To anyone else, anyone not looking closely, he would have been the same. A boy in the dark, a jacket thrown on over his shirt.
But Miel noticed. As soon as she saw him, she noticed. He’d left his jacket open, and she could see the shape of his chest through his shirt.
Her eyes flashed down his body before she drew them back up.
He laughed. He’d expected that, her startling a little when she realized he’d come outside without his binder on under his clothes. In front of anyone else, he always wore the binder, then an undershirt, then another shirt over it. Now it was just the shirt and the undershirt, covering him but showing her more of the shape of him than he’d ever let her see.
But he hadn’t expected the look that came with it, her mouth open a little more.
He’d worried that any girl who ever saw him like this would look at him like a pinned insect. He’d worried that, with clothes on, he was the brown underside of a butterfly, blending in with branches and bark, but that, naked, the reality of his body would be as startling as the bright blue-green of its inner wings.
That look though. It told him Miel was interested, not fascinated. To her, he was not a specimen.
He was someone she wanted.
He could give his body, as it was, to the one girl who understood it was not the whole of him. That there was a story told not just in the contours of his chest and what he had or did not have pressing against the center seam of his jeans. The rest of him was in what he chose. His haircut. His clothes.
His name.
Miel wasn’t looking around, searching the dark. There was no one else out there in the space between their houses, lit by a string of his moons. She knew that. It wasn’t about them being seen. But there was still doubt in her face when she looked at his shirt, not embarrassed, but protective.
He wondered if that was the look he had when he saw a rose opening on her wrist, that feeling of wanting to guard it. He would have felt that now if anyone else was around, Miel’s newest rose showing at the edge of her sleeve. The shell of the outer petals, cream-white as a moon, held a center as dark as her lipstick. The half-open blossom let off a scent that was less perfume and more oak and moss.
Light from the moons he’d hung out here brightened her hair, bleaching it from dark red to the color of rose apples. The white sliver of the moon in the sky traced her hands.
She had given Ivy Bonner something Ivy had never had, a part of her that was her own, that none of her sisters could lay claim to. Ivy’s hair seemed black against the same pale coloring she shared with her sisters, and the soft brown of Miel’s skin made that red look less like fire and more like blood oranges.
Ivy would always be a Bonner girl, and she and Miel would always have a spider-silk-thin thread between them that he only half understood. She still hadn’t told him everything that had happened.
But these were things he needed to give her time to say. She’d given him years to tell her his name.
He pushed a lock of hair out of her face, a ribbon the color of apricot honey.
She caught him looking at it. “Does it bother you?”
He looked down at his chest, unbound under his shirt and his undershirt. “Does this?”
“It never did,” she said. “But you don’t have to do this. Not for me. Not for anyone.”
“I know,” he said. “And you’re not anyone.”
Miel slid one hand into the back pocket of his jeans. A flinch went through his back and hips, but he didn’t pull away. She put her other hand between his shoulder blades, and the petals of her rose brushed the back of his neck.
She kept a little space between them, enough to keep the warmth of his body from meeting hers. She was following rules they had never set in words but that they’d held to, that there were parts of him he did not want to be reminded of.
But right now he wanted to claim all of himself.
When he got dressed for school, he’d put the binder back on before he put on anything else. He didn’t want anyone looking at him and deciding for him what he was.
Tonight, though, he wanted to feel every part of his own body, and know it could not name him. It could not force him into a life that had never been his.
“If you’re not ready,” Miel said.
He took her hand and set it on the edge of his shirt, letting her fingers grasp the hem. “I am.”
lake of hope
For so long she’d been so afraid of everything that grew in the pumpkin fields that she’d never understood the small miracle Sam’s hands had held. His hands and his brushes turned paper and paint into moons, and his hands and the pollination brush turned the possibility of things growing into the truth of them growing. It made blossoms that opened for one day become flesh and seeds and so many colors.