“Did you Turn together?” she asks. “You and Nel?”
He doesn’t want to answer that question. He thinks of Nel racing out of the pine thicket behind the farm—tripping over himself with excitement, his chin wet and pupils blown. All these years later, Lysander can still feel the panic in his chest:What the hell did you do?
That memory brings another—the uneasy quiet of Nel’s dormered room, the smell of bile permeating the air as he pushed his fingers down Nel’s throat.Come on. Comeon, Van Haut. Fuck. Fuck!A rapid-fire knock on the door sent him lurching to his feet. Nel stayed down, curled in on himself in a small, darkc. He didn’t get up.
On the swing next to him, Shea is still waiting for an answer. It isn’t fair of him, and he knows it—the way he covets everything of hers, and offers nothing in return. But all his secrets are damaged, disfigured by a lifetime in the dark. She won’t like them.
On a whim, he reaches into his pocket and pries out a set of batteries. A half dozen alkaline stars glitter in his palm. All the cosmos he can give her.
“Here,” he says, more vehemently than he meant to.
She peers warily into his hand, like he’s offered her a live snake. “What’s this for?”
“For the feed. Back in the Catskills.”
Her starless eyes flick to his. She doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. That fist around his guts tightens until it hurts. He’s doing everything right. He’s playing by the rules.Herrules.Hergame. And she’s looking at him like he’s struck her.
“Take the batteries, Shea.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re making it feel cheap.”
He searches her face, confusion rattling in his chest. “This is how we’ve always done things. Blood for batteries. I’m giving you this because I owe you payment—”
“Payment,” she echoes, and the look on her face shuts him up immediately.
She launches to her feet and he follows, frustration radiating through him. Even his best intentions come out spoiled, withering before they can blossom into something worthwhile.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Payment,”she says again. She spits it out like poison. “For services rendered?”
He cuts her a look. “Don’t do that.”
“Like I’m awhore?”
“No.” His patience is strained to breaking. “You know that’s not what— Where are you going?”
She doesn’t answer. She’s storming away, veering off the road and into the cluster of wide red oaks ahead. He falls into a jog after her, pocketing the batteries as he goes.
“Shea, wait.”
Her voice comes from somewhere just ahead. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
“Fine. Just stay where I can see you.” He ducks under a low-hanging branch just before it snaps back in his face. “Did you hear me? Shea? You can’t—Shit. Shea!”
She’s gone, swallowed by the wood. With a curse, he tails after her. The air here is sharp and cold, and the smell of turpentine clings to everything. The trees thicken, gathering close. He wedges himself sidelong between the boles, doing what he can to scent her in the dark. Cupping his hands to his mouth, he calls for her again. His voice catapults uselessly off the trees.
“Fuck!”
He falters to a stop, tuning his ears to the forest’s deadly frequency. He listens to it breathe—to the primeval pulse of it, same as the pulse through his veins. Sticky. Slow. In the quiet, he hears the murmur of wind through the trees. The snap of a branch and the flit of an animal. The far-off sound of some small thing dying.
There, beneath it, is the hammering of a human heart. One he’s memorized. And she’s afraid.
He takes off running at a clip, shoving through a thicket of needled balsam and bursting into a wide, open clearing. The stars have been dulled by the clouds, blown in from the east. A storm is coming. He can feel it. The moon sits behind a screen of gray, the light sucked out of it.
