And yet, when the rectangle above lightens enough for me to leap and dig out the gathered snow so we might begin our journey again, I am loathed to do so. Growling at my hesitation, I leap and begin to dig, throwing the snow off furiously.
Only the winds outside are still howling, the snow still pelting my hide like angry little pellets.
The storm has not yet passed. Relief and joy slam through me at the realization.
We must stay a little longer.
I grin wide before I catch myself and frown. What am I thinking? I’ve just reasoned that being with the beautiful, amazing, perfect Ksenia is an impossibility. Any continued closeness with her will only be torture in the long run.
And yet, when I leap back to the church floor, bringing a load of snow with me for water, all I feel is happiness.
“Where did you go?” her voice says from the darkness. I need to add wood to the stove, both for light and warmth, and immediately get to the task.
“The storm has not abated,” I say gruffly, trying not to let my joy at this fact show in my words.
“Oh,” she says. My heart beats quickly, waiting for what she will say next. Will she express sadness that she cannot get home as quickly as she hoped?
“Then come back to bed. It’s cold without you.”
My heart sings with happiness as I shove the last of the wood in the stove and hurry back to her side.
I slide into the sleeping bag beside her. We put one beneath us and zipped the second over the top. Well, we could only close it on her side since it had no hope of closing over my large frame. I worried she would not be warm enough without it fully zipped, but she said as long as the fire was going and I was at her side, she would stay warm.
It’s quiet as she wraps herself around me, slotting her small arms between my lower pairs and squeezing against my waist.
“Hold me,” she whispers, and I’m eager to comply.
She is quiet, and I wonder if she is falling back to sleep. But her breathing doesn’t even out the way it does when she slumbers. I slept only a short while during the night. Mostly I stayed awake, listening to the entrancing, melodic sound of her breathing, so I know it well.
But now she is quiet, and her arms around me tense. What is she thinking? Is she upset that we couldn’t continue on toward her home because of the storm?
She is not gone yet.
But soon. . . Like the breath vapors that appear in the cold when we speak, she will be here one moment and disappear the next. I want to grasp that which is ephemeral all the tighter, but she will slip through my fingers.
“What is it like?” I ask, and my voice sounds overly loud in the quiet. “Where you are from.”
She stiffens even more in my arms. “Why are you asking that?” Her voice is slightly muffled from her face pressed againstmy chest, but I can still hear. “I don’t want to think about anything except being here. With you.”
Her words should make me happy, but they do nothing except make the ache pierce more. She is the sun, and I am the moon. There is no sky we can share together. I cannot be in her world, and I refuse to imprison her in mine.
“Tomorrow, the storm will likely abate,” I say, my voice gruff. “And since we know I can carry you, there’s no need to make you walk slowly on your small legs. So as soon as the storm clears, I can run you swiftly to the city.”
I swallow hard. “You could be back home by as soon as tomorrow night, depending on where in the world you live?—”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore!” She withdraws her arms and wriggles out of my grasp, turning around in the small space of the sleeping bag and giving me her back.
I frown and start to wrap my arms around her again, but she sharply says, “Don’t touch me.”
I expel a frustrated breath, laying back, half out of the covers. I haven’t spent much time with humans, so maybe I don’t know how they communicate. My brothers and I are usually only ever direct with each other, so she confuses me.
And then I remember. . . There was the century or so after I came back from the madness where I still refused to speak with Abaddon.
To be fair, he did have me chained to a dungeon wall at the time. But also, I didn’t know how to say… All the complicated things I was feeling. I barely understand them now and still don’t know if I can put words to them.
My head turns towards the spill of Ksenia’s honey hair. Is that what it is like now for the small human at my side? Is she feeling too many complicated things to put into words?
Or is it just me she prefers not to share her thoughts with? I frown and begin to understand some of my brother’s frustrationat not being able to know my thoughts without me speaking. After being so intimate with her body, I want to know all of her. Yet so much of her is still a closed-up box. A beautiful mystery.
