Chapter Thirty. Rory
Rory
It was a long, long autumn. An autumn of longing, stolen looks and hushed, furtive releases in remote corners of the house.
Nights were the worst. Rory would wake in the early hours as he always did—heart pounding with nightmares or with dreams that left him stiff and ashamed—to the sound of Daye’s soft breath, to a leg thrust out of the covers or shirt hitched up to reveal a strip of midriff.
And though he’d seen her legs and stomach every day of every summer since he was eight, nighttime lent them a special nakedness, an intimacy of sheets and abandon that felt sensual, almost lewd.
That he had no right to see, to look at, to stare and yearn and—
He usually took himself to the shower, to the shed, to the spare bedroom across the hall.
Twice, waking from dreams that left him flushed and reckless, he touched himself in his bed, resolutely not looking at Daye, then resolutely staring at her, then resolutely staring away.
Both times, he was too afraid to let it last more than a handful of minutes.
Too aware of how badly he was transgressing; too ashamed to continue and too desperate to stop.
Still, even the guilt and shame were somehow easier than the nights when Daye smiled in her sleep, and the possibility of going to her, of nudging her awake and whispering in her ear how he felt, seemed so very close, so very feasible.
Like it had happened already, and Rory would be merely retracing his steps—
No.
He was waiting. He would wait. He had to.
Waiting was the best plan he could come up with through wakeful nights of lists and arguments and possibilities weighted and discarded.
Through hours upon hours of counting all the reasons, all the thousand ways his feelings were a bad idea, listing them again and again as if they were a rosary, a prayer, a math problem he’d somehow gotten wrong all the previous times he tried solving it, but this time might add up to a different answer altogether:
One: Daye was his best friend. His family in all but the make of their bodies, all but the blood and bone and root and flower. It felt wrong to think about her like that, though not wrong enough to stop.
Two: He had no reason to think that she felt the same for him. And how awkward it would be, how awful, to confess his feelings and receive only a kind smile, a pitying shrug of her shoulder in return.
Three (and this was where the list always began to unravel): Even if she did feel the same, it still didn’t mean that it was a good idea to do anything about it.
What if they tried being together, and it didn’t work, and it ruined their friendship?
What would he do without her? What would Daye do without him?
She couldn’t survive without him. Daye had no choice but to be his friend. Even if she didn’t want to.
What if Daye said yes only because she was afraid?
What if (and the pain of this thought made him flinch every time) Daye stayed with him out of fear? Going through the motions of a relationship she didn’t want while he remained oblivious, sure they were in love?
What if Daye couldn’t trust him?
What if—and this was the heart of it—what if he couldn’t trust himself? What would he do if Daye broke his heart?
He didn’t know. He didn’t know the answer to any of it. And the stakes were too high to chance it and hope for the best.
There really was only one choice: Wait until he found a solution, a way to make Daye independent, a way to remove the need for transition once and for all. Wait until Daye could say no, and Rory could be sure that a yes had no strings lurking in its shadow.
He would wait. There was no other way.
But Rory kept wanting, and every time he looked at Daye, that wanting flared, and every time he took himself away from Daye, he missed her so much it hurt.
He spent as much of that winter as he could in the city, throwing himself into his friends, his books, his research, the sheer safety of distance.
Even the awkwardness that had sprung up between Hanna and him ever since the kiss neither of them acknowledged wasn’t enough to dampen the relief of being away.
On a whim, he even caved to Wynne’s pressure and let Elliott and Noah goad him into taking the entrance exam in February, though despite his grade being good enough for a standing acceptance, he never went so far as to enroll.
Every time he considered it, he found himself on the next train home, itching to see Daye, to be near her, to talk to her.
Even if the moment he got there, all he could do was lock himself in the shed, throwing himself into experiments so as not to reach for her.
The shed walls were fast filling with holly-eyed lizards and quick-climbing mice with bristling pine tails; the floor, with palm-sized deer, their spindly legs click-click-clicking on the floorboards; and in the rafters a growing menagerie of birds roosted, half-woven wings flapping against the dusty windows.
Each failed experiment marked with floral limbs and leaf-tipped feathers, each successful one with talons and fur.
Each one another step toward finding a solution, toward the end of this endless, breathless wait.
And with Daye’s autumn self managing to inch fifteen days into winter, and her winter self already three whole weeks into spring, breaking the cycle of bloom and decay seemed almost feasible—the waiting a transient thing, a matter of mere seasons until he found the right combination of flora, the right type of weaving to make Daye last a whole second season without any help.
And once he’d managed to skip one season, the stretch to two, three, a year even, seemed like nothing at all. Child’s play.
Sometimes, wrists-deep in his latest experiment, he wondered if he was doing too much.
Each new hunch he chased from book to book—collecting the braiding from Chambers’s work on aquatic flora, the inflection from Werde’s work on Blodeuwedd, the use of rosemary and lavender from Penrose’s treatise on herbs in evergreen constructs—took him further from Wynne’s original structure.
But then Daye would stumble or shiver, and every doubt would melt. Or worse, she would smile at him, and the wanting would flare so bright he couldn’t seem to catch his breath.
So he kept researching, kept waiting. Until he could find a way to make Daye independent, or until his feelings faded away. Either. Both. Whichever came first.