Page 92 of Ash Fall

Goddamnit, I will take anything this girl gives me. Any piece of her she allows me to have and hold on to. Whatever crumbs or version of us she's willing to give to me, I’ll take it and get on my knees to thank her for it.

Something hits the concrete outside the door with a clang that echoes off the walls in here. We tear apart, both of us heaving and panting. The door shoves open a little wider and Penny trots in wagging her tail, immensely pleased with herself, an empty fertilizer can rolling in a slow circle behind her. She sits down on my boot and waits to be acknowledged with a doggy grin.

"Penny," Luna groans but she's gasping with one hand pressed flat to her chest, her lips swollen and red from our kiss. I see the confusion rising up through the heat in her eyes. "I didn't... Mars, I didn't mean for that to happen." Her fingers press against her lips. "I don't know what came over me."

She's still glowing. Faint and lovely, the light moving under her skin in slow pulses, and my shadows are still wrapped around her. As I watch they slide higher, over her collarbone, up the column of her throat, and settle around her neck in a loose, dark circle. They aren't holding her, but they aren't letting go either. My magic has claimed her, and hers accepted without consulting either of us.

"I didn't intend that either, Little Moon." My thumb traces the edge of the glow along her jaw, and the light leans into the touch. "But it looks like our magic is happy about it."

She stares up at me, lit from the inside, shadow ringing her throat, and she doesn't pull it away but leans into my touch. Whatever vote I thought I didn't deserve, whatever line I planned to wait behind, my shadows just went around all of it. For the first time in two years, I have real hope that I can get her back.

Chapter 34 - Luna

Seeding trays has a rhythm to it that feels natural once you find it. Press a divot into the soil with your thumb, drop the seed, cover it over, tamp it down, move to the next. Anders has me working the third rack while he does the fourth, and neither of us has said much in twenty minutes, which is exactly why I volunteered this morning. My hands stay busy and my mouth doesn't have to be.

Unfortunately, my brain never got that memo.

Yesterday keeps replaying itself and it always goes to the same place. The maintenance room with my back against the wall, my legs around Mars's waist and my fingers in his shirt hauling him closer instead of pushing him away. I’ve gone over it roughly nine hundred times since it happened and I still can't decide how I feel about it. Confused is a lot of it. Confused because just a few days ago I told him there was no chance of us being together like that again with such confidence. And even more confused because him touching me, our magic weaving around us like that? It felt completely right. The guilt arrives right on schedule and settles over the whole thing.

That's what I can't quite work out. Guilty toward who and about what, exactly? Torrin kissed me in the fifth wheel and made a point of saying there was no confusion about where he stood. Reid and Jules both kissed me behind the motorhome and none of them asked me to choose. Gage though? That’s it. Gage is the reason for the guilt I’m feeling but the way he’s been treating me for the last few days I shouldn’t feel guilty at all. There's no rule or promise that I broke, but I can’t shake off his hurt or my own. He’s made me feel like I’ve done something wrong. That I’ve let him down. Like I’m not the person he thought I was or he wanted me to be and it’s cracked something deep inside that I don’t know how to fix.

The three of them still come find me at night. Torrin, Reid and Jules haven't done anything past that first kiss since it happened, and I know exactly why. After I lost my temper and told half the bay that nobody had bothered to ask what I wanted, they backed off and left the asking to me. So now we sleep together, and that's all we do. Reid's arm over my waist, Jules taking up more than his share of the bed but always with some part of him touching me and Torrin's hand finding my hip in the dark. Not one of them pushes for anything more. It's the kindest thing they could possibly be doing, and it is making me completely insane waiting for what might come next.

Gage doesn't come at all. He hasn't said a word to me in days, and I've started catching myself tracking where he is in a room so I can be somewhere else.

My thumb presses into the soil again and I reach for my light while I do it, the way I've been doing at odd moments since yesterday trying to figure it out. It should work the way flexing a muscle works but today there's nothing to take hold of. The buzz under my ribs is there but it feels low and dull, the same as it's been since the ash started coming down, and pushing at it only makes me tired. In that room last night with Mars, it came up bright without any effort from me at all. I wish I understood how any of it is supposed to work.

"You've just put four seeds in that hole, sweetheart."

Anders is watching me over the top of the rack with his white eyebrows up. I look down at my thumb, still pressing, lift it and stare at the four beet seeds sitting in a sad little pile in the same divot.

"Oops." I fish three of them back out. "Sorry. I'm somewhere else this morning."

"I noticed. You've been somewhere else since breakfast." He goes back to his own tray. "It’ll all work out in the end. Don’t worry on it so."

I send him a small smile for not prying and twist to stretch out my back from all the bending I’ve been doing and take a look around. The sounds of people using tools and voices fill the space around us. Down at the far end, Clayton's people are filling racks of their own, and the gap between our two groups shows up in exactly where everybody chooses to stand. Our end and their end, with a good stretch of open floor in between. Nobody drew that line and nobody has crossed it either. That needs to change.

"All right." Anders straightens up with both hands pressed to his lower back. "Come here a minute. I want to try something, and I'd rather have a witness who won't laugh at me."

"I make no promises." I wink at him with a teasing grin.

He moves down to the end of the second rack where the starters are. The tomato plants came out of his own garden back on the farm. Four scrawny plants in plastic pots that have been sulking and wilted since they were transplanted from his garden to these pots. Anders sets his palms on either side of one of them without quite touching it.

"I've been thinking about the farm." His eyes stay on the plant. "Forty years of my neighbours telling me I've got a green thumb and I always laughed it off. Since the moon cracked, though, every single thing I've put in the ground has come up faster than it has any business coming up. I put it down to luck at first." He shrugs one shoulder. "But now I'm wondering."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Stand there and watch." His brow pulls down while he concentrates. "And don't tell my grandson, because if this doesn't work, I'd like to keep my dignity."

Nothing happens for a good ten seconds while Anders breathes out slow and steady. Then the tomato plant starts to move. The stem thickens first, pushing itself up between his hands until it stands on its own. One leaf unfurls, then another, then a dozen more, and the whole plant fills out dark green and lush while I stand there with my mouth open in awe. Small yellow flowers open all along the branches. Every one of them drops its petals a second after they bloom and behind them come tiny green marbles that swell out along the stems until they're the size of my thumbnail, then bigger than that.

Anders steps back away from it. He looks at his own hands, then at the plant, then at me, and the grin that breaks over his face knocks twenty years off him.

"Well, I'll be damned," he wipes his palms down his jeans. "Guess you can teach an old dog new tricks after all."

The laugh spills out of me completely thrilled by what he just did. He does a second one just to show off, slower this time, watching his own hands while they work. Penny shoves in between our legs to investigate the new smell and comes away with soil on her nose.

"Do you know what this means?" I grab his forearm. "We can feed everybody. Not in eight weeks. We can do it this week. You can replenish the grass in the livestock pen too so the feed lasts longer!"