CHAPTER FIFTEEN #3
They looked at each other across the foot of air.
Two women who had each, in their own way, watched Lark go under and been too late, one at the water and one three years before it, and somewhere in the looking the foot of air stopped being a wall and started being the last thing either of them was holding onto.
"I don't forgive you," Maren said. "I meant that.
I'm not there. But I'm done being alone with it.
The river settled that. Whatever this is, you and me, I'd rather do the rest of it inside arm's reach of the only other person who saw what I saw than safe and clever and steered, by myself, into the deep.
" She drew a breath that hurt. "I keep choosing the love that can't leave.
Look where it's got me. I want to try the other kind.
The kind you have to keep choosing, that could walk out the door any morning and doesn't. I don't know how.
I've never once done it. But I'd like to learn it on you, if you'll stand still for somebody who's this bad at it. "
Rowan's eyes had gone bright and she did not let the tears go, she just stood there holding them, and she said, low, "I'll stand still."
Maren crossed the foot of air.
And because the whole of it, the bind and the cult and the lie and her own clutching ruinous fear, was the taking of a thing without the asking, she stopped with her hand not quite touching and she said, "Can I," and watched the word go into Rowan and do something to her face, watched the small flinch that lived in her at unwarned touch simply not arrive, because she had been warned, because she had been asked, and Rowan said "yes" on a breath, and the size of the yes was the size of a whole life of never once being the one asked, and Maren put her cold hand against the warm weathered side of her neck and felt the pulse going hard under it.
It was slow, after that, and quiet, and shot all the way through with grief, because that was the only honest way it could be.
Maren did not pretend Lark was not in the room.
Lark was on her skin. She undid Rowan's shirt in the dark and put her mouth to the old burn-scars on her arms, the ones the weather and the cult had left, and then to the living pulse at her throat, and Rowan's breath went ragged and her careful hands came up into Maren's hair and then down, learning her, slow, asking with every inch.
When Rowan's mouth came down at last over the mark, over the left breast where Lark lived in the water-lines, the birds shifted under her lips and the nipple drew up hard to the heat of her mouth, and Maren arched off the bed with a sound that had the grief and the wanting braided so close she could not have pulled one loose from the other.
Rowan did not shy from the dead girl in the skin.
She set her tongue to the risen peak and the moving lines around it, patient, unhurried, until Maren's hands closed in her hair and her hips lifted asking for more, and the mark that had spent weeks pretending to be only sorrow answered a living touch for the first time and did not sing of any water at all.
And every place Rowan's scarred hands found her they found Lark too, the figure in the water-lines, the dark birds, and Maren let them, because to hide the dead girl from the living one would have been one more cage, and she was done building cages.
She asked for everything, out loud, in the dark, can i, is this, do you want, and Rowan asked back, a woman to whom no one had ever once said you can choose, and every yes between them was the opposite of a rite, a door left standing open on purpose.
It was not gentle all the way through, and it did not need to be; grief turned over into want and back again, and Rowan met her in all of it.
When it broke over Maren she made a sound she did not know she had in her, and Rowan held her through the shaking and the after, and neither of them said it was a beginning, because they both knew better than to use the word, and it was one anyway.
And the mark over her heart went still.
Not cold. Not the hard cold-with-edges it had thrown at Rowan since the first day, and not the hot forward hunger of the river either.
Still. Utterly, deliberately still, the whole of it, Lark and the water-lines and the dark birds, gone quiet and motionless against her ribs for the first time since the hour Lark died, and Maren felt it go and did not know, lying in the dark with the living woman's heartbeat under her hand and the dead one silent on her skin, she could not for her life tell, whether it was Lark herself gone gentle and giving her permission, her blessing, her go on, or grief finally lying down to rest, or whether it was the other thing, the leash, the patient drowned intelligence under it, going quiet the way a hunting animal goes quiet, not because it has lost interest but because, for the first time, it has seen something worth holding very still to watch.