Even when her lips broke away from Sam’s, he kept his hand on the back of her neck, his mouth still so close to hers she felt the rhythm of his breathing.
He pulled her against him, his arm holding her waist. This morning her rose had given off the scent of honey and apricot, but now its perfume had the weight and spice of copal incense. It filled the air between them.
Each time he kissed her, that faint cardamom taste of his mouth made her shut her eyes. But then it turned bitter on her tongue. The more she cared about him, the more the Bonner sisters saw she cared about him, the more they’d know he was how to get to her. The more they saw how she looked at him, touched his arm when she laughed, pulled him into the trees when he was on his breaks, the more they’d wield that birth certificate.
He was her best friend, and everyone knew it. But half this town must have assumed they were best friends by default. The boy who hung dozens of copies of the moon, and the girl from the water tower. The girl afraid of pumpkins, and the boy who knew how to keep snakes away with cinnamon and clove oil and pink agapanthus. They were each so strange that only someone as odd as the other could get so close.
But if she loved him, the Bonner girls would feel it. She already had to do what they wanted, offer her roses in exchange for their silence. But she couldn’t let them near him. He couldn’t know that the secret held between him and his mother and Aracely and Miel was also in the hands of these four sisters. It would turn him frightened and skittish. He’d hide from the questions he needed to stare down.
She put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him away. “I can’t.” She cradled her forearm against her sweater. “We never should have done this. Any of it.”
“What?” he asked. “Why?”
She reached into the dark for a lie, her fingers grasping for anything solid. “We know each other too well. We’ve been friends too long to do this.” Her voice was thinning and breaking. “We can’t do this.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said, the first word clipped by a hard swallow. “I care about you. But I can’t be with you.” She turned her back to him before the damp sting of salt hit her cheek. “Not like this.”
Even walking away from him, she heard him catch his breath in the back of his throat.
“Miel,” he said.
But she didn’t answer, so he didn’t go after her.
She tried to get far enough away that she wouldn’t hear the soft brushing sound of him slipping his hands into his pockets. And she didn’t look back until she knew he was gone.
This time, when the Bonner girls found her in the dark space between trees, she did not fight. And because she did not fight, they did not dig their fingers into her, or drag her to the stained glass coffin. They just set their hands on her, like they were all in church and they were blessing her. Ivy parted the blades of those brass scissors, and Miel gave herself over to the blazing reds and oranges of the Bonner girls, bright as tongues of flame.
bay of honor
She kept the door to her room closed. She almost never kept the door to her room closed. But lately she and Aracely barely spoke. Miel didn’t know if Aracely was still mad at her, and she didn’t know if she should ask.
Miel lay curled on her side, cheek against her comforter.
Aracely was civil, and that made it worse. She poured Miel coffee in the morning, offered without speaking, but didn’t hold her lips tight or look away like she was angry. She just handed over the cup and then went back to frying nasturtium blossoms. It reminded Miel of how badly she’d ruined the lovesickness cure, and how she’d thinned out Ms. Owens’ loyalty so badly that she was open to the whispers and charms of four fire-haired girls.
Now it was all on Miel to save Sam, to make sure no one tried to force him into matching the name on that paper. She had cut into pieces the net Aracely had woven for all of them. The ache in her wrist, like Ivy was pressing the point of those brass scissors into her, would not let her forget.
The tap of knuckles struck Miel’s door, the soft rhythm she recognized.
“Come in,” Miel said without moving.
The thread of Aracely’s perfume snuck into the room ahead of her.
“Are you hungry?” Aracely said. “I was thinking of making something.”
Miel shook her head, cheek still against the bed.
Aracely sat on the edge of her bed, the slow lowering of her weight buoying Miel a little. It had always been a comforting feeling to her, the sense of another person sitting near her, especially Aracely. Now it sharpened the truth of how little they’d talked.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you about Emma,” Aracely said.
“I deserved it,” Miel said, her voice coming out hoarse without her meaning it to. Not a crying sound. More like her voice, within the country of this house, had fallen out of use.
“No, you didn’t,” Aracely said. “And I went over there and made it right. She’s cured. At least until the next time around.”