How easily the ache in my heart-center returns, the want that can only be sated with his hands against my cold, cold flesh. I am weak. This man makes me pliable and meek in ways I don’t understand.
Levi walks to the dresser and opens the top drawer where his laundry has been neatly cleaned and sorted and folded by several woman in the community. Levi is always tended to, the necessities of his daily life organized around him. I wonder if this will change once Alice Weaver takes up residence inside his home? Will her hands toil over the fabric that lies against his skin, will she mend the clothes that need stitching, will she hang his sheets to dry on the line outside? Will she fold herself into his life seamlessly, ridding me from it completely?
“I’m sorry about everything,” Levi says, reaching into the drawer and pulling out the flask he keeps hidden there. He unscrews the top, the sound of metal, and takes a drink—his throat swallowing stiffly.
I don’t answer him, instead my ears absorb the sound of his heart beating heavily in his chest, the rapid thud, the booze swimming through him and making his skin radiate heat. He walks to me, careful and slow, and my own heart claws against my ribs—betraying me, wanting to reach out and touch the surface of his flesh, to stand up and kiss him. But I don’t allow myself to do this stupid thing.
He has married another woman tonight. He is bound to her now, not me.
“I know that I hurt you,” he says, words smashed together, and I realize he has brought me upstairs to avoid anyone seeing us together, glimpsing us through a window, alone on his wedding night—when he should be with his wife. He sits on the bed beside me. So close. “I know I’ve made everything worse.” His hand lifts and I think he touches a strand of my hair but I can’t be sure. He lets out a hollow breath of air, like someone has punched him in the stomach, and he turns away, his voice directed at the doorway. “You make this hard for me.” I want to remember the feel of his lips on mine, I want to forget everything he said to me before, I want to forget that later tonight, when the party has ended, Alice Weaver will sleep in this bed beside him. In the same place where I have dreamed and dozed and felt the sunrise.
He makes a weak, shuddering sound, like tears might have broken over his eyelids. But then he says, “I have obligations here, in Pastoral.” He takes another drink from the flask, as if fortifying himself, stuffing down whatever he’s afraid to feel. “Alice understands that, she understands what it means to be my wife.”
The words fall like a hammer against my kneecaps, shattering bone.
And I don’t? I want to scream. I know Levi better than anyone, better than he knows himself. Better than docile, perfect Alice Weaver. But the anger feels buried in my marrow, tamped down by a calm buzzing in my eardrums.
“You have always been fearless, wilder than the other girls, especially when we were younger,” he continues. He smells like sweat and the sharpness of whiskey. He smells like summer grass, green and sweet under a hot sun—he smells familiar—but his words bite at me as if he were a stranger. “It’s what I’ve always loved about you. But it’s also why you’re dangerous. You put everything at risk.”
“Why?” I ask, my voice a distant thing, stuffed into the spaces between my ribs.
“Because I think someday you’ll leave me. You’ll try to leave Pastoral.”
I shake my head, but the motion is dizzying, eyes blinking, fluttering up and down, and I think I see candlelight across the room—a flickering that can’t be anything else. But when I squint, it’s replaced by darkness.
Levi stands up and the absence of his body next to mine makes me shiver. “Those men leaving, trying to escape, it feels like it’s only the beginning. Soon others will try too.”
“They weren’t trying to escape,” I explain. “They were going to get help.”
“There is a thin line between escape and sacrifice.” I’m not sure of his meaning, but I hear his footsteps move to the window, and I imagine him staring out at a starlit forest, the moon suspended low in the sky. He’s so far away, I couldn’t touch him even if I wanted to. “I can feel a change in them, all of them,” he says, carefully tracing the words he wants to say before he lets them leave his lips. “They don’t trust me anymore. They think of the outside world, of what they don’t have instead of what they do.”
I run my fingers along the quilt beneath me, feeling the familiar stitching, the pattern sewn together in little triangles. There are no holes, no torn edges in it—unlike most things in Pastoral. It has been mended and well-kept. “They still trust you,” I say, my own mind slipping back into old patterns. Always comforting, always reassuring. Even now, I can’t help but buoy him up. It’s what I’ve always done—I am the guidepost for a man who sways so easily off course. “They just need to know that you trust them in return, that you make decisions for them, not for yourself.”
“Everything I do is for them,” he snaps, his body twisting around, his voice now directed back at me and not at the window. “Those men would have undermined everything if they’d made it any farther down that road. If they’d gone into town.”
“Why?”
He crosses back to the bed. “We don’t know what’s out there,” he answers, mostly to himself. “We don’t know what’s left.”
“What are you talking about?”
He breathes and takes another drink from his flask. The room smells of alcohol, it saturates the walls, the linens, Levi’s skin. As if the house itself has been soaked in whiskey.
“They were traitors,” he answers at last, with a quick finality.
“They weren’t traitors,” I argue. “They only wanted to save Ash’s child.”
His breathing grows deep, a heady weight to each inhale and exhale. “It doesn’t matter why they did it, only that they did. They had to be punished.”
“They were hung because they were sick. Not because they were traitors,” I correct.
He makes a strange sound from the back of his throat. “They see what they want to see.” He sinks back onto the bed beside me, his body too heavy to hold up.