I could hurt her.
The chair creaked as I leaned into its ancient back, creating distance. Eva closed it with a single step, so close her knees kissed my inner thighs. One of her hands was tucked safely in its glove, the other unbearably naked. “Do you not want me to?”
“That’s not it, and you know it.”
A flicker of vulnerability passed over her face. “You’re afraid of me.”
“She is monstrous too, in her own way.”
I bristled at the admiration in the monster’s tone.No, she isn’t,I silently snapped back.
The Moreaus straddled an interesting line between friend and foe in the town’s ecosystem, drawing whispers wherever they went. Eva got the brunt of it. Her sister didn’t have the gift she and her father shared, and for whatever reason, Jack had proven capable of hiding his ability to make things grow when the situation demanded it.
Not like Eva. Wilderness burst from the earth everywhere the bee girl stepped.
“I’m not afraid ofyou,Ev.”
Eva flipped my hand. “What, then?” A honeybee sat in thehollow of her throat, the sections of its wings putting me in mind of a gothic window’s delicate tracery.
“I’m afraid… you want something you can’t have.”
“Can’t?” Eva’s throat pulsed a slow, hard swallow. “Or shouldn’t?”
“Does it matter?”
Her gaze pinned me like a bug to Styrofoam. “It does to me.”
The sketch of her fingernail made my glove feel like it wasn’t even there. I gripped the arms of the chair. “Ev, I—”
“Just let me try. Please.”
A better person would have pulled away, instead of just sitting there, eyes fixed on the determined set of her mouth as she peeled the cotton free and set it on my knee.
I wasn’t a better person.
I was me.
The monster curled deeper inside me, both of us as terrified as we were desperate to let her touch us. Just once.
Please,I begged.Don’t hurt her.
The monster shook inside me, its ever-awareness tuned to the thrum of her pulse, so near our skin.“I won’t, little death-touch,”it said as Eva rolled down the edge of my glove.“I promise.”
The bee girl’s eyes softened. “You trust me?”
I could still say no. Deny it. But she was full of light, and like a sunflower, I couldn’t help yielding to her. My body spoke for me anyway; I sat with my legs spread, palms open, face upturned. There was no use lying whentrustwas written all over me.
Still, my heart beat in my skull, and my skin pulled tight everywhere, anticipation like a drug. I wanted to let her want me. To see me. I wanted the crush of another person’s skin reassuring me that I wasn’t alone.
“Yes,” I whispered. I wasn’t usually one for faith, but she mademe want to believe in something bigger than my own broken pieces.
Eva took my hand in hers.
Like sparklers, the nerves in my fingers lit up. A current of feeling rushed up my arm to the center of my chest. I shivered with something deeper than cold. Something raw. Something new.
I stared at Eva. She twitched a smile, seemingly content to exist under my magnifying glass. I’d been doing it for weeks, cataloging finite details:
The splash of freckles dusting her nose.
