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He looked over his shoulder and watched her, but she was looking at his side with her mouth slightly parted. She reached her hand out, but right before she made contact with his skin, she stopped and flicked her eyes to his.
“May I?” Her voice was soft, hesitant even. He nodded, not trusting his voice at the moment. Mason had to control everything inside him not to move or make a sound as she glided her fingers along the roots of the tree that spread across to his abdomen and around to his lower back.
Gritting his teeth, because her touch felt so fucking good, he forced himself to keep his eyes open as she moved her fingers up the trunk and along the branches.
“There aren’t any leaves.” It wasn’t a question.
“Before I left for duty, my wife became pregnant, but we lost the baby.” Her movements stilled, but he reached across, took her hand, and continued to move it along the bared branches snaking up his ribcage. “The tree started off as just this branch with the tiny blackbird on it.” She pressed her entire hand over the bird. “When I came back home, we tried for another baby. She got pregnant, and we had our son nine months later.”
He knew she was crying without even looking at her anymore. He could smell the saltiness of her tears as if they were his own.
“Tyler had a rare disorder and actually outlived the lifespan the doctors gave him by a year.” His chest hurt from the memory, but he needed to keep going. “After he died, Molly sank into a deep depression. I didn’t know what to do or how to get my wife back. I ended up getting the rest of the tree as sort of a tribute to what we lost and what I wanted to gain in the future.” He glanced at her once again. “To answer your question, the branches are bare, because on the outside, it appears dead, but if you look harder and really see what is there, you’ll realize the tree isn’t dead at all.” He moved her hand down to the roots. “There is still life underneath it all, and we just have to wait for the seasons to change for that life to come back to us.”
Her tears were running freely down her cheeks now, and he lifted his hand and brushed them away.
“She didn’t have time to come out of the depression, because she was bitten before the infection was widely publicized.” By the look in her eyes, he knew he didn’t have to explain to her that he killed his wife right after she became infected.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice was low and filled with pain. He didn’t want to have the past hold him back from taking that next step forward.
He shook his head. He didn’t want her to say sorry, because that wasn’t why he told her. She may have been quiet, but Sparrow had shown she was an empathetic person. He had seen the way she would watch the blackbirds rest atop the dead phone lines that lined the street as they walked. Saw the small smile on her face when the clouds broke free and the sun sliced through the murkiness.
She was a gentle soul with a fierce exterior.
“Life is all about give and take, of dying and being reborn. A little piece of Molly died after the miscarriage, but she was reborn when Tyler came along. But as life tends to keep throwing hardballs, and giving wave after hard and painful wave of turbulence, we lost Tyler. She was never the same after that.” He looked into her eyes. “I lost her long before the immunization turned everyone into these walking corpses, long before I ended her life and her suffering. I felt a lot of guilt for thinking I had done the right thing.” Mason had only cried three times in his life. The first two were when he lost his children, and the third when he watched Molly close her eyes for the last time after he shoved his blade into her head. But unexpected tears started to form in his eyes.
He pushed them away, not wanting to bring on that kind of pain, even if that meant it would help him get rid of some of his hatred and hurt.
“But then I found Asher, talked to the first person about it all, and realized that with death comes release.” He hadn’t realized he looked away until Sparrow placed her much smaller hands on his cheeks and urged him to look at her once more.
They stared at each other for several long seconds, and the pain she felt for him, for what he had gone through, speared him right in the chest like a hot, sharpened blade.
