Peyton’s eyes opened a little more, a wild look that was closer to anger than surprise.
It satisfied Miel more than she expected. It may have been as surface-level as the cracks on the stained glass coffin, but it still cut across the color and shimmer that was the Bonner girls.
“I hope the three of them are all you need,” Miel said. “Because they’re gonna be all you have left.”
Her wrist felt heavy, like the muscle had grown dense as a river stone.
It felt heavier when she realized Peyton was watching it.
A few more leaves had grown from her wrist, peeking out from her sleeve. They sheltered a tiny rosebud, the near-blue of an amethyst, shining with blood and water.
lake of winter
The green shoot was already thickening into a stem, and the heat turned to a slashing feeling. Miel felt the stem’s base anchored in her forearm, reaching almost to the inside of her elbow, under a veil of skin and muscle.
After she’d left the Bonners’ house, the round pearl of the bud had fattened to the size of a marble. Now it was as big as an unbloomed peony, one flinch from shuddering open.
Miel thought of Sam’s palm on her shoulder blade, and pain burned bright through her forearm. It felt as alive as if it had fingers and breath. Each time the stem crawled a sliver further out of her wrist, she wanted to let a scream pour from her throat.
Its perfume, like the warm sugar of figs and pomegranates, felt damning, proof to the Bonner sisters of how much she wanted him. It gossiped to the women at the market. It confessed to the priests at church. It spoke of the olives and lemon groves Sam’s father ran through as a child.
The thought of cutting it off her own wrist came to her, and stayed. It scratched at her, like noticing a trickle of blood on her lip and trying not to lick it away. It pulled her, this rose that had grown faster than any other before it.
But she couldn’t cut it away and kill it.
The Bonner sisters wanted it, demanded it. And Peyton had seen the start of this one, a deeper violet than the house Miel lived in with Aracely.
Without putting on her shoes, Miel crept downstairs and outside, taking a full breath when the night air hit her forearm. The grass smelled clean and strong as citrus pith, and each blade looked a little gilded, taking in light from the house like a cloth soaking up oil.
“Miel.” She heard Sam’s voice. Not the question he’d made of her name when he found her staring at the stained glass pumpkins. He was calling her.
He’d been coming from his house. Even from this distance, in the dark, she could see the tints of the roof tiles. The day she had spilled out of the water tower, her eyes damp and sore, those different-colored tiles had made Sam’s house seem like a place out of a fairy tale.
Now it seemed like a place that the cruel force of her roses might wreck if she came too close.
The moon he carried was not the kind he hung outside her window, the pale blue-lavender of a frost moon, or the soft green of a corn moon, the kind he made for nightmare-plagued children. This one he’d painted in white, and black, and where they met, a thin band of gray. He painted not on paper or fabric but on a rusted metal globe, discarded by an antique shop; she’d gone with him to get it and a half-dozen others they were junking.
He’d covered it in the blue-black of a new moon, and then added the sharp slice of a waning crescent.
“Where are you putting it?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet,” he said.
She wanted to ask if she could go with him, watch him climb that wooden ladder and set the moon in a high tree, this gash of light.
It scared her a little. She’d never seen him paint a moon like this, all white and black, no hint of color, mare insularum and sinus honoris in gray. It was so different from every moon he’d ever brought her, the violets and blues of lunar seas painted on paper, or the plains in a gold so faint they looked like cream.
But that stark beauty made her want to kiss him so badly that the lack of it made her lips feel cold. Her tongue was ice in her own mouth. Her breath was winter wind that stung every surface inside her.
He knew. She saw the shift in how he looked at her, the way his lips parted, a breath held between them. He set down the moon and kissed her, the taste of him like the black cardamom Aracely kept in a glass jar. The smoke and spice filled the air whenever she opened it. Like ginger made darker.
Sam tasted like the one night each year when the air turned from fall to winter, the sudden cold, the smell of damp bark.
Winged cardamom. That was what Aracely called it. For the way the pods, split open, looked like moths about to take flight. The taste fluttered on Miel’s tongue like a meadow brown on an iris petal.