NOT MY TURN #2
He wasn’t screaming anymore, at least. There were only sobs coming from behind his door now.
Esme knocked to be polite, knowing he wouldn’t come to open his door. He said something incomprehensible, and she slid a shadow into the lock, notching its teeth and unlocking it.
Bal was lying on the floor, curled into himself. This time, it wasn’t a body part he held but a small, plush thing.
Esme eased into the room and shut the door behind her.
Bal didn’t care about the intrusion. She kneeled behind him and petted his arm for however long it took for him to realize she was there, and then he turned a bit towards her.
He was still on his side, just with his neck wrenched at an awkward angle to be able to look at her.
“Why are you here?” he asked, his voice small, squeezing the thing made of yarn in his lap.
“You’re alone,” Esme said, still rubbing his arm. “What’s that?” she asked, nodding at the object in his hands.
Bal unfurled himself slowly, muscles unwilling to stretch. In his hands were two messily sewn dolls, both with mismatched gray buttons for eyes and shaggy brown yarn for hair. “Wend made them,” he said.
Esme remembered the gray-eyed little girl that had led her to Bal’s tent weeks ago.
“She snuck them into my bag before I left. I told them to stay in Prelyn. I told Ralph they’d be safe. I lied to them. I—I lied.” Bal dragged the toys back into his body and heaved a sob.
“I’m sorry.” It was a useless sentiment, and it only made Bal cry harder.
“It was her brother,” Bal admitted quietly.
He must not have expected Esme to remember, but there was no way she could forget a boy with the eyes of a man ten times his age.
“His name was Ralph. We’d just found them a few months ago, and he was…
he was brave. Braver than anyone I knew. Braver than me.”
Bal laid flat on his back and then curled the opposite way. He put his head in her lap, and she stroked his hair. Slowly, he melted and let go of the dolls. Then, his arms tangled around her middle. He’d bound himself to her.
He stayed there until Maranna came in to be with him, long after she’d left with the promise of food. Eventually, though, she returned with plates, and Esme tried to leave them to grieve alone, but he didn’t let her. He was locked around her waist, and he ate with one arm clenched around her.
Esme didn’t know why he wouldn’t let her go, but his arms were unmovable and he let all his weight fall on her thighs.
Even when he wasn’t crying, he stayed stuck to her.
He left bloodied fingerprints on the yellow fabric of her dress from where he grabbed it too tight.
Esme had no other choice than to hold him.
The more he cried, the more she wanted to, and the less she felt like she could.
She was exhausted. She wanted to sit somewhere alone.
She would not have anyone’s arms to fall into, so she should be allowed to fall into her bed, at least.
But Bal didn’t let her. She couldn’t pry him off, and she couldn’t tell him she needed to leave. Some part of her was so sad it wanted to scream, and another part told her to put it away because someone else needed her more.
The sun dipped low in the sky, and he kept her there.
When the room became dark, she told him, “You need to rest.” There was just one burning candle, and it drizzled sad yellow light.
He stared up at her in the firelight, squinting and tilting his head. Her stomach twisted.
“You’ll stay, won’t you?” he asked, looking so young and hopeless it was impossible to tear away from him.
She placed her hands on his ruddy face, unsure if her purpose was to comfort or restrain him. “I can get Maranna—”
“I don’t want her. I want you. I’m too tired to explain it to you. Please—please, just stay with me tonight,” he begged, clawing her closer.
She opened her mouth to beg—truly, beg—for him to let her go.
“We should at least lie down,” was what came out instead.
* * *
Esme woke up uncomfortably close to Balthazar.
He wasn’t inherently uncomfortable—his arms were warm, and his breath fanned out across her neck where he’d shoved his face last night—but it wasn’t an embrace she’d asked for.
It was one she felt like she couldn’t refuse.
And so she lay in bed, still as ever. The places their bodies touched itched. She wanted to be alone.
“How long have you been awake?” Bal asked as he shook off sleep, his hand flat on her stomach.
“Not long.” Hours. Hours upon hours, too uncomfortable to stay still and too guilty to move. “I have to go.” She slid out of from under his sheets and to her feet.
He scrambled to wrap his dreaded arm around her again. “Why?” he rasped, pulling himself up to her stomach. He laid his ear against her belly and closed his eyes. “Why not just a bit longer?”
“Because I—” Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. “I have an errand to run.” A terrible lie, but one he looked like he believed.
“Will you return?”
No. Your arms are smothering me, she said, in her heart. “Yes. I will sometime today.”
Before he could wring the details of when out of her, Esme escaped and locked the door behind her. She had to get away.
The walk to her room was long, but she raced the whole way. If he called for her, she didn’t want to hear it. Sympathy would drag her back to him, where she couldn’t bear to be.
When she got to her floor, she blazed down her hallway until she collided with a body she hadn’t even seen.
“There you are.” Simon caught her the second she bounced off him.
“Why are you here?” she whispered, because he was breaking a whole book of laws to be this deep in the castle.
“Because yesterday.” He said it like it was obvious.
Esme’s stomach dropped. She didn’t have enough in her to comfort him, too.
“Your wife, your daughter, you. How are you?”
How are you? She hadn’t been asked that since it happened. “I’m okay,” she said.
Simon pursed his lips. “Don’t lie.”
What exactly was the truth, though? Words could not package how she felt.
She’d cracked into a million pieces since yesterday, and she’d barely been holding all her shards together since.
But standing in Simon’s arms like this, her hold slackened.
Her sadness leaked out all over the floor.
Her pieces did not want to be together. Esme no longer had the strength to hold them so.
She gave up and just cried. Choked, and hiccupped, and swiped over and over at her eyes, even though the tears wouldn’t stop coming. She just stood in the silent hall and made ugly, anguished noises because there was no room left in her to hold them anymore.
Children, terrified children, just dead. Completely gone. Why did that have to happen? Why save them? Why try? If this world was so cruel that it wouldn’t even give them this second chance, what was the good of it?
Esme hated it. She hated death. She’d lost all her previous respect for the process of life, and she just hated death. Ojalla would loathe her for it, but it was true.
“What do you need?”
Another foreign question. Esme stared at Simon, who was but a watery shape and misplaced colors to her bleary eyes.
She slipped her keys from her pocket and handed them to him.
He unbolted her door and she just stood there, crying and doing nothing, and it was such a relief to be useless, just to exist and grieve.
Simon swung her door open and she grabbed his wrist and pulled him inside. He shut her door for her, and now they were standing awkwardly in her living room. How did one ask someone for an embrace in such a state?
“Do you want to be held?”
Thank Ojalla. Esme nodded, and he was upon her in a second.
He was so tall that her face only reached his chest. She buried it there anyway.
The furnace in his heart tried to comfort her, petting her with its flaming fingers and shushing her with the roar of its fires.
She closed her eyes and fell into it. Simon wasn’t hot in the same way Bal was.
Not itchy or stifling. Consuming, but comfortable.
His arms were easy to exist in. She didn’t feel the need to lie her way out of them.
“How are you?” he asked again. “Don’t say okay.”
“Okay.” She snuggled deeper into him.
“Insolent,” he chided.
She had to smile. “How did you get here?”
He took some time to answer. “The guards drank themselves senseless at their posts. I snuck in last night, but you weren’t here.”
Esme squeezed him tighter, then let her arms slacken. Her hands stayed at the dip of his waist. “Bal needed me,” she said. Could he tell how much she hated it by her tone?
Simon swallowed, nodded, and pressed her closer. “You needn’t explain it,” he said, rubbing her back. “Are you hungry?”
Esme groaned and nodded. “I could eat a horse. Maybe two.”
“One of the men told me you did once.” Simon chuckled. “You have many fun myths.”
“That one isn’t even a myth,” Esme said, laying her cheek on his roaring chest again. Not a beat. His heart screamed like a building inferno. “We got caught in a gorge up north, past the Inheritance. I had to eat my horse.”
Simon snorted but shook his head. “Did it taste good?”
“I was too frostbitten and guilty to enjoy it,” she said, then sighed. “Thank you. For yesterday, with the trail. For coming today. All of it.” For letting it be her turn. Esme hadn’t had a turn in a while.
“You’re welcome,” he said. The crown of her head tingled, begging for him to kiss her there. “Now, food?”
“Where are you going to get food from?” Esme asked him.
“One of the kitchen ladies has taken a liking to me,” he said with a grin. “Said I can ask for whatever I wish.”
“You’re going to need that last name,” she said, poking him in the chest.
“Give me yours,” he said. “And give me your order.”