When the Moon was Ours(68)
Miel grabbed Sam’s other hand, the blood on her palm slicking his. She held on so hard her fingers trembled.
He tried to ease his hand out of hers. “You’ve got to let go, okay?”
She didn’t loosen her grip.
“Please don’t leave,” she said, the words dry and wrung-out.
She put all the force and will she had into holding his hand, hard enough that he could feel her slowing pulse against his palm. Hard enough that he was losing the feeling in his fingertips.
“I’m not leaving you,” he said.
But her eyelashes flickered, the recognition leaving her. Her skin felt damp, fevered. She was too far away to hear him, but close enough to hold on to his hand so hard he couldn’t get his fingers back without hurting her. He needed both his hands to help her, but she held on so tight he felt it wringing the blood out of her. She was giving what little strength she had, the force left in her heart and her breathing, to keeping her grasp on him. And if he waited until she was weak enough that it slackened, he’d lose her.
He was losing her, this girl who built with him each night a world so much softer and more beautiful than the one he woke to in the morning. She was the wild blossoms and dark sugar that spoke of what the world could be. She was the pale stars on her brown skin.
She was the whole sky.
That was the cruelest thing about losing someone. In being lost, they became so many different people, even more than when they were there. To Aracely, she would be the lost sister who had only begun to understand that the woman she lived with was made of a boy name Leandro, and a hundred thousand yellow butterflies, and the bright, wild wish to be as she really was.
To Sam, she was the girl who gave his moons somewhere to go. She was the dark amber of beechwood honey, the caramel of sourwood, and the bitter aftertaste of heather and pine. She was every shade of blue between two midnights.
And she was slipping from his grasp because she would not let go.
lake of perseverance
The world darkened and brightened. The wind cupped the thread of her mother’s crying, weak and soft.
Only the slowing rhythm of her pulse in her wound made her sure she was still alive.
His hands on her took her out of these woods, back to a night when he left a rose moon in the beech tree outside her window. And she let herself slip out of the feeling of bleeding from her wrist, and into that first rush of light that had made her wonder if it was spring. It had brought the sudden feeling of being in a different month. Thinking winter was months away and realizing it was October.
This pale, rose-colored light had made her expect to look out her window and find all the trees blooming. A million blushing petals against a midnight sky. Spring descending over fall in countless pink blossoms. That blush on the whole world had turned her next breath into something between a gasp and a laugh. She could almost feel it in her mouth now, almost laughed like that again, but the salt at the back of her throat choked it out of her.
She sank under the memory of finding the trees outside not in blossom, but all amber and gold, tinted with that rose light. Instead of disappointment, it made her feel covered in the sound of his name. Sam. Samir. Moon. All the names she knew for him. Only one of his moons could make the world slip into another season.
Miel opened her eyes as much as she could, her eyelashes shading her vision. She slipped her fingers tight between Sam’s.
She felt his heartbeat in his chest. She heard him saying her name over and over, the two of them breaking against each other.
Her eyes stung, and stayed dry. She had nothing left but the will to hold on to his hand, not to lose him. The water had taken Leandro. It had almost taken Sam. She wasn’t letting go. All the strength in her body she let pour toward her fingers like sand. The night would not turn to water and tear his hand from hers. No matter how much the dark became a river and the wind a current, no matter how much blood Ivy’s pale fingers had taken from her, Miel would not let go of Sam.
Through the slow, loud rhythm of her own pulse in her temples, she heard him sobbing into her hair. The sound was so low, it disappeared. He was holding it tight in his throat, like he meant to stay quiet. His breathing was hard enough that she felt it staggered with his heartbeat.
She wanted to lift her hand to his cheek, to still any drops on his face before their salt reached his lips or his neck. There wasn’t a reason to cry, or be afraid. She wasn’t letting go, wasn’t losing him. If her lips had given up any sound, she would’ve told him.
A lock of his hair brushed Miel’s cheek, like a whip of cool air. But her skin was so hot she barely felt it. He was holding her so close his eyelashes feathered against her cheek. And she meant to hold on to these things, not lose them like silver charms slipping from her fingers and falling into dark water.
The soft brush of something small and wispy grazed Miel’s cheek. She thought it was his eyelashes, or another lock of his hair, but then she felt it again.
The cool film of petals.
She looked up at Sam.
Instead of the salt of his tears, tiny rose petals, red as the blood she was losing, clung to his cheeks. One had caught on the inner corner of his eye. Another had stuck to his lower lip, a third on his temple.
He blinked, and another fell from his eyelashes.
A flicker of movement tilted inside her forearm. She felt a new burst of growth breaking through to the light. She held her gasp in her lungs, and glanced down at the green shoot, covered in tiny new leaves.