This pale, rose-colored light had made her expect to look out her window and find all the trees blooming. A million blushing petals against a midnight sky. Spring descending over fall in countless pink blossoms. That blush on the whole world had turned her next breath into something between a gasp and a laugh. She could almost feel it in her mouth now, almost laughed like that again, but the salt at the back of her throat choked it out of her.
She sank under the memory of finding the trees outside not in blossom, but all amber and gold, tinted with that rose light. Instead of disappointment, it made her feel covered in the sound of his name. Sam. Samir. Moon. All the names she knew for him. Only one of his moons could make the world slip into another season.
Miel opened her eyes as much as she could, her eyelashes shading her vision. She slipped her fingers tight between Sam’s.
She felt his heartbeat in his chest. She heard him saying her name over and over, the two of them breaking against each other.
Her eyes stung, and stayed dry. She had nothing left but the will to hold on to his hand, not to lose him. The water had taken Leandro. It had almost taken Sam. She wasn’t letting go. All the strength in her body she let pour toward her fingers like sand. The night would not turn to water and tear his hand from hers. No matter how much the dark became a river and the wind a current, no matter how much blood Ivy’s pale fingers had taken from her, Miel would not let go of Sam.
Through the slow, loud rhythm of her own pulse in her temples, she heard him sobbing into her hair. The sound was so low, it disappeared. He was holding it tight in his throat, like he meant to stay quiet. His breathing was hard enough that she felt it staggered with his heartbeat.
She wanted to lift her hand to his cheek, to still any drops on his face before their salt reached his lips or his neck. There wasn’t a reason to cry, or be afraid. She wasn’t letting go, wasn’t losing him. If her lips had given up any sound, she would’ve told him.
A lock of his hair brushed Miel’s cheek, like a whip of cool air. But her skin was so hot she barely felt it. He was holding her so close his eyelashes feathered against her cheek. And she meant to hold on to these things, not lose them like silver charms slipping from her fingers and falling into dark water.
The soft brush of something small and wispy grazed Miel’s cheek. She thought it was his eyelashes, or another lock of his hair, but then she felt it again.
The cool film of petals.
She looked up at Sam.
Instead of the salt of his tears, tiny rose petals, red as the blood she was losing, clung to his cheeks. One had caught on the inner corner of his eye. Another had stuck to his lower lip, a third on his temple.
He blinked, and another fell from his eyelashes.
A flicker of movement tilted inside her forearm. She felt a new burst of growth breaking through to the light. She held her gasp in her lungs, and glanced down at the green shoot, covered in tiny new leaves.
It was curling out, taking on the woody look of a rose stem. Then it uncoiled, turning green and pliable, like a morning glory vine.
One thorn snagged the fabric of Sam’s shirt, pulling it back enough to find its way out of the cloth he’d tied around her arm. Then it unfurled and reached Sam’s bare wrist, pressing into him. He flinched but then relaxed, and for that second she thought she could feel what he felt, the pain clean and sudden as a needle.
Then Miel felt the pull, a shift between her veins.
Red lit up the stem, the leaves and thorns tinted gold like sun on a dragonfly.
The stem was drawing blood out of Sam. Miel could feel it dripping into her.
She tried to twist away from it, to stop taking from Sam when she had already taken so much from him.
But now he held on to her, his fingers sure. Before his hand had been tense and twitching against hers. Now it kept her still.
The glow traveled from his wrist to hers, like the stem was pulling from his body not blood but light.
He held his wrist closer to hers, giving his blood to the lit-up stem. She didn’t want to take it from him, to strip from him something that belonged to his body. But now he held on to her harder than she’d held on to him. Now he wouldn’t let her break away from him any more than she’d let his hand go.
The few petals clinging to his cheek rained onto her neck and collarbone. The stem curled away from Sam’s wrist, drawing back so close to Miel’s that it tucked under the fabric of Sam’s shirt around her wrist. And her body began to feel like a living thing again, her heart no longer shuddering.
The world came back to her in time to hear the Bonner sisters, their voices twisting in the air like strands of a braid.
eastern sea
Giving her his blood had left his wrist sore, a good kind. His body felt that way after he’d spent the afternoon hauling in the biggest field and Cinderella pumpkins. The stem had pulled back toward Miel’s wrist, and the cut from the thorn felt clean, already healing.
He felt Miel shifting her weight.
“Can you help me get up?” she asked.