Chapter 33
He took me to his bathroom and put me in his bath, and when I reminded him that I could do this myself, he looked at me. Only looked at me, and my mouth closed. I didn’t remind him again.
March looked…different. I couldn’t really put my finger on it, but he said nothing, only kissed me after pretty much every movement he made while he filled up the tub for me, put in soap, and brought a fresh towel close.
He kissed me again on the head when he sat me down in the tub and went back to the bedroom.
By the time I cleaned myself up and was ready to get out of the tub, he was already back, wearing only a pair of dark red underwear. He wrapped me up in his towel without a word still, then grabbed me in his arms and carried me out into the bedroom again.
I laughed. “What are you doing, Heartling?”
But he didn’t even want to hear it. And when he took me back to the bed I realized he wasn’t gone from the bathroom to give me privacy like I thought, but he’d come out here to change the sheets.
Maybe I’d bled. Maybe I’d made a mess out of them, but the old ones were folded near the door, and these ones were identical, and they smelled like March, too. Rain and roses. Perfect.
“Stay here.” Kiss-kiss-kiss all over my face. “Don’t go anywhere.”
He left me on the bed, wrapped up in the towel still, and he walked backward to the bathroom, probably to clean himself up, too.
I smiled and shook my head and tried to know myself—who is this Ora?
—but failed. He only took a couple minutes, like he really thought I might get up and leave.
Like he really believed I wanted to be anywhere else in the world but in his bed. In his arms.
He even looked relieved when he walked out the bathroom and found me exactly as he’d left me.
He was wrapped up in a towel, too, from the hips down. It looked good on him, that towel, but he looked better without.
A moment later, he lay behind me, wrapped his arms around my body, his chest pressed to my back. He rested his cheek against mine and kissed me while we breathed. Came back to ourselves. Still the same people, but thoroughly changed, too.
“How are you feeling?” he whispered in my ear eventually.
“I’m feeling…new,” I said, because I knew he would appreciate a truth. I believed him when he said he’d know if I lied—I knew if he lied, too.
There was no need to lie right now, though. Whatever tomorrow brought, tonight was ours.
A long, lingering kiss on my cheek. “You’re amazing, Ora. Do you know that?”
Every little thing inside me clenched. If I’d been made out of gears, I’d have gone out of sync in that moment.
My eyes closed. My smile fell. I held onto his hands that crossed over my chest.
This was the March that I knew. The March that he was when we first met. The March that gave me his all, every time, no questions asked.
Except…he wasn’t that March anymore. And I wasn’t that Ora, either.
“I’m far from amazing.” Another truth. Maybe I had been before—to him, that is—but now…
“That wasn’t your fault,” March said, because he knew exactly what I was talking about.
I said nothing for a while, just closed my eyes and felt the heat of him, indulged in his warmth and his kisses.
“What else did you get?” I eventually asked. I was curious, but I was also…restless again. Like before. “What were the other options?”
He’d chosen to give up trust, but what else had been in those mirrors for him? It was comical that I’d gotten the options I’d gotten, when Mimi, for example, had only had to give up her fear of spiders, and Reggie his daydreaming, and Russ his nostalgia.
“Rage,” March whispered. “And compassion.”
My body froze. “Why did you choose trust?” I wondered.
“Because I thought it was the easiest to live without,” March said. “Why did you choose compassion?”
“Because my other options were fear and strength.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.” Fuck was about right. “To be honest, I didn’t really believe that I’d be leaving the actual feeling behind.
I never even considered that I could be stripped of something like compassion.
I wasn’t capable of imagining what that would be like.
” I didn’t know, either, but I did feel the empty spot inside me. Clearly.
“Me, neither,” March said, and kissed my temple. “This game is…”
His voice trailed off, but I could finish for him. “It’s not a game at all. It’s a trap.”
“Do you think we’ll get them back?”
I shook my head. “That’s what I went to ask Master Talik about. He had no answer,” I said, because I was too much of a coward to tell him no. I really didn’t think I would be getting that emptiness inside me fulfilled again any time soon. But perhaps in time…
“You chose well, considering,” March said.
I knew this, but it did make me curious, “Why didn’t you choose compassion?
Trust is important. Compassion, on the other hand…
it just means you don’t really care about other people, and that’s a good thing for this place…
isn’t it?” Of course, I was only trying to justify my own choice, and I was twelve-hours certain March knew this.
For a moment, he was silent, only caressed my cheek with his, intertwined his fingers with mine.
“I don’t think that’s all it is,” he finally whispered. “Compassion doesn’t just mean caring about other people—it means being affected by them, too. It means being…softened by them.”
“You want to be soft?” I said—an attempt to joke, to lighten up the mood, not for him, mind you, but for myself. For the tears that had gathered in my eyes and had turned my view blurry.
March chuckled and my toes curled. “Sometimes, I guess. I want to be in tune with others.” A kiss on my jaw. “With you.”
He was, though. His body was perfectly in tune with mine.
“What’s it like?” he then asked me, and it might be the most difficult question I’d ever considered answering, but tonight was different. Tonight was not for lies.
“It’s like…relief doesn’t quite land,” I said. “And everyone feels distant. And survival is just…I don’t know. Empty.” That’s the best way I could describe it with words.
Another long moment of silence where March held me to him with all his strength.
“It’s not the same with you as it is with everyone else,” he said. “I am still second-guessing every word you say, but…it’s different. Your memories in my head—they make everything different.”
For me, though, it wasn’t. I still didn’t care about what happened to him—I only cared about what it meant for me.
So I said nothing, only closed my eyes and allowed those tears to fall down my cheeks.
“We’ll get them back,” he whispered as he kissed my hair. “I know it. I feel it. We’ll get all of ourselves back soon.”
I didn’t believe him.
I woke up in his arms just before five in the morning. March was sound asleep, our fingers still intertwined, and we were still wrapped up in towels.
I was sure he’d wake up as soon as I moved, but he didn’t. He must have been tired. Slowly, I pushed his hands to the sides and I stood up as silently as I could. I only grabbed my panties and my nightgown, and didn’t bother taking the towel off at all—I would do that in my own bedroom.
For a moment, though, I stopped by the edge of the bed and watched him. Just…watched him.
March asleep, completely relaxed, every feature on his face soft. He looked so young, so peaceful, so complete, and for that moment, I was, too. I was full like I’d never given a single memory, a single version of me to this place at all. Like I was in this just as much as he was.
The need to kiss him overwhelmed me, and so I turned around and tiptoed out of his room before he woke. It was already hard enough—I didn’t want him to wake up and see me, talk to me, ask me to stay.
Because would he?
And would I?
I would rather not have to find out.
So I went to my room and I lay on my bed alone, still wrapped up in his towel. I cried myself back to sleep as if I thought the tears were going to fill the gaping hole in my chest at any moment. They didn’t.
What felt like seconds later, Lida knocked on my door to wake me up for breakfast, and I was back in the real world, the same different Ora.
Training with Asha was more brutal than ever before. She gave us weapons and dummies, and told us to cause as much damage as we could to the wooden and leather bound pieces. My muscles were screaming even after lunch, and when we made it to Master Talik’s workshop, the Timekeeper wasn’t even there.
Calren had no idea why. You could just tell by the way he looked about when he opened the door, saw that the room was empty, that it was a mess.
“Well, it seems Master Talik could be busy with something,” he said, and offered us a fake smile. “Go ahead, make yourselves comfortable. I’ll be right back with him.” And he pushed the door open for us to enter, then closed it behind us when we did.
Meanwhile March was standing just two feet to my side, looking at me through his peripheral, and I knew it because I knew the weight of his attention.
Except every time I turned to him, he looked away.
And every time I turned to him, every inch of my skin raised in goose bumps because the memories were there.
The feel of his hands on my body, of his mouth, of his cock inside me—it was perfectly vivid still, so my cheeks remained red at all times.
I was used to the heat in them by now, and the changes in my body.
Not something obvious, or even anything I could point out.
I wasn’t in pain, but I just had this slight pressure between my legs.
I wasn’t a virgin anymore. I’d actually had sex—and I’d loved every second of it.
A whistle, loud and sharp. “Would you look at that!” Reggie said as he strode to the main table where Master Talik worked on usually.