Sam looked up. “One thing, Miel. One thing I didn’t want to talk about. I’ve given you all there is of me. You have it. How much of you have you kept back?”
She had held nothing back just because she wanted to keep it from him. His was a world of painted moons and feather grasses and trees that bloomed in autumn. She didn’t want to bring into that world the awful, half-remembered things she grasped at when she had a fever. She wanted to be the girl who belonged under his moons, the girl whose skin he’d set foil stars on in constellations that mirrored the sky.
Maybe she’d kept more from him than he had from her. But he was still as unfamiliar as the valleys of vapor on the moon. She didn’t know the safe ways to touch him, or whether she should say his name, let the word Sam off her tongue when he was touching her and she barely had the breath for it. She didn’t know if it would remind him that she wanted him, or if it would just remind him that he did not want to be a girl called Samira.
She knew him no better than the landscapes in those library astronomy atlases. He was as distant as the lake of summer and the marsh of sleep and the ocean of storms.
“I can’t map you,” she said, and the choked laugh in her own voice surprised her. That resignation, the giving-up, made her body feel light, unmoored. “I’ve tried, and I can’t map you.”
“I don’t want you to map me,” he said. “I want you to…”
The sound of his voice cut out. He winced harder than when she’d slapped him, his slouch so hard and fast she thought he was doubling over. She stepped forward to catch him, hold him up. But he straightened, pulled himself back.
Even through this, she caught his mouth slipping into the shape of the next word, a word his voice gave no sound. His tongue flicked against his teeth, but then he bit it, stopping himself.
It was still enough to let her guess what he didn’t finish saying.
I don’t want you to map me. I want you to love me.
The unsaid words clung to her like foil stars. She felt the light from his moons tracing them, the shadows of lunar seas leaving their outlines on her skin. She would wear this night—those words, said and unsaid—on her body. Whether the points of those stars would cut into her hinged on whether she answered what he could not say.
“I love you,” she said, the words said so softly they didn’t feel tethered to her. “I’ve always loved you. You know that, right?”
She meant it however he wanted to take it. That she loved him as the boy who’d first been willing to come near her. That she loved him as her best friend. That she loved him in a way that made her glow with the memory of every moon he’d ever painted and every time he’d spread his hands over her back.
“Yeah, great.” The sarcasm in his voice was sudden, as sharp and narrow as an icicle, and she felt the rose stem dragging its thorns against her skin. “But you know what? I don’t love you. Because I don’t know you.” He turned his back to her and the river. “You never let me.”
lake of sorrow
They had said so many awful things to each other, but this was what echoed in her head like the sound of glass breaking. I don’t love you. I don’t love you.
She had loved him since they were small, when they’d met on feral land among the brush of feather reed grass. They had spent nights pretending the stars were things that could be lured to earth. That the fairy rings thick with white-capped mushrooms were the light of the moon seared into the ground.
A little more of the rose slid out of Miel’s wrist. It made her bite down on her tongue, the faint taste of blood slipping down her throat.
She knelt next to the water and plunged her hand in, her palm still hot from hitting Sam. The first cord of gold was tracing the hills, but she hadn’t gone home, knowing Aracely would probably still be sitting in Ms. Owens’ kitchen. If she went home, she’d take Sam’s words home with her, and they’d rattle around in that empty house, barren and cold without Aracely’s noise and laugh.
Miel beat her hands against the water. Her fingers clawed at the current, even though she knew it wouldn’t feel it, that she never hurt it the way it had hurt her. She could never take from the river as much as it had taken from her.
And now she couldn’t even give her mother the offering of her roses. She couldn’t cut them away and force them down into the river that had stolen her mother. The Bonners demanded she surrender those petals, or they’d spread lies about her mother and what they thought was the truth about Sam.
The blood and muscle holding her together felt like a cast iron pan left out on a stove, barely cooled. The autumn air around her felt like ice that might crack just from touching her skin.
A thread on her forearm, hot and damp like a trickle of honey, made her open her eyes.
She looked down at her wrist.
A trail of blood dripped onto her palm.
The rose was gone. There was nothing but the stub of a stem, the wood rough from being snapped instead of cut.