When the Moon was Ours(35)

But she couldn’t cut it away and kill it.

The Bonner sisters wanted it, demanded it. And Peyton had seen the start of this one, a deeper violet than the house Miel lived in with Aracely.

Without putting on her shoes, Miel crept downstairs and outside, taking a full breath when the night air hit her forearm. The grass smelled clean and strong as citrus pith, and each blade looked a little gilded, taking in light from the house like a cloth soaking up oil.

“Miel.” She heard Sam’s voice. Not the question he’d made of her name when he found her staring at the stained glass pumpkins. He was calling her.

He’d been coming from his house. Even from this distance, in the dark, she could see the tints of the roof tiles. The day she had spilled out of the water tower, her eyes damp and sore, those different-colored tiles had made Sam’s house seem like a place out of a fairy tale.

Now it seemed like a place that the cruel force of her roses might wreck if she came too close.

The moon he carried was not the kind he hung outside her window, the pale blue-lavender of a frost moon, or the soft green of a corn moon, the kind he made for nightmare-plagued children. This one he’d painted in white, and black, and where they met, a thin band of gray. He painted not on paper or fabric but on a rusted metal globe, discarded by an antique shop; she’d gone with him to get it and a half-dozen others they were junking.

He’d covered it in the blue-black of a new moon, and then added the sharp slice of a waning crescent.

“Where are you putting it?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet,” he said.

She wanted to ask if she could go with him, watch him climb that wooden ladder and set the moon in a high tree, this gash of light.

It scared her a little. She’d never seen him paint a moon like this, all white and black, no hint of color, mare insularum and sinus honoris in gray. It was so different from every moon he’d ever brought her, the violets and blues of lunar seas painted on paper, or the plains in a gold so faint they looked like cream.

But that stark beauty made her want to kiss him so badly that the lack of it made her lips feel cold. Her tongue was ice in her own mouth. Her breath was winter wind that stung every surface inside her.

He knew. She saw the shift in how he looked at her, the way his lips parted, a breath held between them. He set down the moon and kissed her, the taste of him like the black cardamom Aracely kept in a glass jar. The smoke and spice filled the air whenever she opened it. Like ginger made darker.

Sam tasted like the one night each year when the air turned from fall to winter, the sudden cold, the smell of damp bark.

Winged cardamom. That was what Aracely called it. For the way the pods, split open, looked like moths about to take flight. The taste fluttered on Miel’s tongue like a meadow brown on an iris petal.

Even when her lips broke away from Sam’s, he kept his hand on the back of her neck, his mouth still so close to hers she felt the rhythm of his breathing.

He pulled her against him, his arm holding her waist. This morning her rose had given off the scent of honey and apricot, but now its perfume had the weight and spice of copal incense. It filled the air between them.

Each time he kissed her, that faint cardamom taste of his mouth made her shut her eyes. But then it turned bitter on her tongue. The more she cared about him, the more the Bonner sisters saw she cared about him, the more they’d know he was how to get to her. The more they saw how she looked at him, touched his arm when she laughed, pulled him into the trees when he was on his breaks, the more they’d wield that birth certificate.

He was her best friend, and everyone knew it. But half this town must have assumed they were best friends by default. The boy who hung dozens of copies of the moon, and the girl from the water tower. The girl afraid of pumpkins, and the boy who knew how to keep snakes away with cinnamon and clove oil and pink agapanthus. They were each so strange that only someone as odd as the other could get so close.

But if she loved him, the Bonner girls would feel it. She already had to do what they wanted, offer her roses in exchange for their silence. But she couldn’t let them near him. He couldn’t know that the secret held between him and his mother and Aracely and Miel was also in the hands of these four sisters. It would turn him frightened and skittish. He’d hide from the questions he needed to stare down.

She put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him away. “I can’t.” She cradled her forearm against her sweater. “We never should have done this. Any of it.”

“What?” he asked. “Why?”

She reached into the dark for a lie, her fingers grasping for anything solid. “We know each other too well. We’ve been friends too long to do this.” Her voice was thinning and breaking. “We can’t do this.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“I’m sorry,” she said, the first word clipped by a hard swallow. “I care about you. But I can’t be with you.” She turned her back to him before the damp sting of salt hit her cheek. “Not like this.”

Even walking away from him, she heard him catch his breath in the back of his throat.

“Miel,” he said.

But she didn’t answer, so he didn’t go after her.

She tried to get far enough away that she wouldn’t hear the soft brushing sound of him slipping his hands into his pockets. And she didn’t look back until she knew he was gone.