Chapter 25 Arthur, Before
Arthur,
Before
You’re still not ready?”
I shot Eva a look of exasperation as I tugged on my shoes. “How are you so awake this morning?” We’d been up past midnight, watching movies and stuffing our bellies with popcorn. It wouldn’t have mattered, except today was Sunday—or “bird-watching day,” as the bee girl had dubbed it weeks ago.
She wiggled the last bite of a pancake in my face, then popped it into her mouth. “Easily.”
Eva was a bear until she got her morning pastry. Last week she’d nearly bitten my head off when I stole the last slice of brioche. The girl did not like to be toast-teased.
“Insufferable,” I muttered.
Eva hooked my chin with a finger and tilted my face up. Instantly, I began clicking through her features. Round cheeks. Damp hair. A masterpiece of freckles.
She deserved analog. Soft focus, hazy light, rolls and rolls of film.
When her lips puckered, I realized I was staring at her mouth.
“Suffer me, then,” she whispered, leaning in to plant the faintest kiss on the corner of my mouth.
My breath caught, and the mudroom hazed around me.
Before I was ready, she pulled back and flashed a dimple, brushing her palms over the pockets of her sunflower-patterned dress. “Five minutes, sleepyhead, or I leave without you.” Then she slipped out the door, leaving me speechless.
She’d kissed me. Actually kissed me.
After a long moment, the monster nudged me. “Let’s go, little death-touch.”
It was kidding, right? I touched my lips. “I can’t?” I was frozen in this spot, probably forever. Stuck in the feeling of Eva’s mouth on mine.
Wait, no.
Not on my mouth, exactly. On my… cheek? My neck heated. Was that on purpose? Had she missed? Maybe she only meant to kiss me as a friend, and I turned my head wrong—
“Calm down.”
A new fear uncoiled inside me. She’d run away so fast. Did that mean she regretted it?
“She woke up early. For birds,” the monster said, exasperated. “I don’t think she regrets it. Now finish your laces.”
Right. Okay.
I yanked the knots to my boots tight and scrambled to follow after her. The strap of my Minolta hung comfortably over my shoulder as I rounded the corner, where Eva stood facing the woods, her new book on local songbirds tucked under her arm. When she heard me coming, she turned, smiling.
A warm glow stirred in my chest. “Ready?”
In answer, she shook a packet of wildflower seeds.
It was Eva’s idea to practice controlling my death-touch. I’d never tried before, afraid I would slip up and make things worse somehow. But Eva eased that fear, bringing the plants I killed back to life with a simple touch of her own.
As we angled for the path, Eva opened the packet and poured a handful of seeds into her palm.
In seconds, the seeds cracked. Thin sproutlets pushed out, spinning themselves into long green threads.
By the time we reached the clearing I’d chosen, Eva held a palmful of white candy-stripe creeping phlox, their pale roots dangling from her wrist.
She extended the bundle to me. Anxiety buzzed in my chest as I accepted the fragile blossoms. “Slow,” Eva reminded me.
It took only a second of contact with my skin for the first creeping phlox to wilt.
I bit my lip and closed my eyes, trying to halt the starving thing inside me that wanted so badly.
It felt unnatural, at first. It always did.
The monster’s appetite was all-consuming.
It wanted me to suck the life from the little flowers and crush their skeletal remains in my fist.
It wanted me to take.
I thought of the sky, as Eva had taught me.
Storms moving through me, instead of sucking me down.
I thought of the earth. It was easy with the monster’s awareness so tuned in to the woods around me.
Water rushed from the damp soil into nutrient-seeking roots.
Sunlight bathed the hungry leaves. Inches away, Eva’s heartbeat thumped.
Anxious. Eager. It was an anchor, and I tethered myself to it until my breathing slowed.
When I looked again, I found three little blooms still blushed with pink.
“You’re getting better,” Eva said.
I passed the bundle back to her. In seconds, it was green again. I wanted to argue. Three blooms out of nine didn’t feel like enough, and neither did I.
A peachy sunrise cast the glade in hazy soft-focus, dew-glossed spiderwebs sparkling in the grass. Birdsong constellated the woods around us. I grinned and swung my leg over a fallen tree, motioning her to sit in front of me.
This was the reason we woke at such an ungodly hour.
When Eva was properly situated, I lifted the Minolta strap and draped it over her neck.
“Ready?”
Eva nodded, rubbing her thumb over the advance lever, as I’d taught her.
Somewhere above us, a bird released a syrupy trill. I leaned closer, wrapping my arms around Eva and notching the settings into place with my thumbs. “What’s that?” I asked her.
“Robin?”
I nodded, my nose brushing her hair. When I whistled in perfect imitation to the songbird, goose bumps pebbled down Eva’s arms. The monster watched them in fascination.
“Now, that is a sight to behold.”
“Show-off,” Eva muttered.
I grinned.
As a kid, Mom’s job-hopping had left me plenty of time to wander the woods alone, practicing the calls of any and every bird I came across. I’d thought she would like that I’d spent so much effort learning their songs. Mom always did love birds.
My throat lodged with emotion. I’d been with the Moreaus for three months now, and I was fine, happy even. Still, not a day went by that I didn’t think of my mother and worry.
She hadn’t called once.
A new chirrup painted the air, and Eva sat up. “What was that one?”
“Tufted titmouse.”
“That’s a funny name,” she said, lifting the camera and squinting through the viewfinder.
“You see your bird up there, Ev?”
“I see… a blur.”
I buried a chuckle. “Here. Switch with me.”
While I scanned the canopy for movement, Eva flipped through the pages of the bird identification book she’d picked up, still so new that the slick pages stuck together.
The breeze tossed a dark gold strand of hair onto her cheek.
There were endless variations to the colors in her hair.
Yellow, wheat, molasses, gold. It refused to stay straight but didn’t quite curl, caught somewhere in between.
Usually in the heat she wound it into a braid, but this morning it tumbled freely down her back.
When she found the page with the tufted titmouse, her face lit up. “It’s so cute!”
I watched the way her fingers ran over the edge of the illustration. They weren’t even real feathers, but she touched it so delicately they might as well have been.
Eva leaned back against my chest and took the camera from me again. I cupped her elbow instinctively to steady her.
“There,” she whispered.
Something rustled the leaves. To my surprise, a little gray-and-white songbird alighted on a branch nearby. We held our breath in tandem—I felt the seize of muscle, so closely was her back pressed to my chest.
Had she done that? I knew the bees were attuned to her, but never in our weeks of bird-watching had a bird come so close as this. The monster tuned our awareness to the rapid pulse of the tufted titmouse’s heartbeat. I didn’t even mind. There was no temptation, no hunger.
Not for that, anyway.
“No,” the monster murmured softly into our shared mind, almost teasing. “You hunger for something else now, don’t you?”
As Eva peered through the camera’s viewfinder, my eyes dropped to her mouth. The bow of her lip, the soft parting of breath.
Suffer me, then.
Eva snapped a shot of the bird, then lowered the camera to her lap. She looked back at me, our faces drawn closer than I’d planned on. Just a breath and my lips would graze her nose.
The monster preened at the sudden speeding of her pulse.
“I’ve always envied them.”
Eva stilled. “Songbirds?”
I nodded.
“Because they’re free?” Eva asked.
No. That’s why Mom loved them. She wanted, needed, wings.
“Some species migrate at night,” I said. “Daytime thermals affect the atmosphere, but after dark, the air cools. It makes it easier for them to find their way back home.”
Eva’s gaze dipped. “That’s really cool.”
Was she looking at my mouth?
The monster gave me a little nudge. “If you can touch her, you can taste her, little death-touch.”
Cheeks flushed, I plunged on, unwilling to take romantic advice from the creature in my head. “They have a biological compass?” I hadn’t meant to make it into a question. I just felt nervous. “It brings them back home.”
Eva twisted toward me more fully, letting the Minolta hang from her neck. “You’re thinking about your mom, aren’t you?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised she’d picked up on that.
“Where was your home before you came to us?” she asked.
Home had never been a where at all. I shrugged, scuffing rough bark with the toe of my shoe. “I didn’t really have one, bee girl.”
What I did have was a lifetime of days spent on the road with Mom.
Some of those memories were good, others dull.
Far too many were sharp with the disappointment that no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get the one person I loved most to see me.
I couldn’t get her to look past her need for escape and find a home in what we already had.
Eva bit her lip. “That isn’t fair.”
No. I supposed it wasn’t.
Suddenly antsy, I moved to dismount the log, but before I could, Eva caught me by the shirt. “I don’t think any home worth its salt would run from you, Arthur.”
I huffed. That was easy for her to say.
“What?” she pressed.
“That just isn’t my experience.”
Her eyes were blue fire. “Trust mine, then,” she said. “Real love doesn’t run so easily. And home is a thing that grows, wherever you are.”
“I don’t grow things, Ev.”
Maybe for her, love was something you watered and dug up for harvest, but I wasn’t like that. It was easy to paint the world in pretty colors when nothing was permanent and you could bring things back to life just by willing it.
But my love killed.
“You’re so determined to see your gift as a curse,” Eva said, as though she could hear the very thoughts in my head.
“But every tree that dies and becomes a snag in the woods provides life to hundreds of creatures below it. You are like…” She seemed to search for the word, and when she found it, she lit up. “Like mulch!”
The monster snorted. “She’s terrible at flirting. Worse than you are, which I didn’t think was possible.”
Softening, Eva reached out and lifted my chin with a finger. “Are you really so afraid of yourself?”
“Of course I am.” I swallowed hard. “I ruin things.”
She was close enough for me to inhale the maple syrup on her breath. Close enough for me to kiss. I didn’t realize I was tapping on her arm until her fingers curled over mine.
“I mend things,” Eva whispered, leaning in.
Our mouths brushed, soft as a butterfly’s wing to a flower, light and so delicate I could easily pull back and pretend it hadn’t happened at all.
“Don’t you dare.” The monster was breathless, at my mercy for once. A thrill surged through me.
Eva angled her head and brushed her lips over mine again with more purpose, her skin warm and soft and seeking. An exhale rushed from me, and when I moved too fast in my sudden excitement, our teeth clicked together.
“Oh! Sorry,” Eva said with a little laugh.
“That’s okay.” I pulled her back to me, resting a hand on the bend of her hip to steady the both of us. Eva melted into the embrace, leaning fully against my chest as she tilted her chin and caught my mouth with hers again. She laughed, and it was sunshine.
This was actually happening. So many weeks of wanting to kiss her, to touch her, and still I couldn’t believe that I was here with the bee girl in my arms.
“What are we doing?” she whispered, a smile still spreading her cheeks.
“What I should have done a month ago.” I deepened the kiss, instinctively sucking in her bottom lip.
The pleasure of that simple indulgence sent a flush over my skin, my body hardening in response.
I moved closer as Eva grasped the hair at my nape, her excitement tasteable.
When she parted her lips against mine, I groaned.
Her tongue was a delicate agony.
Eva broke away. “You wanted to kiss me a month ago?”
“Yes.”
She play-smacked me. “You jerk!”
Then she kissed me again.
I hadn’t thought it possible that she could hunger for me like this. I fought my baser instinct to lick the salt off her skin, instead carding my hand back into her loose, soft waves.
Eva drew back again, panting slightly. “I thought it was just me. I didn’t know that you… that you wanted…”
Her words were honey, summer-scraped. The sweetness was almost too much.
“I do, Ev.”
I’d tried to ignore the wanting, knowing soft and stolen moments like these would only make it all hurt more in the end when I had to leave.
Eva chewed her lip. “I want… more of this,” she said slowly.
I frowned, sensing a but. “What is it?”
I’d never seen her look so nervous. “I don’t want to go fast.”
Immediately, I flashed back to the altercation she’d had in the Shoppe with Lenny. Something in me still felt bruised when I recalled first her fear, then her panic that someone would find out.
Not for the first time, I worried I’d made a mistake by promising to keep that secret.
“Of course we can go slow, bee girl.”
“You mean it?”
I nodded and pulled her against me again, pressing my face into her hair. “I only want what you want too.” That was already more than I’d ever hoped for.
The tension in her shoulders dissipated. Her relief made me ache, and a new layer of disdain for Lenny Walker grew inside my heart. She didn’t deserve to feel the way Lenny had made her feel. She shouldn’t have to worry that wanting—or not wanting—was something to fear.
I breathed into her loose golden waves. “Slow is perfect,” I whispered, rubbing a circle over her back as the words she’d spoken only minutes before came back to me.
Home is a thing that grows.
Maybe trust was too.
Eva trusted me to keep my mouth shut about what Lenny had done. So, I would. But I would hate him for what he’d done to the girl I was starting to love. It hurt to recognize the look I’d seen on her face that day and to know exactly how he’d made her feel.
Scared. Immobile. Frozen.
That was something I could understand. The claustrophobic feeling of not having a choice had stuck its roots in me long ago.
Resolve settled in me like old seeds packed under a heavy weight of soil. I wouldn’t let that happen again. I wouldn’t let him near enough to hurt her.