I say, “I’m sorry I interrupted your FrostPlays meditation time with my unrelated presence.”
“I do not meditate in front of my collection of your posters.”
“Well, I hope you aren’t praying to them.”
She drags a hand down her face, stretching the skin beneath her eye as she groans, turns, and heads toward her remarkable town system, where she appears to be selecting her tasks for the day and eating one of the sandwiches I brought over last night.
I steal the sandwich.
“Hey,” she blurts.
I shove the bowl of whipped cream into her arms. “Trade.”
“What…is this?”
I also, benevolently, provide her with the plate of pancakes and fruit. “Clara breakfast.”
“Oh.” She settles immediately, because that is the power of Clara. It takes Morana the entirety of unwrapping her food to realize that I am awake. Right now. In the morning time. She expresses this realization in the kindest, sweetest, and most softest way possible—by looking at me as though I am an alien creature fit only for autopsy and saying, with both disgust and apprehension, “Why are you presently conscious?”
Holding her eyes, I bite into her sandwich over the shape of her mouth mark, chew, swallow, and say, “I missed you so muchmy chest hurt. I came out for breakfast, just to see you, but you weren’t there, and it was so painful I almost died.” I take another bite.
“Can you be more dramatic?” she asks, ripping a piece of pancake and dipping it in the whip cream.
“Yes.”
“Yeah, I heard myself after I asked.Don’t.” She nibbles her food and shifts her attention back to the town, surveying.
She pulls a card from a small flap holding it to a refrigerator in a house that is entirely a kitchen. The card says,Clean out fridge. Five whole points. She plucks aDust front parlorfree from a different building, and I stare at the single point it provides.
“Still trying to buy my prone likeness?” I ask.
“No.” She gets another task. “I burned that card.”
“You realized you prefer the real thing?”
“Yep.”
I flush.
“Shame you’re not cuddly.”
I bristle. “Who says I’m not cuddly?”
She meets my eyes, dry resignation in them. Then she tugs the collar of her turtleneck down.
I tense.
A harsh, angry bruise stares at me.
Before I have managed to processit, she lifts her shirt, showing off the scattered fingerprints across her soft stomach. They’re all so muchangrierthan they were last night. A shudder rocks me to my core, and I lose several moments of life, frozen in a place without thought or reason.
She’sbeautiful.
She’s hurt.
I hurt her.
I—
