.

Kid walked off with a fracture." I swallowed. I tested my arm. Still attached. Still bending. Lucky. Orion must have been too sleepy tonight to run at full capacity.

Otherwise, at the level I'd gone in at, I'd be looking at a permanent disability. Marty scrubbed at my head like I was a golden retriever. "Star.

When are we fixing the fallforanythingwithapulse situation. You clear twentyseven this year. Rounds up to thirty." "Rounds up to forty on you," I said. "Daily checkin.

Famous yet? Charting yet? Made rent yet?" Marty clutched his chest like I'd run him through. "Stella. I'm your brother.

Your actual brother." I'd wanted to go deeper into the whole condition situation. The specifics. Whether fever scaled with kiss duration.

Whether the system had, buried somewhere in it, an exploitable bug. I never got the chance.

Marty's phone lit up and stayed lit, five, six calls deep, some musicshow producer on the other end. So that was the source of the suspicious behavior. He wasn't being led astray.

He was landing work, and Adrian had flown all that way home to help my brother chase the dream back down. Which was sweet. Genuinely.

It also left me alone with the only thought that mattered. A condition like that had to have a loophole.

And I have never once in my life walked away from something I wasn't supposed to taste. Chapter 5 "Work's in. Work's in.

Star, whatever you need, ask me tomorrow." Marty was already shrugging into his jacket and making for the door.

I pressed a hand to my forehead. "...You're still in your shorts." The red ones.

I have never fully grasped the depth of my brother's need to be famous, but it lives, somehow, in his wardrobe. Phone case to gym shorts, the man is one unbroken sheet of red.

He posts about them, too. Cheap. Durable. Five stars. Marty doubled back, chin up, wildly defensive. "Obviously I know. I went out to check the weather. I read the sky.

This time it happens for me." "And if it doesn't, that's fine too.

The point is I get to stand on a stage again." Then he launched into one of Adrian's old hits, beaming like a kid handed a gold star, doing a little dance with it. I had nothing.

My brother had clearly redeemed some kind of coupon. Thirty years off the age requirement. Two hundred points off the IQ. That night I had a deeply unhinged dream.

In it, I lost the war with temptation and kissed Orion. We both ended up in the ICU. Him with a fever that wouldn't break. Me with internal bleeding.

The hospital, in its mercy, put us in a couples' package. ... I jolted awake and grabbed my phone. A message from Marty, sent the night before.

Marty: [Star, you know Adrian and I are familyfirst guys. So when it came down to choosing between taking care of you and Ri, or recording the show...] Marty: [We chose the show.

No hesitation. Flight's tonight, back in three months. You're home with him.

Be nice to Ri.] I stared at the screen for a few seconds, and slowly, against my own better judgment, my mouth started to curve.

The single most identical thing about Marty and me, as siblings, is that we are both constitutionally incapable of doing what we're told. I knew it was a terrible idea.

That was sort of the appeal. A thing is only worth wanting if it might wreck you a little. Three months. Alone. With him.

I dug my makeup out of my bag and built a careful, devious little nomakeup look. Finished right at eight. ...Time to wake the foxspirit. A sleepy, softedged Orion.

He'd be unbearable in the best way. I pulled my door open, looking my absolute best. Orion was already on the other side of it. Fully dressed. Hand raised, midknock. I stalled out.

Tactical failure. How was the foxspirit up this early.

His cool eyes carried the faintest trace of a smile. "You're up." The voice was cold, the delivery lazy and careless, and my heart tripped over its own feet. A menace is a menace.

He doesn't even have to try. Operating at baseline is enough to scramble a person.

His gaze rested on my face a few seconds, then his mouth curved, barely. "Let's eat, Stella." I followed him to the table. It was buried under a balanced, nutritious breakfast.

Orion smiled and handed me a fork. "Marty said you're picky, so I made extra. See if anything looks good." My eyelid twitched.

A bad feeling started its climb. "Did Marty say anything else? Besides picky?" Orion, perfectly even. "He said you have a temper. That you like to hit people.

To be careful." My smile was losing structural integrity. I got three words out through my teeth. "Anything else." Orion: "He also said you have a lot of exes.

That people come by the apartment now and then to collect on old debts. So I shouldn't open the door to strangers." Chapter 6 Great, Marty. That's how you sell me out in the wild.

Then don't blame me for what I do to you online. I still had a few photos from his competition days.

Full scenekid era, hair teased into a black thundercloud, eyeliner you could spot from orbit. I took a breath and went breezy. "My brother jokes.

Don't listen to him." Orion nodded. "I don't. I only believe you." So good. So obedient. I want to take him home.

Shame I'd be checked into a hospital before I got him through the door. After breakfast, to put on a show of competence, I fought him for the dishes.

Orion couldn't win the fight, so he just watched, quiet, as I carried the stack into the kitchen. Where, owing to a total ignorance of my brother's kitchen, I immediately tripped.

I was fine. The bowls were not. They went down in a porcelain detonation, shrapnel skating across the floor. I glared at the pointless little step under my feet.

Where Marty had found the design inspiration, I will never know. "You okay?" Orion was already at the doorway, moving to come in.

Looking at the field of broken china, I reached on instinct to stop him. And then, with truly exceptional timing, I forgot about the pointless little step again.

My foot came down on it. My center of gravity left the building. In a crisis, there is no time to think. So I threw my arms out and grabbed Orion. His arm hooked around my waist.

Once I'd steadied, I looked up, straight into his eyes. They were the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. Lit like a whole sky of stars.

The black of them ran down forever, the kind of place you drown in without deciding to.

Then his hand shook against my waist, barely, and gave away whatever he was actually thinking. I didn't want to. I stepped back anyway. Twice. Out of his arms.

Fractures, after all, are not a joke. Orion held the shape of the embrace a second longer, his face gone dark with something I couldn't read.

Then the charming halfsmile slid back into place. "I've got it, Stella." He crossed to the kitchen in a few strides and started clearing the wreckage I'd made.

I watched the clean line of his back, the narrow waist, and remembered exactly how warm he'd been a second ago. I swallowed. And regretted everything. Should have milked it.

Should have held on right up to the halfsecond before his system gave out, and let go then. The picture assembled itself before I could stop it.

Orion, standing in the halflight, holding out a hand, voice rich with feeling. Want to date? The kind that ends in a fracture? A laugh got out of me. Orion turned his head.

I rearranged my face into someone earnestly looking for a way to help and finding none.

Crouched over the shards, he tipped his head, the corner of his mouth pulling up like he was swallowing a laugh of his own. ...He had better not be laughing at me.

For the next few weeks I worked, hard, at being impressive in front of Orion. Damage control on a reputation that was, frankly, circling the drain.

I asked Adrian, very casually, about Orion's hard limits and his type. Limits, Adrian gave me exactly one: a serious germ thing. He especially can't stand sharing utensils.

Crossing forks, eating off the same anything. Type, Adrian gave me three words. Hardworking. Gentle. Kind. So I built a meticulous campaign around all three.

Chapter 7 I swore to Orion, hand on heart, "You just got home. Rest. Leave it all to me." I lasted three days as the hardworking one.

After that, no alarm on earth could pry me out of bed in the morning. Every day it was Orion up early, back from a run, breakfast made, showered, knocking on my door.

Some mornings I'd drag getting ready out forever, and he'd just wait outside. No nagging. No irritation.

Once, he knocked, I answered, and then I fell back asleep for a solid twenty minutes. I figured he'd given up and gone to do something useful.

So I rolled out with no makeup, a bird's nest for hair, and undereye circles you could file taxes against, and opened the door to go pee. I walked facefirst into his chest.

My nose hit him hard enough to bring tears up. Scared the pee right back out of me. The point is, at some unmarked moment, it stopped mattering whether I got up early or late.

Every single morning, I opened that door to the frankly unholy beauty of Orion's face. Leaning in the frame, dark hair soft across his forehead, mouth a deep pink.

In the early light he looked like a young tree, all of it boyish. It made a person... ravenous. It also handed me several consecutive nights of dreams I will not be describing.

I consoled myself. Fine. The hardworking persona was dead in the water. But I had two left. Gentle and kind.

Hold those, never lose my temper, and I would be gentleness incarnate, kindness in the flesh.

Which is when, in the thick of my worst deadline week, the unit upstairs started renovating. Morning. Noon. Night. My skull was walltowall power drill.

I couldn't get a word down, so I went to war with Marty's haters online instead. Apparently he really is about to make it. People have started coming for him.

I left them with a closing statement: "The only dark thing about Marty is the eyeliner in his old photos.

The man has zero other red flags." Then I set the tablet down, rolled up my sleeves, and while Orion was in the kitchen on lunch, I marched upstairs with the full force of my convictions.

I hammered on the door. It opened. Filling the frame was a wall of a man. I unloaded the entire speech I'd rehearsed in my head. The wall of a man looked supremely bored. "My place.

I'll renovate when I want