I tried to get out of my own way. I tried to let the sentence come from somewhere other than the scripts I had spent the last decade perfecting.
“I want,” I said, and then stopped.
He made a small sound of encouragement, a hum through his teeth that was both patient and urgent, the way a man hums a lullaby to a child on the edge of sleep.
“I want—” I could not finish it. I wanted to. I wanted to want something. I could not give it a name.
The pressure of the not-touching was unbearable. My body leaned into the space between us, the knees parting by anotherinch, the weight of me shifting forward as if my own center of gravity wanted to be his. I felt the pilot light flare again, and this time it ran the length of my throat and into the base of my tongue.
I opened my eyes.
He was watching me, and the shimmer along his cheekbone had gone pale gold, the color of a wedding ring worn so thin it was almost transparent.
I looked at the parchment.
The gold lines waited.
I took a breath.
“I want to be looked at,” I said. The words came out so quietly I did not know if I had said them aloud, or only in the bone of my own skull.
The gold sigil at the end of the line flared so bright it blinded me for a second.
A sound came out of my mouth I did not recognize. It was not a sound I had made in public, or in private. It was the sound of a person who has spent years denying hunger and is, for the first time, being handed a meal.
He did not touch me. He did not have to.
“Good girl,” he said, low, and the words went through me like a struck note, like a bell rung at the end of an execution, except that the person being executed was the old self, the ghost, the one who would not let herself be seen.
The words made my thighs shake.
He watched. He let the words land. Then he prompted, again, in the same soft executioner’s tone.
“What else?”
I tried to resist. The resistance was feeble.
“I want,” I said, and this time I tried to build a fence around it, to soften the sentence, but the magic was not interested in fences. The magic wanted only what was true.
“I want to be told I’m clever,” I said.
The gold sigil at the end of the line burned.
Another sound. Higher, more fragile. My hands went from the table to his forearms, bracing for the next one.
He let me touch, but did not touch back.
“What else, dove?”
I realized, in that moment, that the bond was making a collection of me. It was not enough to have the first line, or the second. It wanted the whole of the hunger.
“I want to write under my own name,” I said.
The gold sigil came, bright and final.
“I want—” I said, and stopped, because the next clause was too raw for air, too ugly.
He waited.
