She pulls her arm back and pushes the sleeve higher, tracing the edge of the mark where the color fades into her own skin. She touches the border with her other hand.
“Seems alright,” she says, pulling the sleeve down. “If I start turning gray, you’ll be the second to know.” She goes back to the channel.
I go to the courtyard.
The afternoon passes. She works in the corridors. I check the perimeter, circle the outer boundary, inspect the places where the jungle presses against the temple walls.
When I come back, she is in the main hall, washing her hands in the basin.
“The channels are different sizes,” she says, not looking up from the water. “The ones in the east corridor are wider than the ones in the west. And the stone is different. The east ones are older.”
A fact. An observation delivered while she’s thinking of something else.
“Yes,” I say. “The east wing is the oldest part of the building.”
“How old?”
“It was standing before my people came. We built onto it.”
“Huh.” She dries her hands and looks down the east corridor with new respect. “That explains the joints.”
She doesn’t ask the question under the question. I’m not ready to give her more answers. Not yet.
BRYN
The routine takes three days to set.
Mornings: he has food on the stones before I’m up. He eats on his side of the hall. I eat on mine. The gap between the stones has narrowed by about a foot since the first morning. I moved mine. I did it again this morning while he was in the lower hall. I wanted to see if he’d notice. I wanted to see if he’d move his.
This is the level of strategy I have descended to. My mother crossed the wards in a glider. I am moving a rock four inches at a time toward a male.
After breakfast, I work the channels. I have cleared the full east corridor and started on the west. The debris gets thicker deeper into the building. Older roots, denser dirt, and in some places a chalky deposit that coats the inside of the groove and has to be chipped out with the flat of a stone. My knuckles are raw from it.
After midday he comes to wherever I’m working, checks my progress, sometimes brings water. The corridors are narrow and he is large and the proximity keeps happening. A brush of scales against my arm. His tail shifting past my legs as he turns in thepassage. My hand finding his coil when I need to steady myself on uneven stone.
Every contact leaves a mark that lasts a little longer than the one before. Neither of us is naming what we are doing. Neither of us is pulling away.
I could tell myself it is the marks. It would be the easy answer.
It is not the marks.
It is the food set out on the stones every morning before I am awake, for a woman he paid for and owes nothing else. It is the way he pulls his hand off my skin fast every single time, like the danger in the room is him touching me and not the other way around, when I have watched him hold venom that eats through rock in his bare palms and not so much as blink.
He is not careful with himself.
He is careful with me.
It is the bedroll in an empty room in an empty building where, as far as I can tell, he has been the only thing breathing for years. I have known a lot of people who wanted something from me. I am trying to remember the last one who was gentle with me before he had a single reason to be. That is the thing I keep turning over in the dark. Not his hands. Him.
I have started noticing things during the contact that I should not be noticing. It gets worse every day. I do not intend to stop.
The scales on his forearm change texture about halfway between wrist and elbow. The larger plates give way to finer ones, denser, more tightly packed. The color shifts, too. Darker teal on the outer arm, paler where the arm turns inward.
I notice this when he reaches past me to test a section of channel wall. I have been watching the transition line since.
His hands.
He breaks the flatbread at meals with both hands, a clean snap, the bread splitting along whatever fault line his fingersfind. I watch his hands more than I watch anything else in this building. I want to know what that grip feels like somewhere other than bread. The thought does not leave when I tell it to. When he’s looking at me, I stop watching. When he stops looking, I start again.
