“I’m not going to leave you here looking like that, so what happened?”He brought his face close to hers, and his words were pointed as spires, as sharp as the cut of his jaw.
Lila shook her head.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she mumbled, drawing her knees up to her chest.I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to touch you. I don’t want to be with you. I don’t want to want you. I don’t want you. I don’t want you.
She wanted to disappear. She always wanted to disappear, but this was different. She couldn’t bear being under Luc’s stare. It wasn’t crass or invasive like Castor’s, and she wasn’t naked, but she still wanted to hide from it. When he pulled away, she breathed a sigh of relief.
He put his arm around her, and she tensed again.
“Fine. Don’t talk to me,” he said.
“Wh-what are you doing?”
“I’m hugging you. Friends hug. See? You think Hadri’s my only friend, but I have you too.” Luc drew her to his side, and Lila had no strength to push him away. Grudgingly, she allowed him to hold her. She laid her head over his heart when he pressed it there, and her tears came again, soaking the chest of his robes.
Fortunately, he didn’t say anything else. He didn’t push her to tell him what was wrong. After a while, she let his warmth soothe her and relaxed into his body. His hand was splayed on the side of her neck, and he dug his fingers into her hair and rubbed his thumb over the base of her scalp.
“Whatever it is, I’m sure it will be okay,” he whispered, and he was wrong, so wrong, so terribly blinded by his own privilege. But she’d been wrong too. Shedidstill want to touch Luc. She wanted him to hold her like that until the Creator lost His grip and the Void swallowed everything.
Luc smelled like ink and scrolls, like he’d been holed up in the Library for an aeon. Like the promise of endless beautiful possibilities, even if they were illusions. Lila wanted to hold those illusions in her palms and stare at them and pretend they were real. She wanted to hold him and pretend he was hers, so she did. She took what comfort she could from his heartbeat in her ear and his fingertips dancing across her cheek. She closed her eyes and matched her breaths to his and thought how nice it would be to lie with him in their own house and let herself cry angry tears that it would never happen.
“Tell me about Earth,” she croaked.
“Earth?” His smooth voice sparkled with amusement. “You know everything I do.”
“Humor me.”
Luc said nothing for a moment, but right when she thought he wouldn’t humor her, he cleared his throat and said, “All right.” He softened his voice, but his next words teemed with urgency. “The sky there isn’t like our sky. It isn’t gold. It doesn’t glisten. Sometimes, it’s a clear, deep blue. Sometimes, it’s pale. Sometimes, it’s pink and purple and gold, all the colors bleeding into each other like paint dripping down a canvas. And sometimes, it’s dark as the Void. An endless black, then a dark blue. And sometimes, you can’t see it at all. Too many clouds.” He kept speaking, in his animated cadence, of a world where anything could happen. The sky could change colors in endless cycles, and the creatures could communicate without speaking the same language.
She closed her eyes and tried to picture it, all that color poured over the ceiling of Heaven—azure, magenta, burgundy, violet. She imagined Luc on a tall ladder painting the aether with a giant paintbrush while, far below, the instructors scolded him but didn’t dare to climb up, much less fly up, and wrench the brush from him.
This image made her snort with laughter, and Luc cut off.
“I assure you, the armadillo is nothing to laugh at,” he informed her.
Armadillo? She hadn’t been listening, but he must have been talking about one of his strange creatures.
“No, it’s not that.” She shifted, stifling more laughter. “Thank you.” A smile tugged at her lips, despite the tears streaming down her cheeks. Despite the future stretching out before her, bleak and inescapable.
When she glanced up at him, Luc raised an eyebrow.
Avoiding his probing stare, Lila melted into his chest again. She searched for his heartbeat.
“Can we go there?” she asked, a tinge of desperation in her voice.
Can we go now? Can we go forever?
“Anytime you want,” he answered, and she braced herself on the beautiful lie.
She inhaled it, then let it out. Inhaled…then let it out again.
Eventually, she pulled away first because she knew she had to.
Luc’s warmth melted from her cheek, gone in a mere breath.
Present Aeon
“Comeon,Lila.”
