When the Moon was Ours(69)

It was curling out, taking on the woody look of a rose stem. Then it uncoiled, turning green and pliable, like a morning glory vine.

One thorn snagged the fabric of Sam’s shirt, pulling it back enough to find its way out of the cloth he’d tied around her arm. Then it unfurled and reached Sam’s bare wrist, pressing into him. He flinched but then relaxed, and for that second she thought she could feel what he felt, the pain clean and sudden as a needle.

Then Miel felt the pull, a shift between her veins.

Red lit up the stem, the leaves and thorns tinted gold like sun on a dragonfly.

The stem was drawing blood out of Sam. Miel could feel it dripping into her.

She tried to twist away from it, to stop taking from Sam when she had already taken so much from him.

But now he held on to her, his fingers sure. Before his hand had been tense and twitching against hers. Now it kept her still.

The glow traveled from his wrist to hers, like the stem was pulling from his body not blood but light.

He held his wrist closer to hers, giving his blood to the lit-up stem. She didn’t want to take it from him, to strip from him something that belonged to his body. But now he held on to her harder than she’d held on to him. Now he wouldn’t let her break away from him any more than she’d let his hand go.

The few petals clinging to his cheek rained onto her neck and collarbone. The stem curled away from Sam’s wrist, drawing back so close to Miel’s that it tucked under the fabric of Sam’s shirt around her wrist. And her body began to feel like a living thing again, her heart no longer shuddering.

The world came back to her in time to hear the Bonner sisters, their voices twisting in the air like strands of a braid.





eastern sea

Giving her his blood had left his wrist sore, a good kind. His body felt that way after he’d spent the afternoon hauling in the biggest field and Cinderella pumpkins. The stem had pulled back toward Miel’s wrist, and the cut from the thorn felt clean, already healing.

He felt Miel shifting her weight.

“Can you help me get up?” she asked.

If she hadn’t been so streaked in her own blood, her shirt so dyed red, he would’ve laughed. She couldn’t stand on her own. The flush had come back into her cheeks and her lips, but she was still shaking enough that he was ready to carry her if he had to.

She was already leaning on him, trying to get to her feet. He steadied her, standing with her, holding an arm around her waist.

“You have to leave,” she said, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was watching a point between the trees, a dark space among the fingers of yellow leaves.

It wasn’t until the wind calmed that he heard why.

The sound of the Bonner girls’ voices, the mingling of higher and lower pitches, their shared cadence. But instead of reckless and laughing, their voices sounded taut and pressing. They hushed each other.

“Did they do this to you?” he asked. Every time he’d covered for Peyton, every time he’d tried to remind Lian that she was not as slow as everyone thought, each hour he’d worked for Mr. Bonner, stuck him like the thorns on his mother’s Callery pear tree. Not the short, clean thorns on Miel’s roses. The Callery pear’s were little daggers, rough, and each as long as Miel’s fingers.

He felt the warmth of Miel’s palm on his collarbone. Her blood had stained his undershirt, and her hand left a soft imprint of red.

Now she was looking at him. “You have to leave.”

“Miel,” he said, their faces close enough that he could see her pupils spreading and contracting. “Are they the ones who did this to you?”

“Go,” she said. “You have to leave.”

“So do you,” he said.

“I’m not backing down on this,” she said, looking toward the trees. Fear cut into the resolve in her voice. “I’m not backing down from them. Not anymore.”

“And I’m not leaving you alone.”

“Dammit, Sam.” She broke away from him.

The sudden movement must have hurt her. She clutched her wrist against her, rubbing the back of her forearm with her other hand. Her steps wavered, and he set a hand on her back.

Her eyes were so coated in tears she was a blink from them spilling over. She stared, her mouth half-open.

The trembling in her eyelashes and lips was more than pain. It almost looked like pity. Her pursed lips, the slight tilt to her head, the cringe of a lost cause. Like Sam was a child trying to bring back to life a bird fallen from a nest.

“They know about you,” she said.

Each word was another thorn off that pear tree. Their points didn’t slide all the way into him, like the thought of the Bonner sisters hurting Miel. But they pricked him, left him scratched.

“What?” he asked.

“They saw your birth certificate,” she said. “They have a copy.”

Now those thorns were shredding his clothes, cutting them away from his body.

“They could out you to everyone,” Miel said. She stumbled forward, away from his hand. That film of water spilled over and fell down her cheeks.

He could not shrug away the sense that his shirt, his binder, his jeans, were all turning to pieces. They were falling away from him, leaving him naked to the night and all these trees.

But it was his body. It was his to name. And he was under this roof of gold and darkness with a girl who would learn to call him whatever he named himself.