I relaxed my face, angling back towards him. “Good thing, too, since you were always more deserving of the latter.”
“I scent no lie,” he whispered.
A silence descended between us, eight cycles worth, turning the air viscous. So many words to say, so little time, and though I had planned an almost limitless number of them, every syllable evaded me.
After a quick glance over his shoulder, at the small clusters of laurels and sullen faces of the paxiams ensconcing us, he stepped closer, straight into where the silence was thickest.
“Ashara,” he started, forcing my eyes to open—I hadn’t realised I’d closed them. His tongue rolled over the swell of his lips, wetting them. I had the sudden urge to brush the gloss of spit away, the sudden urgeto lick it. Would he taste the same as he used to? His eyes landed on my lips, glazing with something that mirrored my own.
“I have thought of you,” he said, his gaze never leaving my mouth. “I have thought of this moment, every day for the last eight cycles.” He drew in a breath, lifting his head to the sky. “I…I have so much to say to you, and not nearly enough time.”
Had he planned grand speeches, too? Most nights, I’d rehearsed them long into the early turns: apologies, confessions, reassurances. And on my darker days, scoldings and demands. Demands to know why he’d ever taken my hand that day and led me to the yard; why he would endanger us both, endangerme. Come morning, I always knew the answer—it was the same reason I had returned to him every Seventh Day, again and again and again. We were addicted to each other. Addicted to the way we had made each other feel. Addicted tosmall sins.
“You look well.”
Eyebrows lost to my hairline, I choked on a laugh. “I lookwell?”
His smile was all claws. “Although, it is with my sincerest regret that I must inform you…you’ve gone grey.” He schooled his face into a show of mock horror.
“You dolt. I’ve always been grey.”
“True, but you’ve never had those.” The little heathen pointed to the fold of skin between my brows. “Wrinkles, no less,” he tutted. Gods, but a few breaths in each other’s company, and I already wanted to strike him.
“Knowing you will do that to a woman,” I accused, rubbing self-consciously at my forehead, as if I could smooth them. “Stress is the most notorious thief of youth.”
“I know the markers of pining when I see them.” He smirked. “That’s notstressetched across your face, my darling.”
Something dropped in my stomach. My hand fell.
“I don’t think I’m your anything. Not anymore.”
He flinched before he could catch himself, hurt shuttering his eyes before it cooled to something far, far worse.
“You have been, and will always be, something to me, Ashara.”
I couldn’t make sense of it, the feeling his words ignited within me. Shame warred with relief, regret with hope. I clenched with the effort to remain still, hands loose at my sides. To not reachfor him, to not grab him with both hands and lose myself in the home of his body.
Did he smell the same? Like cherry wine and fresh air?
“Gods, Ashara. Your mother…”
My mother. Offered. Dead.
“I am so fucking sorry I wasn’t there,” he continued, breaking our gaze, his head shaking.
I blinked, looking away, the chasm in my chest growing wider. “Blood Demands Blood,” I whispered, examining the twisted spires of the templum between the gaps of the pillars. Her death stalked me everywhere, another hole in the ground, like Adelaide’s, waiting for the moment I tripped. I’d gotten very good at skirting around their edges.
“Your parents?” I asked, fiddling with the damned buttons.
They’d moved to another enclave in Dendra, a decision probably motivated by Demetri’s and my indiscretion. Both cypresses, they’d been allowed to marry and live well into their fiftieth cycles.
“Father was summoned two cycles past, but Mother’s alive,” he revealed with a frown. “I don’t think she’ll live to reach hers, anyway. More likely to weep herself into an early grave long before that.” His eyes briefly lost focus. “First Adelaide and now me. The state of her when I left…” He hung his head, curls cascading over his brow. “You know what she’s like. Straight to hysterics over a weevil in the flour. Now, she must endure without any of us.”
Parents outliving their children was commonplace in Thromarra. Roselli would be left with no one, and I could not decide which was the worse fate: to die alongside a familiar face or to live amongst strangers.
Another silence descended between us. It had never been awkward before. Perhaps it was my fault, or perhaps we had grown too far apart to ever bridge the gap now between us.
So little time. So little left.
