I flashed to the kiss we’d shared in the pit, when she’d tried to snap me out of the same claustrophobic pressure that was eking back into my thoughts even now, inside this small, dark space. That moment sat between us now, making it difficult to pretend that everything we’d once been to each other was truly dead and buried. Love, like infection, had a way of festering until the soft remains turned septic with neglect.
Love could be gangrenous. After my mother died, the monster’s love had spread like an infection. In its eagerness to keep me from hurting, the monster had smothered my grief again and again, until I was left feeling nothing at all.
I’d come back to Audrey, desperate to feel again. I’d dreaded seeing Eva, knowing how our love had rotted away, too. But nowshe was looking at me with flushed cheeks and eyes full of tears, asking for reassurance.
“We’ll figure it out.” I took a step forward, an ache opening up in my chest. My throat closed around the words.
So many things to say to her, and none of them came easily.
My eyes fell to the round bow of Eva’s lips. She’d lost her scrunchie in the river, and her loose, damp hair was plastered against her neck. “I don’t know how to make things right between us,” I exhaled through my nose, suddenly flustered. “Maybe I shouldn’t try. It’s just… I miss you so much, bee girl.”
Eva’s eyes grew wider, her mouth puckering. My own mouth felt as dry as cotton. But she deserved to hear that, at least once. She deserved to know that she had been loved. That I would choose infection now if it meant I had once been hers.
The air between us sat heavy and thick with the smell of rain. Of fresh things.
“Is it too late for us?” I asked. The wind rushed in at my back, chilling my still-damp skin.
Surprise rippled across her face at the question.
“Sorry.” I stepped back, suddenly flushed. “That was out of line. I shouldn’t—”
“Stop,” Eva commanded, and I did. She closed the scant distance between us, her fingers splaying over my abdomen. The door snapped shut behind me, plunging us into darkness as Eva pinned me against the damp aged wood.
When her mouth pressed to mine, the world narrowed to a thread.
My hands found her waist before my mind properly processed what we were doing, my lips parting for the dip of her tongue. Shekissed too urgently to be soft, her warmth like the sun, magnetizing me closer.
“Arthur,” Eva whispered. In her mouth, my name was a sentencing, and a trickle of fear ran down my body. But I wanted her judgment. I wanted atonement. I wanted her, sharp or soft.
The rain beat against the door behind me as we held each other a little tighter, our bodies damp and our breaths ragged.
“You left me alone, after all that happened.” Eva thumbed the side of my mouth, her breath a hot caress on my chin.
“I know.”
My response seemed to irritate her, and she kissed me harder. The metallic slide of iron spread over my tongue, and I flinched, licking the split in my lower lip. The salt of her was a luxury. So human, to sweat and bleed, to want and wound.
“Is that all you have to say?” she asked.
I pushed off the door. Eva grabbed my hips, limping us back toward the cot. “No,” I whispered.
When the backs of her calves hit the cot, Eva turned us and pushed me down onto the makeshift bed. A spark of pain erupted in the swollen skin around my stitches, making me wince.
“I have a lot I want to say to you, bee girl.”
A zing of awareness shot up my limbs as Eva stepped between my knees and knit her fingers into the hair at my nape.
“Sometimes being angry at you was the only thing I had to hold on to,” she whispered.
I swallowed. “Be angry, then, bee girl. Be furious with me, but don’t let go.” I wrapped my arms tightly around her middle, yearning to draw her in completely and bury my face in the soft ravines of her body.
Eva gently touched my forehead, but the skin was too sensitive, and I flinched back without meaning to.
“Your fever is worse,” she said.
“It’s fine. I just need to rest.”
“Youneedantibiotics,”the monster snapped inside our head.
