26. Hevva is dragged from bed.
twenty-six
Hevva is dragged from bed.
“ P lease?” Kas begged from the foot of her bed, where he tugged on her big toe.
“Nnhnhmph,” Hevva mumbled sleepily into the pillow. She’d pulled it over her face when her blasted little brother had bumbled in, tossing open the curtains with a flourish of air and flooding the room with unnecessary light.
“Come on, please come swim with me?” he pleaded, coming around to stand at her side. “It’s almost luncheon! You can’t sleep all day.” Kas stuck his too-long fingers beneath the edge of the pillow and lifted it up.
A narrow face, all cheekbones and chin, peeked in at her, and he smiled.
She sighed.
“Please, please, please, pleeease?”
Hevva rolled away from her brother, winding up flat on her stomach. She turned her head toward him and swiped a swath of hair from her face. “I’m sad , Kas.”
“I know , Hevva,” he mocked her. “We’ve been here for days, and I’m bored. Why did you bring me along to Summer Cottage if not to have fun and get un-sad?”
“Do you not mean ‘happy?’”
“I didn’t want to ask too much.” He shrugged .
She laughed then, the first real one she’d let out in ages, light and airy with the tiniest touch of un-sad.
“Please?” he asked again, giving her the most dramatic pout she’d ever witnessed. It was leaps and bounds beyond the one that had gotten her assigned the role of chaperone at the damned symposium. Again, with the air magic, her brother pushed open the windows, and a hot breeze plowed into the room.
“Kas Kahoth!” Hevva shrieked, pulling together a handful of leaves to toss at his face. “You are so annoying!”
He giggled as the greenery fluttered around him. Before anything could hit the ground, Kas whipped up a dervish and sent them all flying back into Hevva’s face.
Sand was next. She hadn’t wanted to hurt him, but clearly he had no compunctions about whipping her with stems.
Kas shouted when the grains hit him in the face, slipping down into his shirt, as she intended, to annoy him all day. “Not fair!”
When he sent a gust strong enough to lift her mattress, she wiggled the wood floor, sending him flying across the room to land cockeyed upon her settee.
Laughing, he called for a truce.
Trying to put her windblown hair back to rights, she offered her brother a lopsided smile. “Thank you, Kas. I’m still quite sad. But I needed that.”
“Sad how?” he asked, making himself comfortable on the sofa.
She flopped back down and focused on the burning sensation deep in her chest. “It’s hard to explain. I feel like my lungs are ripping apart every time I take a breath. Like my legs will give out sometimes, just because a particularly heavy thought has entered my mind. I feel like every single day is cold and dreary and gray . . . Like the very end of winter, when the beautiful snow is gone, and the whole world is muddy and dead. That’s how I feel.”
“I hope that never happens to me.”
Hevva met his gaze her eyes welled up with tears. “I too hope you never ever feel as I do.”
“Don’t cry! Come swim with me.” Kas bounced up to race across the room, and before she knew it, he was tugging on her leg, trying to get her to stand.
She swiped her tears away before rolling off the bed in a halfhearted display of energy. “Fine, fine, let’s go to the pond.”