And I’m so tired. So tired of counting days and managing fear and sleeping badly and waking up reaching across cold sheets for someone who isn't there. And tonight was the first time in so long that I felt something light and almost easy, and I don't know how to hold that alongside the guilt of it, don't know how to be a woman who loves someone completely and still felt what I felt on that step.
Maybe that's what loneliness does. Maybe that's whatmonths of fear and uncertainty and longing does to a person.
Maybe I'm just so hungry for him that almost anyone standing close enough in the dark would feel like?—
No.
That's not honest, and I know it isn't honest. Ian isn't anyone. Ian has never been just anyone. And what exists between us has always been its own specific thing, light where Reth is heavy, easy where Reth is hard, safe in a completely different way. Not the safety of being chosen by someone extraordinary, but the safety of being known by someone steady.
I don't know what to do with that, so I lie down and softly cry into my pillow and think about Reth until his face is clear and present and real in my mind, until I can feel the specific weight of him, until the missing sharpens back into something that has only one form and only one name.
Nazareth.
I hold on to that. I hold on to it until the house goes quiet and the cicadas wind down one by one and the tap runs its thirty seconds and stops.
Until Ian's door opens.
Until his voice in the garden, stripped and raw.
"Andrei. Where the fuck is Reth?”
4
RETH
There’s a woman.
Blonde.
That’s what comes first, before her name, before her face resolves fully—just the color, gold and pale and warm, the specific shade of it in afternoon light coming through a Paris window.
I hold on to it. The image bobs and blurs at the edges, and I grip it the way you grip something in a current, knowing that if I let go I won't find it again, not today, maybe not ever.
The rest of me is rotting.
The stone floor is slick with old vomit and piss and whatever else has leaked out of me over the days that have blurred into one endless, stinking night. My clothes are stiff with it. My hair is matted. There’s a cut on my forehead from where I slammed my skull against the wall earlier, and the blood has dried in flaky trails down my face. I can taste copper on my tongue. I don’t know if it’s from the cut or from biting the inside of my cheek raw.
"You smell like a sewer." Valeria's voice comes through the slot. Measured. Almost gentle, the way she is when she's decided on a particular approach.
I don't move.
I'm on my side on the floor, my cheek against the stone, and the stone is cold, and the cold is the most real thing currently available to me, so I stay with it. The smell is worse when I breathe through my mouth. Sour bile, old blood, and the chemical tang of whatever she’s been pumping into me.
My body has been betraying me for days, weeks, months—cramps, sweats, the shakes that start in my fingers and spread until I can’t hold my own head up.
"Nazareth." The slot widens slightly. "You've vomited on yourself. You're lying in it."
I know. I've known for—however long. Time doesn't behave correctly in here. It stretches and compresses without logic, hours vanishing, single minutes lasting geological ages.
I know about the vomit. I know about the other things too, the smells that have accumulated in this room over however many days, and I have filed all of it into the category of things that are true and cannot currently be changed, alongside Mary and the door and the crack in the ceiling.
"Let me come in." Her voice drops. Something performing tenderness moves into it. "Let me have someone bring warm water. I’ll bathe you. Help you get into clean clothes. Let me take care of?—"
"Touch me," my voice comes out wrecked and slow, but the words are clear enough, "put one hand on me, Valeria. Put one finger on me." I pause. Let the haze do its slow work for a moment. "I'll bite it off at the knuckle.” I let out an eerie laugh. “I think I’ll chew through it and spit it at yourfeet and then…” I raise a hand in the air like I’m making a profound statement. “…then I'll use the bone to open my own wrist just so you have to watch me bleed out on this floor. And there's not a fucking thing you can do about it."
Silence from the slot.
"I'll pull your tongue out through your throat," I continue, conversationally. "I'll take those pretty eyes out with my thumbs. I've thought about it. I've had time to think about it in here. I've thought about it in detail." I pause, a clear picture forming in my head—clearer than any picture’s been for a while. My hands covered in her blood. It ignites this rush in my bones, the thought of her suffering. "On second thought, do come in.” My gaze fixes on hers. “I’d love for you to put your hands on me. Please.”
