In moments of lying to herself, she told herself it was just Sam, just that she wanted to see him and touch where the sweat off the back of his neck had left his hair a little damp. She wanted to kiss him when his mouth was still wet from having just taken a swallow of water.
And that was true. But in moments of letting the rest of the truth edge into her, she knew she wanted the Bonner sisters to see her. Wanted them to catch her pulling Sam into the woods, kissing him before they even reached the trees’ shadows. She wanted them to see her bare wrist and know that just because they were the Bonner girls, just because they’d gotten Hunter Cross and Jerome Carter and every other boy they wanted, didn’t mean she’d turn over to them the things her body grew.
If they thought they needed her roses, they had lost something. That left Miel less afraid of them knowing she wanted Sam, and more intent on them knowing he did not belong to them. He belonged to himself, and to his mother, and maybe even to Miel, but not to them. He wasn’t theirs any more than Miel’s roses were.
Today she caught Sam at the edge of the pumpkin fields, pulled him under a sycamore big enough to hide them both. For a few minutes, before he went back to work, and she left to finish her reading or pick up eggs from the Carlsons’ farm, this canopy of leaves, orange and gold at the edges but still green at its heart, was their whole world.
She backed him against the bark, kissing him hard enough that it stung. Her hand brushed his chest, and without her realizing she spread it flat, fingers fanned out against his shirt.
She only noticed when he shuddered, his shoulders pressing back harder against the tree.
“Sorry,” she said, her mouth still near his. “Sorry.”
They both stayed still, taking in a long breath of air that was wet and earthy with fall but sharp from the smoke of farmers burning leaves.
Miel told her palm to move. She tried to send the impulse to her fingers to pull away from him. She knew so much of his body, but this was a place she hadn’t touched. His chest had been against her when they were in his bed, but she hadn’t mapped it with her hands.
Even with the undershirt that pressed it down and, through a shirt, made his chest flat as any other boy’s, she never put her hands here. Not even poking a finger just under his collarbone when she teased him or flirted with him. It was a part of his body he didn’t like being reminded of, and she understood, now, that her hands were the worst kind of reminder.
She checked his watch for him, always checked his watch for him, because she knew he didn’t like telling her he had to get back.
“You’re late,” she said.
He kissed her again, hard, and it felt like him telling her that they could forget this. He would forgive her. Not even forgive her. He would let it go, treat it like the accident it was. Like him holding her in a way that pressed the edge of his belt buckle into her, or her, without meaning to when she put her hand to the side of his neck, scratching him.
When he left, she leaned against the tree, hands flat on the bark behind the small of her back, and watched him. To her he had always been Sam, the boy who made the moon for her, the boy whose silhouette she’d found a hundred times on that wooden ladder, light filling his hands. That didn’t change when she saw him, through the bedroom door he thought he’d closed but with a latch that sometimes sighed open, changing his clothes or getting dressed after taking a shower. It was only then that she saw that part of him he bound down with that undershirt, or his hips, a little wider in a way that didn’t show through jeans but she could see when he had on just his boxers.
None of it had been a surprise. She knew what he was, the tension in the fact that, to anyone who didn’t understand, there was contradiction between how he lived and what he had under his clothes. How he had to wear pants loose enough that no one noticed what he did or did not have.
His face was softer than the other boys in their class, but his work on the Bonners’ farm had added enough muscle to his back and shoulders that he looked a little broader than before. Boys at school had almost stopped calling him a girl, a thing they meant as something else, a thing they said without knowing what they were saying.
From what little Miel knew, from what little his mother had been willing to say, this was something Sam thought he would grow out of.
He didn’t seem to realize he was growing into it.
Miel walked alongside the road, the points of wet, fallen leaves brushing her ankles.
A swath of copper swept out of the woods, like a whole branch of leaves breaking loose.
Ivy Bonner stood, watching her.
“I want to show you something,” she said. No greeting, no introduction. Not even a glare for Miel’s bare wrist.
Miel could have kept walking. But ignoring her would have felt like provocation. Keeping quiet, not telling her no, had cost her that candle-yellow rose.
“What?” Miel asked.