Chapter 6 #3
She writhed, laughing too hard to form words, and then her hand found a fistful of sawdust from the nearby pile and flung it at my face.
I sputtered, blinded momentarily, and she used the opening to roll us, her body suddenly on top of mine, her knees on either side of my hips, her hands pinning my wrists to the grass beside my head.
Her face was inches from mine. Her hair had come completely loose, dark blonde strands falling across her forehead, sticking to her damp temples.
Her chest heaved with the effort of breathing through laughter, her breasts pressing against the front of her dress with each rapid inhale.
Her eyes were bright, wild, the blue of open sky after rain, and she was smiling the smile of someone who had just discovered they were winning a fight they had no business winning.
“Checkmate,” she said, her voice breathless.
I looked up at her. Her collarbones caught the light. The curve of her throat led my eye downward to where her dress had slipped slightly off one shoulder, revealing the pale slope of skin that disappeared into fabric.
And her back. I could see it from this angle, the clean unbroken line of it where her dress dipped low between her shoulder blades.
No wings. No feathers. No arch of bone and membrane that every other woman in the kingdom carried as naturally as breathing.
Just skin, smooth and sun-kissed and entirely, completely her own.
The realization hit me with the force of something I should have seen coming and hadn’t.
I had spent my entire life surrounded by winged women, mostly angels.
Beautiful, their wings a source of pride and identity and the aesthetic that defined feminine beauty in the sky.
I had never questioned it. Wings were beautiful.
Therefore, women with wings were beautiful.
The logic was circular and unexamined and had been sitting in my brain since childhood like furniture I’d stopped noticing.
But Gabriella, Gabriella with her straight back and her capable hands and the way she moved through the world as if her body had never received the memo that it was supposed to be lesser.
Her winglessness was a presence. It was the thing that made her Gabriella instead of just another young woman, and somewhere in the six years I’d been gone, that difference had stopped being something I pitied and started being something I found, against all reason and several very firmly held boundaries, captivating.
She was still on top of me. Her weight was warm against my hips.
Her hands held my wrists. Her breath came in short pulls that I could feel against my chest where our bodies pressed together.
And she was looking at me, and something in her expression had changed, and I realized she had caught me staring.
A flush climbed her neck, quick and vivid, and she looked away, releasing my wrists, pushing herself off me with a haste that suggested she had also noticed something about the configuration of our bodies that warranted immediate correction.
“Gabriel! Gabriella!”
Angelina’s voice carried from the house, breaking the spell with the timing that suggested she had been standing on the porch watching us for approximately long enough to have opinions she was choosing not to voice.
“The new sheep are settled. Come help me move them to the pasture!”
We gathered ourselves. I stood, dusted off my trousers, picked up the hammer I’d dropped somewhere during the chase.
Gabriella retied her hair. We walked to the temporary pen where the new ewes waited, six of them, their wool pale against the summer grass, their eyes calm and assessing in the way of animals who had not been consulted about this relocation and were reserving judgment.
Angelina stood at the gate, her wings half-folded, a smile on her face that carried the warmth of a woman watching something she had hoped for come to pass.
Together, we opened the gate. The sheep hesitated, then filed through in that single-minded way sheep have, heading for the open pasture with the quiet certainty of creatures who recognized grass when they saw it.
They spread across the field, pale dots against green, and the sight of them, living things, moving across land that had been empty for too long, settled in my chest.
Angelina stood beside me, her hand finding mine on the fence rail. She squeezed. “Thank you,” she said quietly.
I looked at her and at Gabriella, who was watching the sheep with an expression of joy. At the farm around us, weathered and patched and standing. At the fence we had built together, post by post, nail by nail, a straight line against the chaos of six years.
“Don’t thank me yet,” I said. “We’ve only fixed one fence.”
Angelina smiled. “I’m not thanking you for the fence, Gabriel.”
I knew what she meant. I just didn’t know if I was ready to name it.
We stood there as the afternoon light turned the pasture gold, and I tried very hard not to think about the weight of Gabriella on my hips or the clean line of her back or the way her eyes had held mine in the grass before she looked away.
* * *
I was trying to sleep, but then the knock came so soft I almost missed it. Three shy taps as if someone was now reconsidering the entire journey with each passing second.
I was lying in my bed staring at the ceiling beams, turning over the afternoon in my head like a stone I couldn’t stop feeling the edges of.
The weight of her on my hips. The clean line of her back.
The way her eyes had found mine in the grass and then skittered away, carrying something I wasn’t ready to name.
“Come in,” I said.
The door opened. Gabriella stood in the frame, backlit by the hallway’s low lantern, a blanket clutched against her chest like armor.
She wore a nightgown, pale cotton, thin enough that the light behind her outlined the narrow shape of her body through the fabric.
Her hair was loose around her shoulders, dark blonde in the dimness, and her eyes held that look I recognized from childhood, the one that meant she was embarrassed and determined not to show it and failing completely.
“Sorry,” she said. “I know it’s late. I can go back.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Come here.”
She crossed the room quickly, as if speed might minimize the awkwardness of the situation, and stopped beside the bed.
“I had a nightmare,” she said. The words came out in a rush, like she’d rehearsed them in the hallway and was now delivering them before her courage expired.
“It happens sometimes. Not often. But when it does, I usually… Angelina lets me sleep with her. But she’s already asleep and I didn’t want to wake her and I thought maybe… ”
She trailed off. The blanket was still pressed to her chest.
“You thought maybe I wouldn’t mind,” I said.
She nodded, not meeting my eyes.
“I don’t mind.” I lifted the quilt. “Get in before you freeze. It’s the middle of summer and you’re shaking.”
She climbed in. The mattress dipped with her weight, the old frame creaking its familiar complaint, and then she was beside me, her body a careful inch from mine, the blanket still between us like a negotiated border.
We lay there. The house settled around us, the night sounds of an old farmhouse, timbers contracting, the distant tick of the cooling stove and Valen stirring in his stall below my window.
Gabriella’s breathing gradually steadied, the quick shallow pulls giving way to something deeper, and I could feel the heat of her through the thin cotton of her nightgown, the curve of her hip against the mattress, the occasional small adjustment of her position that brought her an inch closer, then retreated, then advanced again like tide testing a shoreline.
After a while, when the quiet had done its work and the embarrassment had receded to something manageable, I turned my head on the pillow. “Want to talk about it?”
She was quiet for so long I thought she might have fallen asleep. “It wasn’t about the war.”
“Okay.”
“It was about… growing up. I dreamt I was little again. Back at the playground. The one by the cliffs, the one we walked to. The swings, the high platforms, all of it. And I was trying to climb the ladder to the big swing, the one that launches, and the other kids were there. The angels. They were laughing.”
I felt something cold settle in my chest … recognition.
“They were pointing. Saying things. The usual things. ‘Broken.’ ‘Worthless.’ ‘Shouldn’t have happened.’ You know.
” She swallowed. I could hear it, the small sound in the dark.
“And in the dream, I kept climbing. My wrist wasn’t broken yet.
I hadn’t fallen. I was just climbing, and they were laughing, and every rung I got higher the laughing got louder, and I knew I was going to fall.
I always fall in that dream. I’ve had it a hundred times.
I always fall, and they always laugh, and I always wake up before I hit the ground because apparently even my subconscious has limits. ”
The blanket rustled as she adjusted it, pulling it higher, and I realized she was subtly crying. “I still dream about the playground, climbing that ladder, listening to them laugh.”
The guilt hit me like a physical thing, a weight across my chest that made it hard to breathe.
Six years. Six years of war, of fighting for a kingdom, of carrying the weight of survival and command and the responsibility of keeping men alive when keeping them alive was the harder choice.
And while I’d been doing that, Gabriella had been here.
Climbing her own ladder. Falling, alone, with no one to catch her.