Page 47

“What did you do to that boy?” I asked Rowan.

“Nothing. I stood outside his window one night.”

“Rowan!”

“One night. An hour, maybe. I didn’t even knock.”

Rowan still can’t stand anybody. He still calls them flies, right to their faces. He still tells grown men to move out of his way, and they still move. When the miller’s wife tried to hug him at the bakery, he just looked at her until she went back behind the counter.

But when the miller’s wheel froze solid in January and nobody in the village could grind flour, Rowan walked down there in the snow, put his shoulder to that wheel, and broke it loose with his bare hands.

The miller ran out to thank him. Rowan told him to move. Then he walked back up the hill without another word.

When I asked him why he did it, he just shrugged.

“You like bread.”

That’s it. That’s the whole reason. Not the village. Not the miller. Me. Because I like bread.

Lord, this man.

* * *

He’s never asked about the bite.

Not one time. Not during my heat, not after, not since. He bit my damn bed instead of me, and he’s never brought it up again.

But I see him looking. When I put my hair up. When I lean over the stove. In the mornings, when I’m half asleep and my braids fall to one side, I catch him staring at the back of my neck. Right at that soft spot. Then he looks away.

He’s waiting on me. He’d wait forever, too. Stubborn ass.

When the last bed broke, he built a whole new frame, but he kept the headboard. Because I told him I wanted that bee. So every night, I fall asleep looking at it. A little wooden bee with two rows of teeth marks straight through its wings.

And every night, I think, that should’ve been my neck.

* * *

The first warm night of spring, I finally say something.

The snow’s melting. The window’s cracked open, and the whole room smells like wet dirt and the meadow waking up. Rowan’s curled up behind me in bed with his hand on my belly, and the baby’s been kicking his palm for an hour. He’s very proud of himself about it.

I reach up and touch the bitten bee.

“Rowan.”

“Hm.”

“Why’d you bite the bed? That night?”

He gets real quiet behind me.

“Because you didn’t ask,” he says.

I knew that. But hearing him say it, plain like that, in the dark, makes my chest hurt.

I turn my head on the pillow so I can see him.

“I’m asking now.”