When the Moon was Ours(50)

He’ll get there, Sam’s mother had tried to tell her. But Miel hadn’t let that calm and that patience find its way into her.

Instead, when she and Sam had fought, she’d thrown it all at him. She’d forced him up against things he wasn’t ready to look at.

She was no better than Ivy, no better than the Bonner girls sliding Sam’s birth certificate across that wooden table.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Sam looked up.

“I shouldn’t have…” She stopped. She didn’t know how to apologize without doing the same thing again. Bringing it up enough to apologize meant shoving it all toward him again.

Sam didn’t move. He just watched her, his face open but a little tense.

“I shouldn’t have pushed you that hard,” she said.

His jaw tightened, the way it had by the river.

“If I ever don’t tell you something, it’s not because I don’t want to tell you,” he said. “It’s because I don’t know.”

Maybe no one else would’ve caught it, but in that flinch, she saw it, the fact that all this was breaking him.

The truth slid over her skin, that if she loved him, sometimes it would mean doing nothing. It would mean being still. It would mean saying nothing, but standing close enough so he would know she was there, that she was staying.

Sam took his mother’s wooden rolling pin from the freezer, where she always put it, a trick she swore by for rolling out roti, but that Sam said his aunts considered just shy of sacrilege to the family recipe.

Miel felt the conversation evaporating, like water vapor boiling off the milk on the stove. She let it. If Sam didn’t want to talk about this, she wouldn’t force it. Maybe there was nothing else she could do for him right now, but she could do this, be there whether he wanted to stay quiet or wanted to speak.

He leaned over the counter, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, putting the weight of his shoulders behind his hands. The line of the muscle in his forearm stood out as he worked the rolling pin.

He caught her watching him. “You’ll never look at me the same way after this,” he said.

“Are you kidding?” she asked. “There’s nothing more alluring than a guy who knows how to work a rolling pin.”

He laughed without looking up.

Her own words, said without thinking, brushed over her, prickling her. Even with his laugh. Worse, because of his laugh. Was she flirting with him? She couldn’t flirt with him. He was Sam. Even after they’d slept together, flirting felt distant, almost formal, the act of a boy and a girl who’d just met. He knew all the things about her that made flirting impossible. There was only so much she could flirt with someone who knew that eating casaba melon made a rash spread across her stomach.

A flash of color made her check her hands.

A sugared starflower petal had stuck to her palm.

The rough, shimmering surface, edges deep blue, made her wonder how much she could touch Sam without him flinching away.

There was no flirting. They were years past that.

She came close enough to make him look up.

He took a step back, startled by the small distance between them. But she set the starflower petal against his lips, touching only the sugared surface, not his mouth, until he took it onto his tongue.

He shut his eyes, letting the petal dissolve.

Miel pretended, for that one moment of him closing his eyes, that the petal had come from one of her roses, that he was taking onto his tongue a thing she had grown from her own body.

She turned back to the milk and sugar simmering on the stove. The thought of being in bed with him, how his mouth had felt when she brushed her thumb over his lower lip, made her feel like the powdered sugar in the air, floating and shimmering.

The wooden spoon slipped against the bottom of the pot, and a slick of hot dulce de leche sputtered onto the heel of her hand.

She pulled away from the stove, a gasp whistling across her throat. The coin of heat burned into her palm.

Sam grabbed her hand and set her palm against his lips. His tongue licked away the dulce de leche, already cooling enough for his mouth when a few seconds before it had scalded her hand.

In that second of his tongue on her palm, she felt the new rosebud pressing out of her wrist. Even with the pain cutting through her forearm, she thought of kissing him until it was a full rose, bursting open.

She thought she felt his lips pressed against her hand, the place where the sugar would have worsened the burn if he hadn’t taken it into his mouth. But he did it so quickly. Before she could be sure, he set the cold rolling pin against her hand.

Her fingers trembled from the dulce de leche’s heat and the sudden chill of the wood.

She would never be Aracely. Fearless charm would never flow from her body like yards of chiffon. But Sam looked at Miel as if all her sharp edges and cursed petals, everything she’d tried to keep in shadow, were the glinting facets of unpolished rose quartz.

What Sam had told her the time she first kissed him, about pollinating each pumpkin blossom by hand, she knew it was true. He hadn’t made it up. But now it felt like something he’d invented, a fairy story about an enchanted paintbrush that shimmered with pollen like gold dust. It covered her in the feeling that his fingers were brushes, and under them she was growing into something alive.

She stayed still a few seconds too long. A stricken look crossed Sam’s face.