“Bullshit,” I spit out. I turn back to Julian. “Come on,” I say in a low voice. “Let’s go inside. We’ll clean you up.”
He takes his hand away from his nose, then brings his shirt to his face, wiping the remaining blood off his lip. Now his shirt is coated with dark streaks, glistening almost black in the night. “No way,” he says, still without looking at me. “We were just getting started. Weren’t we, Alex?”
“Julian—” I start to plead. Alex cuts me off.
“Lena’s right,” he says, his tone deliberately light. “It’s late. We can barely see anything out here. We can pick up again tomorrow.”
Julian’s voice is also light—but beneath it I can hear a hard edge of anger, a bitterness I don’t recognize. “No time like the present.”
The silence stretches between them, electric and dangerous.
“Please, Julian.” I reach for his wrist and he shakes me off. I turn once again to Alex, willing him to look at me, to break eye contact with Julian. The tension between them is cresting, peaking, like something black and murderous rising underneath the surface of the air. “Alex.”
Alex looks at me finally, and for a second I see a look of surprise cross his face—as though he hadn’t realized I was there, or as though he is only just seeing me. It’s followed quickly by an expression of regret, and just like that the tension ebbs away and I can breathe.
“Not tonight,” Alex says shortly. Then he turns around and goes to push back into the woods.
In an instant, before I can react or cry out, Julian charges and tackles him from behind. He brings Alex tumbling to the concrete, and all of a sudden they are spitting and grunting, rolling over each other, wrestling each other into the ground. Then I do scream—both their names, and stop, and please.
Julian is on top of Alex. He draws his fist up; I hear the heavy thud as he swings it down against Alex’s cheek. Alex spits at him, gets a hand on Julian’s jaw, forcing his head back, pushing Julian up and off. Distantly, I think I hear shouting, but I can’t focus on it, can’t do anything but scream until my throat is sore. There are lights, too, flashing in my peripheral vision, as though I’m the one getting hit, as though my vision is exploding with bursts of color.
Alex manages to gain the advantage and presses Julian back against the ground. He swings twice, hard, and I hear a horrible crack. Blood is flowing freely across Julian’s face now.
“Alex, please!” I’m crying now. I want to pull him off Julian, but fear has frozen me in place, rooted me to the ground.
But either Alex doesn’t hear me or he chooses to ignore me. I’ve never seen him look like this: his face lit up with anger, transfigured in the moonlight to something raw and harsh and terrifying. I can’t even scream anymore, can’t do anything but cry convulsively, feel nausea build in my throat. Everything is surreal, slow-motion.
Then Tack and Raven burst through the trees on a blaze of sudden light—sweating, out of breath, carrying lanterns—and Raven is shouting and gripping me by the shoulders, and Tack pulls Alex off Julian—“What the fuck are you doing?”—and everything begins moving at normal speed again. Julian coughs once and lies back against the ground. I break away from Raven and run toward him, dropping to my knees. I know immediately that his nose is broken. His face is dark with blood, and his eyes are two bare slits as he struggles to sit up.
“Hey.” I put a hand on his chest, swallowing back the spasms in my throat. “Hey, take it easy.”
Julian relaxes again. I feel his heart beating up into my palm.
“What happened?” Tack is shouting.
Alex is standing a little ways away from where Julian is lying. All his anger is gone; instead he looks shocked, his hands limp at his sides. He’s staring at Julian, looking puzzled, as though he doesn’t know how Julian got there.
I stand up and move toward him, feeling the anger crawl into my fingers. I wish I could wrap them around his neck, choke him.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” My voice is low. I have to push the words out past the hard lump of anger in my throat.
“I—I’m sorry,” Alex whispers. He shakes his head. “I didn’t mean . . . I don’t know what happened. I’m sorry, Lena.”
If he keeps looking at me like that—pleading, willing me to understand—I know I’ll start to forgive him.
“Lena.” He takes a step toward me, and I take a step back. For a moment we stand there; I can feel the pressure of his eyes on me, and the pressure, too, of his guilt. But I won’t look at him. I can’t.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats again, too low for Raven and Tack to hear. “I’m sorry for everything.”
Then he turns and pushes back into the woods, and he’s gone.
Hana
Out of the shifting liquid of my sleep, the dream rises and takes shape:
Lena’s face.
Lena’s face, floating out of the shadow. No. Not shadow. She is pushing up from the ash, from a deep drift of cinders and char. Her mouth is open. Her eyes are closed.