AISLIN
I've kissed people before.
Not many, and not like that mattered particularly — the mechanics of survival don't leave a lot of room for tenderness, and what passed for it in my life before the Stonevein was hurried and practical and nothing I'd filed away. Oliver, once, behind his mother's house when we were seventeen, and I'd thought afterward:is that it, then?Pressed my fingers to my mouth more in confusion than anything else and gone back inside.
That was not this.
This is the problem.
My mind finally kicks in — because it hadn't been present when I decided to kiss Ursik when my words failed me. I pull back and I don't know how long it's been — long enough that my chest has done something complicated, that my hands are still holding the front of his shirt, that his arms are still around me. His face is very close and his eyes are open and he's watching me with an expression I've never seen on him, all the usual noise stripped out of it, and I can't look at it directly.
I let go of his shirt.
His arms loosen. Not immediately, with a kind of deliberateness, like the decision had to be made rather than arriving automatically.
My mouth is still warm where his was.
"I'll see you in the morning," I say.
It comes out level. It comes out completely level, which is frankly the bravest thing I've done this week including the balance beam, and I step back once, twice, and then I turn and I walk and I do not look back and I do not run because running would mean something I'm not prepared to commit to.
I make it around the first stand of birches before the walking stops being sufficient.
Not running. Not running. I'm walking at a pace that is aggressively not running, through the thin afternoon light, past the outer edge of the yard where the festival noise has settled into post-event cleanup and small conversations, and I do not go toward the cabins. I can't.
The cabins mean faces I'm responsible for and eyes that read me better than I'd like, and I am currently not a person who should be read. I am currently a person who made an enormous mistake in a birch grove and is carrying the consequences of it somewhere behind her sternum where it won't stop pressing.
He'd held on.
That's the part. He'd pulled me closer, like that was the obvious thing, like there was no world in which the response to being kissed by me was anything exceptyes, more of that,and I'd gone with it — I'dgone with it— and for somewhere between thirty seconds and the entire collapse of my good judgment, I'd been completely unreachable. Not vigilant, not watching the angles, not cataloguing exits. Just. There.
Lost.
I've kept myself for years on the understanding that lost is how you get killed. Lost is how you get given away by someone who was supposed to be?—
I stop that thought before it finishes.
I keep walking.
The settlement's perimeter runs longer than I've traced it in a while, and I let myself go around the far edge, past the eastern storage buildings and the corrals and the place where the ground goes soft near the stream crossing. This part I've checked before — I always check, it's the first thing I do in any new territory, map it until I know which directions offer cover and which offer speed and which are traps dressed as exits. The Frostfang perimeter is a known quantity. Normally that knowledge sits comfortable.
Right now I'm just walking because walking is the alternative.
The trees thicken past the corrals, and the path I'm on narrows and goes a little uphill, and I follow it because it's going somewhere that isn't where I just was, and that's sufficient qualification. The afternoon is doing something particular with the light in here — coming through at a low angle, catching the new leaf growth that's started to blur the branches, and the ground is soft and the sound of the settlement is very faint.
The path opens up.
It's a clearing. Not large — maybe twenty feet across, roughly circular, with the treeline pulling back to let in a wider square of sky overhead. The grass is early-spring pale and thick, and someone has been here recently enough that there's a flat rock near the centre that's been cleared of debris, the kind of clearing people make when they've sat somewhere more than once.
Ressa is on it.
She has a waterskin and she's tipped her face up toward the sky, eyes closed, the late light doing something warm on the redof her hair. She looks like a person actively choosing to be exactly where she is, which is an expression I'm not sure I've ever worn.
I take a step back into the path.
"You can stay." She hasn't opened her eyes. "There's enough sky for both of us."
I stop moving. "I was leaving."
