I’d never seen her look so nervous. “I don’t want to go fast.”
Immediately, I flashed back to the altercation she’d had in theShoppe with Lenny. Something in me still felt bruised when I recalled first her fear, then her panic that someone would find out.
Not for the first time, I worried I’d made a mistake by promising to keep that secret.
“Of course we can go slow, bee girl.”
“You mean it?”
I nodded and pulled her against me again, pressing my face into her hair. “I only want what you want too.” That was already more than I’d ever hoped for.
The tension in her shoulders dissipated. Her relief made me ache, and a new layer of disdain for Lenny Walker grew inside my heart. She didn’t deserve to feel the way Lenny had made her feel. She shouldn’t have to worry that wanting—or not wanting—was something to fear.
I breathed into her loose golden waves. “Slow is perfect,” I whispered, rubbing a circle over her back as the words she’d spoken only minutes before came back to me.
Home is a thing that grows.
Maybe trust was too.
Eva trusted me to keep my mouth shut about what Lenny had done. So, I would. But I would hate him for what he’d done to the girl I was starting to love. It hurt to recognize the look I’d seen on her face that day and to know exactly how he’d made her feel.
Scared. Immobile. Frozen.
That was something I could understand. The claustrophobic feeling of not having a choice had stuck its roots in me long ago.
Resolve settled in me like old seeds packed under a heavy weight of soil. I wouldn’t let that happen again. I wouldn’t let him near enough to hurt her.
Chapter 26
Arthur
The honey was gone.
I stared as Eva tore frame after frame out of their hive boxes, growing more frantic by the second.It’s all gone.Blood pounded in my ears, and the world seemed to thin, stealing my breath until the center of my chest ached with that single, nauseating truth.
There was no honey.
No cure.
No escape. Not for Jack, and certainly not for me.
The words ran viscous through my mind, slipping through the cracks between my will and the monster’s, and I imagined the membranous barrier between us growing sticky.
Eva limped to the hive box farthest from where I stood, an audible sob slipping out as she tore off the top. I flinched at the cracking sound of the wood as storm-damaged splinters flecked off into the grass.
“It’s all gone,” she rasped.
A chill swept down my spine, the monster’s touch as gentle as a rime of frost on a window deep in autumn. Hands shaking, I bentto lift a discarded wooden frame from the grass and tried to fight off the monster’s trickling cold. Mildew speckled the rough-cut grain, the wood slightly warped from exposure to the elements. Wax moths had eaten a tunnel through the cells, leaving silky, weblike strands behind. The sparse remaining comb fragments had turned brittle and dark with age and neglect, the hives turned to ruin without proper care.
Bug jogged on soft paws through the carpet of swaying grasses and deep blue flowers, looking around curiously. She seemed oblivious to the source of Eva’s tears, and to the emptiness swelling inside me, content to play in this new, colorful place.
The monster didn’t say the obvious, that we were too late—many years too late, by the state of the frames. Instead, I felt its hope sink into a cool resolve inside my chest.
In my current state of overwhelm, it would be such a relief to just… let go. Let the monster have me. I already felt myself slipping—I always did when everything felt like too much. The monster had always been there for me, hadn’t it? It never let me fall or break. It was an escape.
The frame slipped from my fingers, thunking into the grass at my feet as the meadow kaleidoscoped in a swirl of blues and greens around me. With a start, I realized I wastap-tap-tappingthe side of my leg again. It took effort to flatten my palm, and I closed my eyes and slowed my breath. Told myself to stay.
Stay here.
