Dark and Deepest Red(40)

“I have already been taken to the bailiff once,” Lala says, her voice thinning so quickly she doesn’t need to try at a whisper.

Alifair’s eyes widen, just for a moment, before he wrests back control of his expression.

“All the talk about me,” Lala says. “Did you think it started from nothing?”

“This city invents reasons to blame people,” Alifair says. “You know that. Especially anyone like you and your aunt.”

So Alifair has been observant enough to know that powerful men cast suspicion on brown-skinned women, but not enough to realize they may cast it on him next.

“All I have wanted is for you both to be safe,” Lala says.

“So you push me away yet keep staring at me,” he says.

Lala shakes her head, a knot building in her throat. “It’s all I can have of you.”

He holds his jaw tight. His anger carves and refines him. It brings out angles in his face that both unnerve Lala and that she cannot help finding beautiful. And it is that beauty, the unfamiliar look of him, that roots her to where she stands, in the grassy light between beech and chestnut trees.

“If you want to look at me,” he says again, “then go on, look at me.”

He shrugs away his tunic.

Lala glances forward and back on the path. “Alifair.” They are veiled only by the yews. Madness has taken Strasbourg, not only in la fièvre but in those who think the color red causes it, in her aunt sharing a bed with the flax farmer, in Alifair showing himself to these trees.

Alifair has always been careful. He wears such loose-fitting garments, his shift and shirt hanging from his body, to turn the impression of him into that of a more solid boy, a little stout even, instead of suggesting the true shape of him. His chemise and tunic leave so much room between the hemp and his skin that in winter the cold air finds its way between, his stomach chilled as an axe blade.

Next he removes his shirt, leaving nothing but the cloths bound across his chest. “Do not stare at me unless you are willing to see me.”

He stands, steady as a hunter’s aim.

“Look at me,” he says. “Look at this body. My body. Or stop looking. Deny it, and deny me.”

The sight of him, his bare shoulders and arms in the half daylight, stuns her silent. He binds himself down, the effect of which makes him seem broad-chested beneath his clothes. His hips keep the hose up, but without the length of the tunic, it is more obvious, to her at least, how he stuffs extra cloth into the plain fabric of his trousers, to hide what is not there.

Lala’s fingers have never wanted more to find their way past that cloth.

“But do not act as though I am some pathetic, lovesick boy while your eyes stay on me,” he says, each word with a sharp point. “I will not let you have both anymore. If you do not want me, then deny me. All of me.”

She tells her mouth to speak the words. She gives the command again, as though her tongue is a stubborn horse.

But the feeling of wanting rises up in her. It opens in her so wide she can feel it in Alifair’s body, a desire spread through them like the shared life inside his aspen trees.

When she kisses him, her mouth warm and wet on his, it is this she thinks of. How she cannot quite tell the feeling of his body beneath her hands from her own body under his palms.

When he kisses her back so hard she stumbles, she thinks of these trees, taking in water together.

“There is nothing I want more than I want you,” she says, her lips brushing his with each word. They come more fierce than soft, more angry than tender.

“Then stop thinking of what it will cost me,” he says, keeping the same slight distance, the same tone, hard and set as a stone in the earth.

When she touches the fabric between his legs, when she finds him beneath the scrap of extra cloth, their breath catches between their mouths, and she thinks of those aspen leaves all breathing at once.

He takes his hands through her hair, and she thinks of the wind fanning out the leaves.

She has thought so often of him at night, as her hand drifted down her body and between her legs, her shift a thin veil over the patch of coarse hair. She thought so much of being alongside him in the dark as she pressed her fingers into her body, harder, until the ribbon of longing folded in on itself.

Now her hands are on him, and he is naked to the waist, in nothing but his breeches. It is the first time she has gotten to both see his body, the muscles forged by work, and feel its warmth for this long.

They fall onto the shade-cool moss, her legs intertwining with his, and she thinks of the trees’ roots beneath the ground, all sharing the space like clasped hands.

And when the way he touches her makes her tip her head back, there is nothing but the shared life threading through both their hearts. It is bright as the red jewels of the berries studding the yew branches above them. It is the breath that stays between them as the sky grows dark and fills with the living sapphires of the stars.





Emil


When he tried to sleep, she was there.

Not Rosella.

His five-centuries-ago relative, with her hair, the same coarse black as his and his cousins’, and her skin a tone of brown that ran through him and his whole family. She was there, in the dust-softened cloth of her dyed skirt, among the stone and canal water of Strasbourg. She was there, in this city that smelled like iron and sweat and summer heat, with its sky that seemed sliced in half by la cathédrale’s pink-tinted spire. She was there, within the chaos and flurry of all those dancing bodies.