Chapter Thirty-Four Vina
Chapter Thirty-Four
Vina
She’s been gone all these years, and I’m too old for sentimentality. But this morning my lantern unfolded into a bird without my say-so and for a moment I thought Simran had come home.
Source: Letter from Lydia Chen to Hari Patel
Simran.
She was changed. Her skin bare of tattoos, her hair shorter than it had ever been—a sheet of black silk that reached to her shoulders. But by heaven and hell, she was still herself. They’d both made it somehow, into a new life. Both survived.
Simran touched Vina’s face; the sweep of her jaw, her cheekbone.
Vina let herself grasp Simran’s face in return.
It was like time had fallen away; like they’d woken lying next to one another in the witch’s tor side by side and begun to kiss, safe and sweet in wanting each other.
She drew Simran close. Simran came eagerly, laughter still in the shape of her mouth, and God, did she look good when she laughed.
It was precious, hard-earned, that laughter.
Her mouth was soft, and sent dizzying want in a deluge through Vina’s blood.
They parted, and then leaned in again, and again. And finally, with a breath, Vina drew back just enough to press her forehead to Simran’s own, and feel the cool night air on them both, and know they were finally whole again.
Simran tangled their hands together. She was warm, her fingers soft but strong.
“I missed you,” Simran admitted. “I’m sorry about—everything. The knife, mostly.”
“It was just a bookbinding knife,” Vina said. “You don’t need to apologize.”
“I was afraid to remember you.” Simran’s voice was vulnerable. “I was afraid to remember myself.”
For Simran to admit fear… Vina’s heart cracked.
It was a gift. She knew how Simran hated to be vulnerable; how she lashed out, guarded herself, held her secrets close and pushed her loved ones away.
Right then and there, Vina promised herself that when Simran was vulnerable she would protect her.
She would be her armor, her shield. She would hold all of Simran’s fragility gently in the palm of her hand.
Twenty years, and an entire lifetime had separated them. And yet it was nothing.
“I missed you too,” Vina said in return.
They sat together on the roof’s edge, fingers still touching. They stared across the rooftops together. Then Vina took a deep breath, and told Simran about the librarians and the witches and cunning folk. And then, because it was the harder thing, the stranger thing, about Hari and Galath.
Simran stared at her, eyes wide.
“The two of them?” Simran repeated.
“You can ask Hari,” said Vina. “About them. You can ask him anything. He’d answer you.”
“I can’t believe Hari and Galath raised you,” Simran said, mouth open in shock. “And they’re, what—together?”
“Married,” said Vina. “I’m afraid they love each other.”
“How the hells did that happen?”
“I don’t know,” said Vina. “Do people usually know why or how their parents fell in love? I never thought much about it as a child, and I certainly don’t want to think about it now.”
“Is that how you think of them? As your parents?”
Vina swallowed. “Yes, and no,” she said. “I used to. When I didn’t remember—everything—I never questioned it. They were my fathers. They were as reliable and real as the silver sea, as the sun in the sky. But now there’s two halves of me. The one that remembers before, and the one that lives now.”
“And my… parents?” Simran asked. Vulnerability flitted across her face.
Vina’s heart twisted.
“They’re gone,” said Vina. “I’m sorry. But they—they had a family in Hari. They visited all the time. And when they got older, they lived with us until they passed. They were like grandparents to me.” A beat, and she amended her words. “They were grandparents to me.”
Simran closed her eyes, breathing through the wound, then opened them.
“I always hoped Hari would be the child they deserved,” she said. “I’m glad.” She looked away. “It was the stories my father told me that saved me,” said Simran. “Saved us both, truthfully. I just wish I could have told him. Told both of them.”
They sat in silence for a while. Simran clearly needed it, and Vina was glad to give it to her.
“I’m not who I was before,” said Simran finally.
“I had a whole life then. A big life. Now I’m some girl raised in seclusion to serve a single purpose.
You’re the first person I’ve kissed. I remember—well.
I wasn’t a nun in our last life. I had a good time.
But this body is all new. I don’t have my old tattoos. ” She raised her arms up.
“We could change that,” said Vina. “If you wanted to.”
“What?”
“We could find a tattooist to ink you,” said Vina. “If you’re not going back to the archivists, there’s nothing to stop you.”
Simran looked at her, unsmiling now. Considering her. Simran’s eyes were dark.
“I think a good way to learn myself would be to place myself under your hands,” said Simran. “It might even be better than ink.”
Hot want pooled in Vina’s belly at those words. She saw it reflected in Simran’s eyes.
“We’ve only just reunited,” whispered Vina. “I can’t undress you on a rooftop.”
“Why not?” Simran asked. “If I want you to, and you want to—why not?”
There were good reasons. The noisy streets below were one.
But instead of answering, Vina gave in to the gravity that kept calling her hands back to Simran’s skin.
It was want, yes, and hunger; but it was also reassurance.
You’re here. You’re alive. You’re with me.
She touched her fingertips lightly to the curves of Simran’s shoulders and began to move her fingers in looping patterns.
“What are you doing?” Simran asked. Her eyes had darkened. She hadn’t moved.
“Tracing your tattoos,” said Vina. “You had flowers, here. Roses. And here—thorns.” A scrape of her fingers, aiming for something between tenderness and tender hurt. Simran made a stifled noise. “And marks here, like you’d see in an old manuscript.”
“Scrollwork,” said Simran. She closed her eyes as Vina’s fingers mimicked those shapes, those swirling lines, moving down the sensitive skin of her inner arms.
“Let’s move away from the edge of the roof,” Vina said.
Simran huffed out a laugh.
“Fine,” she said. “That I can do.”
They lay on her coat and Vina traced patterns into Simran’s arms and shoulders, exquisitely slow.
She followed the lines of her neck, her collarbones.
She pressed her hands beneath Simran’s shirt, to burning skin, then lower still, into her trousers; into the welcome of her hot, vulnerable thighs.
She watched Simran’s head tip back, her mouth part, her eyelashes grace her cheeks, and felt half crazed with it.
This, forever. She could do this forever.
Later, seconds or minutes or hours later, she held Simran in her arms, all the fragile weight of her.
“I need you to know…” Vina hesitated.
That I started falling in love with you in our last life, thought Vina. When we were on the cusp of death, when you saved me—that’s when it happened, when I fell. And now I remember me, remember us, I love you again. It’s like the love was always in me, a winged bird waiting to take flight.
I love you. I always have.
She looked at Simran’s face, and the peace of her half-closed eyes.
Not yet. Not now. She’d wait until better times, if they came.
When the words would be welcome. When the world wasn’t falling around them, bloodstained princes on the horizon and tales in chains, and no promise of a soft future where they fulfilled their new tale, ending the archives, walking free.
“What is it?” Simran asked sleepily.
“Nothing,” she said, instead. “Let’s stay here a little longer. That’s all.”