Page 31 of Property of Prophet

“I know,” he says. “Me too.”

The silence that follows isn’t uncomfortable. It’s the other kind, the kind with too much inside it to fill with words.

After a while, he says, “You deserve more than this.”

It’s not a compliment, and it doesn’t land like one. It lands like a diagnosis, the kind of thing you already know and have been hoping no one says out loud.

“Define more,” I say.

He leans forward, elbows on the table, and looks at me with those impossible blue eyes that catch the light wrong sometimes, and still remind me of the crater and wings burned into frozen ground. “Someone who sees you,” he says. “The whole of you. Not the version you hand people so they’ll stay comfortable. Not the edited one. The surgeon they tried to bury and the woman who walked north and refused to stay buried...” He pauses. “Someone who finds all of it worth looking at.”

My throat does something painful and involuntary. “That’s a very specific definition,” I say.

“You asked.”

Outside, the storm screams. A gust slams the cabin hard enough to shake the walls and send a groan through the timbers. I feel it through the floorboards.

When I look back at Prophet, he’s closer than he was a moment ago. Or I am. The distance across this table has never been much to begin with. The cabin doesn’t run to generous furniture clearances, but it’s somehow less now, without either of us having decided against it.

He reaches out. His hand moves slowly enough that I can track every inch of it and could pull back, turn my head, pretending I don’t know what’s coming. He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, the one loose piece that’s been falling across my face for the last hour, and I have been pushing it back with the back of my hand every time it falls, and his fingers don’t withdraw. They stay at my jaw, just resting there, warm against the cold of my skin, his eyes on mine, and his whole body has gone absolutely still.

Not pushing or asking, just present.

My heart kicks hard enough to hurt.

He smells of woodsmoke and something underneath it, warm, mineral, and faintly electric. I have a ridiculous moment of thinking about the crater again, about the particular smell of ozone, struck lightning, and understanding that it wasn’t just the fall... it’s him. It’s always been him.

I want to close the small distance left between us so much it scares me.

That’s the thing. That’s the whole problem, sitting right there in the lamplight with nowhere to go, not the wanting, which I could probably handle, which I have filed under survivable for the past few weeks, but the fear underneath it. Five years ago, I was certain of myself in ways I will never be certain of myself again. He is sitting three feet away from me, looking at me as if I’m something worth the trouble of seeing, and I cannot afford to be wrong about this too.

I look at him, then I look away.

His hand withdraws. Slowly, no sharp edge to it, no hurt. He brings it back to the table and wraps it around his coffee cup, and gives me time to breathe, the way he always gives me time.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Don’t be.”

“I’m not—” I stop, then start over. “It’s not that I don’t—”

“Lily.” His voice is quiet. “You don’t have to explain it.”

I press my lips together hard.

The lamp burns on.

Outside, the storm screams and screams and does not stop.

“I know I don’t,” I say. “I want to.”

He waits.

“I’m not good at this,” I tell him. “I was, once... before. I used to know how to be a person who let people in.” I look at my hands flat on the table. Surgeon’s hands, my professors used to call them. Wasted now on snares, firewood, and not trembling when I want them to. “I’ve forgotten the sequence.”

“There’s no sequence,” he says.

“There has to be. Everything has a sequence.”