“I know you mean it.” Tess picked the fish back up, turned it over, and then set it down again, all without looking at Polly. “That’s the thing about you, you actually mean it. But everybody means it, to an extent. You have a choice. And you do, right up until you make the one they don’t want, and then—” She spread her hands, and the tremor was back. “Then suddenly there’s a reason. It’s for your own good. It’s too dangerous out there, it’s not the right time, just wait, just a little longer, we’re only looking out for you. And you wait. And you’re grateful, because it’s nice, it’s so much nicer than the last place, and one day you look up and you realize the door was never actually going toopen. It was just going to keep being not quite the right moment for it to open. Forever.”
The words landed cold and hard in her chest, because they were not about her and yet they were exactly about her.
Tess was watching her.
“See,” Tess said quietly. “You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“That’s not—” she began, then stopped and started again. “It’s not the same, but I’m not going to sit here and tell you I don’t know the feeling. I do.” She looked down at the ruined little bird with its missing wing. “I’ve got someone who’s never once shut a door on me. Never even leaned towards it. And I still lie awake sometimes waiting for him to. Not because of anything he’s done. Just because—” Her throat tightened. “Because that’s what people did before. And sometimes your body doesn’t know the difference between before and now. It just remembers the cage.”
Tess said nothing for a while, shaving more stone away from her fish.
“That’s the most true thing anyone’s said to me since I got here,” she said finally, then added, gruffly, “This fish still looks like a turd.”
“It looks like a very good fish.”
“It looks like a turd with fins.”
“Amajesticturd.”
Tess gave an ugly, startled,reallaugh, the first Polly had heard out of her, and for a moment the two of them just sat there in thecrystal-light shaving stone and being two women who had both learned the shape of a cage and were, slowly, learning it wasn’t the only shape there was.
But the cold thing Tess had put in Polly’s chest didn’t leave. It rode with her all through the rest of the day, humming its ugly little tune.Just wait. Just a little longer. It’s not quite the right moment.
And by the time the crystals dimmed and she stood in the mouth of Njkall’s sleeping cave that night, she’d made up her mind about something, though she couldn’t have said in words exactly what.
She was so tired of waiting for the door to open. She wanted, for once in her life, to open it herself and walk towards something.
“Come,” he said in the dark, and she came.
But she didn’t fit herself against his side. She didn’t lie down at all. She got up onto the furs on her knees beside him, and she felt him go still, waiting to learn what she needed so he could give it and take nothing, and something about that stillness made her chest ache and her resolve harden both at once.
“I’ve been thinking all day,” she said.
“Mm.”
“About last night.” She found his chest in the dark, and laid both her hands flat against it, feeling his heart already racing. He couldn’t hide that from her, and she loved that he couldn’t. “And I decided something.”
“Tell me.”
“No,” she said, and her voice didn’t shake at all, which surprised her. “I’ll show you.”
And she leaned down and kissed him.
Last night had been tentative and uncertain, a question. This was an answer, with both her hands braced on his chest and her whole weight tipped over him. She pressed her mouth to his, and this time she didn’t pull back. She moved closer and learned the shape of his mouth, her tongue tracing the seam of his lips.
For a long moment he did what he always did. Held still. Let her do what she wanted.
And then, so slowly she felt every second of the change, he kissed her back.
She’d braced for careful. For the same patience turned outwards. And there was gentleness in it. His enormous hand came up and cradled the back of her head like she was something that could break, all that strength held down to a whisper. But underneath the gentleness there was heat. A low, banked, wonderful heat, the kind that had clearly been chained inside him for a very long time, and when his mouth answered hers it answered with a hunger that set her body on fire.
She hadn’t known she could feel that sudden greedy ache, low in her belly, or that her hands could fist in his fur to pull him closer, or that a small sound she didn’t authorize would come out against his mouth?—
She broke away, breathing hard.
His hand fell from her head at once. He didn’t chase her. Of course he didn’t chase her, and she knelt there over him with her heart pounding and her lips hot and swollen and her whole bodylit up in a way she wasn’t prepared for. In the dim glow she could just make out his face, watching her, waiting to be told what she’d felt so he could be whatever she needed him to be about it.
She understood that he thought she’d bolted. He thought that the heat between them had frightened her and his hunger had frightened her, and that he’d let too much control slip and scared her away.
