I reread all his letters last night. And I don’t think he tried to play me. At least, maybe he did at the very beginning, but not anymore. I also don’t know how to fully describe how I’m feeling. Perhaps there are no words to explain such a thing, but …
Sometimes I still feel his hand in mine, drawing me through the smoke and terror of the trenches. Sometimes I still feel him lifting me up as if I were weightless, spinning me around as if we were dancing. Or how he came between me and the grenade, and I still can’t breathe. Sometimes I remember how my heart stopped when I saw him sprawled on his back, staring up at the sky as if he were dead. When I saw him walking through the field during the eithral siren. When we collided in the golden grass. When his lips touched mine.
I am coming to love him, in two different ways. Face to face, and word to word. If I’m honest, there were moments when I longed for Carver, and moments when I longed for Roman, and now I don’t know how to bring the two together. Or if I even should.
He was trying to tell me. And I was too distracted to put the pieces together. It’s my own fault; my pride is simply wounded, and I need to let it go and continue with my life, with or without him.
I’m just furious mortified upset seething afraid.
I’m afraid he’s going to hurt me. I’m afraid to lose someone I love again. I’m afraid to let go. To acknowledge what I feel for him. And yet he has proven himself to me. Over and over. He found me on my darkest day. He followed me to war, to the front lines. He came between me and Death, taking wounds that were supposed to be mine.
There is something electric within me. Something that is begging me to remove the last of my armor and let him see me as I am. To choose him. And yet here I sit, alone, typing word after word as I seek to make sense of myself. I watch the candlelight flicker and all I can think is …
I am so afraid. And yet how I long to be vulnerable and brave when it comes to my own heart.
{35}
The Hill That Almost Bested Iris
Iris knelt in the garden, watering the soil. In the days that she had been away at the front, a few green tendrils had started to break the ground, and the sight of their fragile unfurling made her heart soften. She imagined Keegan returning from the war soon, and the joy she would feel upon realizing that Marisol had ensured the garden was planted. It wasn’t the most beautiful or orderly garden, but it was slowly awakening.
I grew something living in a season of death.
The words echoed through Iris as she gently traced the closest stem with her fingertip. Her watering can was empty, but she remained kneeling, and the dampness of the soil bled into the knees of her jumpsuit.
She felt so tired and heavy. They had finished burying all the deceased the day before.
“Thought I might find you here,” Attie said.
Iris glanced over her shoulder to see her friend standing on the back terrace, shielding her eyes from the afternoon sunlight.
“Does Marisol need me?” Iris asked.
“No, actually.” Attie hesitated, kicking a pebble with the toe of her boot.
“What is it, Attie? You’re worrying me.”
“Roman just returned from the infirmary,” Attie said, clearing her throat. “He’s resting in his bedroom.”
“Oh.” Iris returned her attention to the soil, but her heart was suddenly pounding. It had been two days since she had gone to him, letters in hand. Two days since she had seen or spoken with him. Two days since they had kissed like they were each starving for the other. Two days that she had spent sorting through her feelings, trying to decide what to do. “That’s good to hear, I suppose.”
“I think you should go visit him, Iris.”
“Why?” She needed a distraction. There, a weed to pull. Iris made quick work of it, suddenly craving another task for her hands.
“I’m not sure what has come between the two of you, and I won’t ask,” Attie said. “All I know is that he doesn’t look well.”
The words chilled Iris to the bone.
“Doesn’t look well?”
“I mean … it looks like his spirit’s broken. And you know what they say about injured soldiers in low spirits.”
“Kitt’s a correspondent,” Iris argued, but there was a splinter in her voice. She couldn’t help but glance at Roman’s second-story window, remembering the day he had leaned on the sill, tossing a message to her.
His window was shut now, the curtains drawn over the glass panes.
Attie was silent. The lull eventually drew Iris’s gaze back to hers.
“Will you please visit him?” Attie asked. “I’ll take over the watering for you.”
Before Iris could scrounge up an excuse, Attie had scooped up the metal pail and was heading to the well.
Iris bit her lip but rose, knocking the dirt from her jumpsuit. She saw how filthy her hands were and stopped to scrub them in Marisol’s wash bin, only to give up with a sigh. Roman had already seen her at her dirtiest. Her messiest.
The house was full of quiet shadows as Iris ascended the stairs. Her heart quickened when she saw Roman’s bedroom door, closed to the world. She paused before the wood, listening to the ebb and flow of her breath, and then she scolded herself for being cowardly.
I won’t know what I want to do until I see him again.
She knocked, three times fast.
There was no answer. Frowning, she knocked again, harder and deliberate. But Roman was unresponsive.
“Kitt?” she called to him through the wood. “Kitt, will you please answer me?”
At last he replied in a flat voice, “What do you want, Winnow?”
“May I come in?”
Roman was silent for a beat, and then drawled, “Why not.”
Iris opened the door and stepped into his room. It was the first time she had been in his quarters, but her gaze went directly to him in the dusky light, where he was lying on his makeshift pallet on the floor. His eyes were closed, his fingers laced over his chest. He was dressed in a clean jumpsuit, his dark hair damp across his brow. She could smell the soap on his skin, which was uncommonly pallid. His face was shaved and his sharp cheekbones were sunken, as if he had become hollow.
And she was right; she knew exactly what she wanted to choose.
“What do you want?” he repeated, but his voice was a rasp.
“Good afternoon to you too,” Iris countered happily. “How are you feeling?”
“Peachy.”
A smile flirted with the corner of his lips, and the pit in her stomach began to ease. But his eyes remained shut. She suddenly longed for him to look at her.
“Ah, there’s the Second Alouette,” she said, her gaze fixing on his typewriter. Her heart warmed to see it. “Although it’s far too dim in here, Kitt! You should let the light in.”
“I don’t want the light,” he grumbled, but Iris had already parted the window curtains. He raised his hands to shield his face against the stream of sunshine. “Why have you come to torture me, Winnow?”
“If this is my torture, I would hate to see what my pleasure would be.”
Roman made no reply, his hands remaining splayed over his face. As if the last thing he wanted was to look at her.