She thought she had made him up, this boy she had imagined out of shadow, the difference between dark and moonlight. His hair, so dark that at night it looked like blue-violet ink. The brown of his forearms and the back of his neck, the color of the cinnamon fiddlehead ferns his mother grew along the side of the house.
But then the dark flash of his hair and his hands turned to the warmth of him. It turned to him setting her arms around him when she couldn’t feel them enough to do it herself, and him pulling her out. He had the gravity of the moon in the sky. He could pull on oceans and rivers. He could drag lakes across deserts. There was enough force in him to turn the river that held her to light. He drew the water out of this place where she was forever slipping from her mother’s hold and drowning in the dark.
“What happened?” he asked.
She breathed in the warmth that clung to his skin, her forehead on his shoulder, her cheek against his shirt. If she stayed this close to him, he was the whole world. There was no stained glass, there were no pumpkins turning clear and brittle, no gradations of red sweeping through the dark. There was no lost moon, not when he remade it so many times. There was just the strength in him from all those nights taking the wooden ladder from his mother’s shed and into the trees. She could feel it in his hands and his arms. She could feel it when she slid her palms over his back.
“Who did this to you?” he asked, his arms crossing her back.
But she only half-registered his words. Her body was sore from fighting the glass, and her skin was stinging with dried salt, and she held on to him hard enough that she felt him startle, his breath catching between them.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s okay.” And for the space of his words, they were small again, her soaked in rust-darkened water, and him, the one boy she didn’t scare.
She set her mouth against his cheek, kissing him where she’d slapped him, her grasp at taking it back. She would let her whole body turn to roses in exchange for making those few seconds disappear, how she’d struck him when he was hurting.
The steadiness came back into him. He understood. Her hands in his hair or clutching the back of his shirt, the I’m sorry folded into how she touched him. And she felt it, how him holding her, his palms making her feel her own body again, this was his I know, his so am I.
There were apologies too heavy for their tongues. Even too heavy for any one set of their hands. So this one, they shared. They carried it together. They interlaced their fingers, hers against his, and held it in their palms. They wore it on their skin. They guarded it in the breath of space between their bodies.
And this, their first apology in a language they were still learning, was a thing they stammered and halted through. But it stopped them from spinning out and losing each other. It kept them in each other’s fields of gravity, finding each other.
lake of dreams
Still holding on to him, she’d begged him not to take her home. “Please,” she said. “I don’t want her seeing me like this.” She didn’t want this to be the way Aracely thought of her, shaking and still trying to get her breath back, her skin pale with salt.
She’d already wrecked everything with Sam. He’d seen the worst, cruelest places in her.
But with Aracely there was still a little left to salvage. She was still the girl who handed her blue eggs and lumia lemons. They were still something a little like sisters, standing at the stove together, melting the piloncillo into their coffee.
So now she lay on her stomach on a sofa in Sam’s living room, her cheek against the cushion.
Sam sat next to her, his hand on her back as he asked her, “What happened to you? Who put you in there?”
She couldn’t drag her eyes up to him. She stared at the woven rug under the coffee table, the knotted wool in reds and creams and deep blues.
It was so quiet in this house, empty except for them, and the two of them barely talking, that Miel could hear Sam’s next breath out.
He pulled his hand back, and Miel couldn’t move enough to tell him she wanted it.
His fingers slid off her. “What I said…”
Don’t, she tried to say. They had settled things, made their apologies, with their hands and their bodies. You don’t have to say anything.
“What I told you,” he said. “I didn’t…”
She heard him blow a slow, soft breath out between his lips.
Her heart felt like a thing becoming glass, its flesh turning hard and fragile. She’d wanted this since the day he turned her skin into a brown sky dotted with pale constellations. But now she was too broken and brittle to take it. She wasn’t a soft place he could fall. She was all edges, all fierce rivers and panels of stained glass. Only joints of rose brass held her together.
He sighed, standing up. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him slipping his hand into his pockets.
“Do you need more water?” he asked.
She shook her head. She’d already stood at the tap, drinking out of her cupped hand before Sam could hand her a glass.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
She shook her head.