Chapter Sixty-One. Daye
Daye
Here was Daye’s worst secret, the most hidden one, the one she only rarely admitted, even to herself: lately, she’d started looking forward to Rory’s absences.
Sometimes she was relieved to see him disappear around the bend in the road, knowing she had eleven full days until he’d come back.
To be with her birds. To stay in her fortress.
To simply … breathe. Sometimes her lips curled around words she couldn’t feel: Sadness.
Anger. And around the ones she could: Betrayal. Hollowness. Longing and regret.
But maybe worst of all was this: she was always, always glad when Rory came back. She couldn’t help but smile when the blackness of sleep ruptured into Rory’s face above her, his lips pressed to hers; the smell of him, fabric and metal and Rory, mixing with the sweetness of flowers.
She was leaning on the kitchen table now, while he rummaged in the pantry.
Beside her, the bouquet he picked for her spilled from the vase, a cloud of green and blue and white, lush and lovely.
She touched the crown of a daffodil, softly, with her wrist; felt it give way against her skin, in the exact spot where, two days before, she’d woven a different daffodil into herself.
It was so strange, opening herself up, seeing her body transform into branches and leaves and rotting flowers.
Her face was the strangest of all: She did it in front of the mirror, watching her skin transform into a field of snowdrops, her lips to holly berries, her eyebrows to the needles of firs.
Watching her hand, a hand of woven twigs and crumpled flower petals, reaching inside her cheek to pry out a dead leaf.
The reverse was even more implausible to see: One moment, she was a profusion of flowers, a girl-shaped bouquet, and the next, she was her, with only a handful of words, strange and echoing, to bridge the gap.
Her transition to spring was a soft, gradual thing.
A slope instead of a bluff or ravine. Not a single event, but dozens of small transitions—here a shin, there an elbow—growing more frequent the warmer the air became.
Her hands choosing, almost by themselves, the places where a twinge of the rot lurked, or an echo of weakness hummed under her skin, before it could break out in a web of cracks.
It was damper than she thought it would be.
The old, decaying petals giving-soft, mold climbing up their undersides in dark, fuzzy patches.
Nothing like the piles of withered leaves she’d wake up surrounded by at the beginning of each season.
Inside the pantry, Rory made a triumphant noise. A moment later he emerged, brandishing a pack of instant pancakes like he had unearthed a grand treasure. Daye couldn’t help but giggle at his silliness. Rory made a face back.
“You’re really here for four weeks?” she asked, for the third time since he got there.
“I really am.” He smiled, stepping closer to press a kiss to her nose. “What would you like to do?”
“I don’t know. Four whole weeks with nothing to do …” She couldn’t remember the last time he had stayed for that long.
“Well, I might have something to do,” Rory amended.
“It’s a good something,” he added hurriedly.
“Nothing bad, I promise. I—” He hesitated.
“I think I have a new solution. Something different.” He seemed to choose his words carefully.
“This new solution, it might solve everything. If it works, it should make you truly independent. And the best part is that you wouldn’t have to change anything.
Nothing about it should affect you directly.
Other than making you safer, that is.” He rubbed his hands anxiously.
Daye was bewildered. Another solution? A new one? Why? Why was he looking for a solution when the one they had was working so well? Why would he look for more—
Oh.
Daye’s hand rose to cup her throat. There was only one reason for Rory to look for a new solution: because she had asked him to.
Made him promise he would. And now here he was, with a new idea, a new set of experiments to execute.
She knew she should have felt happy about it, grateful even.
But all she could feel was this guilt-gilded panic.
Would it mean losing her voice and plunging back into silence? Or would it change her voice? Would it mean losing her birds? She couldn’t think of a way to ask without explaining about being able to talk with birds, and her chest seized at the thought of telling him about it, a violent squeeze.
She didn’t want to. It was hers.
“Oh,” she said finally, biting her lip. “You don’t have to do that.”
He snorted. “Of course I do.”
“No. I mean, I was wrong. I changed my mind.”
“What?” He turned to look at her.
“About the voice,” she said, looking down at her hands. A panicky feeling was unfurling in her chest with every new word. “I changed my mind. I’m okay with it. You don’t need to find another solution.”
“Why did you change your mind?”
Daye shrugged. “Just did. I … I don’t want you to find another way to give me a voice. I’m fine with this one.” Her heart—the heart she wove together from bluebells, rosemary, and wild garlic—drummed loudly in her ears.
“Well, this isn’t exactly about a new voice—”
“Well, great then. If it’s not about that, we don’t need it anyway,” she cut him off, pushing away from the table. She needed this conversation to stop. She needed him to stop. Why did he keep pushing? Why wouldn’t he listen?
“Um, I still don’t understand—”
The panic was rising up her throat, her heartbeats so loud they all but swallowed Rory’s words. She threw herself forward and covered his mouth with hers, silencing him with a kiss. She couldn’t let him take away the birds. She wouldn’t.
“I missed you,” she said, looking up at him. “So,” another kiss on his bottom lip, “so,” a third, on his throat, “much.” She remembered him kissing her the exact same way, one year—or was it two?—ago, when she asked him not to go to the university. The memory eased the guilt a little.
She took his hand in hers, pulling him toward the stairs.
“But—” Rory said, but her dress was already on the floor, and she was running up, pausing at the landing to look back at him over her shoulder.
“There are still things we need to talk about,” he said, pulling his shirt over his head.
“Later,” Daye said, stepping out of her underwear.
“Later,” he echoed.