Chapter 19 Arthur, Before
Arthur,
Before
Audrey’s weekly farmers’ market drew a hungry crowd from Cumberland Valley.
They came in droves to fill their woven baskets with pears from the orchard and goods from the Honey Shoppe.
Harvest season provided the town with a much-needed financial boost. With Jack up the mountain collecting samples of flowers to dry into tea, the task of selling the Shoppe’s stock fell to his daughters, and to me.
I managed the cash register, more than eager to lessen the risk of skin-to-skin contact. Citrine sunlight spilled in through the bay window, and an acoustic guitar thrummed outside. Through the crowd, I caught sight of Eva’s bouncing, messy bun.
“Excuse me.”
My attention snapped to June, Izzy’s friend and Dane Walker’s soon-to-be bride. She lifted her sunglasses onto her forehead, a crinkle of tension knotting her otherwise perfectly smooth brow.
“Sorry, yes.” I cleared my throat. “How can I help?”
“I’m here for the wedding candles. Izzy said she left a note?”
I snapped my fingers. “Yes. Hang on. I think she put them in the back.”
The storage room was a welcoming mess of jarred pollen, honey sticks, and a bee-balm lip salve that sold like… well, like honey cakes. When autumn comes, Eva had said, we’ll sell those too. You’ll love them, Arthur.
The idea of still being here when autumn hit was hard to wrap my mind around. I couldn’t picture the bee girl in the cold.
Sometimes my mind drifted to my mother. Hope was a scab I picked and picked. Would she come back for the holidays?
I bent, thumbing the handwritten labels along the shelf edge as I searched for the box, the slide of my thumb over tape the only sound in the quiet space.
Not here. I stood, turning, eyes surfing upper shelves stuffed with glass jars of honey, steel and brass infusers, and biodegradable tea bags you could fill yourself.
When the bell dinged in the Shoppe, I glanced up. I was taking too long. Where are those damn candles?
Through a gap in the curtain, I watched as Lenny Walker stepped toward the counter, carrying a large crate full of golden pears. Eva trailed behind him, picking at the hem of her shirt. “On the counter,” she said stiffly.
Lenny lowered the crate with a grunt, then turned to June. “Dane’s looking for you.”
“Oh?” She sounded surprised.
My toe stubbed into a box sticking out from underneath the lowest shelf. I crouched and peeled off Izzy’s note, scrawled with instructions: Three dozen votive candles for Walker reception.
Lenny took one of the pears in hand and tossed it once. When he caught it again, he buried his incisors into its flesh, his eyes trained on Eva all the while. “Something about the band calling to cancel?”
“What?!” June shrieked. Lenny shrugged and took another bite, pear juice bursting through his lips.
June launched out of the Honey Shoppe, visibly alarmed. The instant she was gone, Lenny crossed to the door.
But he didn’t leave. He bolted the lock.
A whisper of alarm went through me.
“What are you doing?” Eva asked uneasily.
“I’m not a bad guy, you know.” Lenny tugged the blinds, tension pulling his back muscles taut, then turned toward her, eyes hard. “You didn’t have to stand me up like that.”
When he stepped forward, Eva stepped back.
“I just want to talk,” Lenny huffed, exasperated. “I’ve been trying to talk to you all fucking summer.”
“I-I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Dammit, Eva, it was just a kiss!”
I knifed to my feet.
When Eva tried to shoot past him, Lenny grabbed her around the waist. He took her jaw in his grip and pressed his lips hard to her mouth.
“Hey!” I barked out as I pushed through the gap in the curtain.
Lenny jerked back.
I snatched a jar of honey off a shelf and chucked it at him. Glass shattered at his feet where it landed, shards skittering under the display tables.
“Get out!”
Lenny released Eva. She gasped as she fell against the counter’s edge.
“OUT!” I roared again.
I felt the monster in every pulse of adrenaline, and it took all I had to fight back the lapping desire to rush forward and seize Lenny by the throat. Already, I could see it in my mind’s eye. He’d turn purple, the monster squeezing our hand around his neck. He would—
Stop it, I inwardly snapped.
Flushed, Lenny swiped his mouth, his eyes still dark with cruel intent. When I stepped forward, he turned on his heel. The bolt resisted him, sticking in brass, before he jerked the door open and fled.
My vision hazed, and tinnitus pealed bright in my ears. I crossed to the door and re-bolted it, adrenaline rushing through me. The monster thrashed inside me, demanding I go after the coward. It wanted me to hurt him. I wanted to hurt him.
But then Eva let out a sob and rushed past me to the storage room, hiding her face in her hands.
My anger crumpled. I flicked the sign to CLOSED and steadied a palm on the door. Tried to bury the fury stretching its wings inside me. I could do that, for her.
I gave us both a minute to collect ourselves before going after her. When I pulled back the burlap curtain, Eva turned away from me. She white-knuckled the shelf, a raw sound breaking past her lips.
I felt like an intruder. I hadn’t earned the right to her bare emotion like this, but I was here, seeing it anyway.
“I’ll pay for the jar,” I said softly.
Eva turned. Tears striped her cheeks, and her bottom lip was swollen. She tried to speak once and had to start over to get the words out. “I don’t”—hic—“care about the jar!”
I nodded, scared that anything I said would only make her feel more cornered. Eva’s eyes shone under the ancient, swinging bulb. Her breaths quickened into short puffs. Too quick. In seconds, alarm washed her features.
She was hyperventilating.
I moved to her on instinct, hoping I wouldn’t scare her too. To my relief, Eva fell against me. She clutched my T-shirt, hitching sobs.
“Help her, little death-touch.”
Cupping the back of her head, I thought back to the day she’d tended my bee sting. If I couldn’t find the right words, I could steal hers. “Think of the sky,” I whispered. “The storm clouds. They move through you, right?”
“I can’t… can’t breathe!” Eva gasped.
When I pulled back, I realized her bottom lip wasn’t only swollen—it was bitten. The skin had darkened where Lenny had buried his teeth. A rush of anger made me dizzy, but I swallowed it down, for now, and placed Eva’s hand over my heart, as she’d done before.
“Do you feel that?” I said softly.
Eva nodded fast.
“Good.” I inhaled, deeply. “Can you try to breathe with me?”
Together, we inhaled. We exhaled. Time seemed to flatten, keeping us suspended as Eva’s frantic breathing slowly evened out.
“Okay.” Tears spilled down my cheeks. “You’re okay, Ev.”
It was a lie. Nothing was okay right now. Lenny’s words turned over in my mind. It was just a kiss. I thought of the blank expression she’d worn the day Lenny had walked into the workshop, the day her bees had stung him. I thought about what she’d told me the very day we met.
They won’t hurt you. If you’re nice.
The monster’s anger steamed down to aggressive worry as Eva leaned her weight into my chest. I rubbed circles over her back, counting in circuits of eight. Stretching time. Slowing her down.
The monster’s ability to sense the life around us turned Eva’s heartbeat into a drum. Slowly, the rhythm lost its frantic edge. Our breaths moved in tandem. Eva slipped her arms around my waist. Somehow, that touch, so trusting, reached deeper than anything else had.
“You’re okay,” I whispered again.
I turned my face into her hair, not daring to plant a real kiss there but needing the reassurance of her touch. Eva melted into me. Could she feel my heart pounding too, with our chests pressed this close?
“I’m sorry,” Eva husked.
“No. You did nothing wrong.” I drew back. “He was way out of line. You know that, right?”
She hiccupped.
“Eva,” I said carefully, “has Lenny ever done that before?”
Her eyes shimmered as they stared into mine, and for a long, trembling moment, I thought she wouldn’t answer. At last, she nodded slightly. “Once.”
My heart dropped into my stomach.
“Last day of school. He… he cornered me by the lockers.” Eva choked out the words.
The door to the Honey Shoppe rattled. Eva jerked in my arms, but it was only Izzy, who called through the door. “Let me in, lovebirds! We have a wedding emergency.”
A panicked look overtook Eva’s features. “You can’t tell her!”
“What?” I shook my head. “Ev, we have to.”
“No!”
I stared, stunned. Eva Moreau was the most fearless person I’d ever met, and the anxiety painting her face now was wrong, all wrong. Hatred burst under my skin for the boy who’d made her cry like this, who’d touched her without permission.
My eyes fixed on her swollen lip. “We need to tell someone.”
If I’d thought she looked panicked before, it was nothing on the terror that seized her now. “Not Izzy.”
“Helloooooo,” her sister called, wiggling the doorknob. “Is someone in here? Market’s still going.”
Eva turned desperate eyes on me. “Please, Arthur.” Her voice was fainter than before. “I just want to forget it, okay?”
I hesitated. This… this didn’t feel right.
Eva took my hand and pressed her lips to my knuckles. It wasn’t a kiss, not really, but it was warm and pleading. “I don’t want to be another thing my neighbors talk about,” she croaked. “Please.”
She was looking at me with so much fear. So much hope. No one looked at me like that.
I didn’t want to disappoint her.
“Okay.”
Relief melted over her face. “Promise me.”
I nodded. “I promise.”
The moment the words slipped past my lips, I knew they were a mistake.