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It’s quiet as she wraps herself around me, slotting her small arms between my lower pairs and squeezing against my waist.
“Hold me,” she whispers, and I’m eager to comply.
She is quiet, and I wonder if she is falling back to sleep. But her breathing doesn’t even out the way it does when she slumbers. I slept only a short while during the night. Mostly I stayed awake, listening to the entrancing, melodic sound of her breathing, so I know it well.
But now she is quiet, and her arms around me tense. What is she thinking? Is she upset that we couldn’t continue on toward her home because of the storm?
She is not gone yet.
But soon. . . Like the breath vapors that appear in the cold when we speak, she will be here one moment and disappear the next. I want to grasp that which is ephemeral all the tighter, but she will slip through my fingers.
“What is it like?” I ask, and my voice sounds overly loud in the quiet. “Where you are from.”
She stiffens even more in my arms. “Why are you asking that?” Her voice is slightly muffled from her face pressed against my chest, but I can still hear. “I don’t want to think about anything except being here. With you.”
Her words should make me happy, but they do nothing except make the ache pierce more. She is the sun, and I am the moon. There is no sky we can share together. I cannot be in her world, and I refuse to imprison her in mine.
“Tomorrow, the storm will likely abate,” I say, my voice gruff. “And since we know I can carry you, there’s no need to make you walk slowly on your small legs. So as soon as the storm clears, I can run you swiftly to the city.”
I swallow hard. “You could be back home by as soon as tomorrow night, depending on where in the world you live—”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore!” She withdraws her arms and wriggles out of my grasp, turning around in the small space of the sleeping bag and giving me her back.
I frown and start to wrap my arms around her again, but she sharply says, “Don’t touch me.”
I expel a frustrated breath, laying back, half out of the covers. I haven’t spent much time with humans, so maybe I don’t know how they communicate. My brothers and I are usually only ever direct with each other, so she confuses me.
And then I remember. . . There was the century or so after I came back from the madness where I still refused to speak with Abaddon.
To be fair, he did have me chained to a dungeon wall at the time. But also, I didn’t know how to say… All the complicated things I was feeling. I barely understand them now and still don’t know if I can put words to them.
My head turns towards the spill of Ksenia’s honey hair. Is that what it is like now for the small human at my side? Is she feeling too many complicated things to put into words?
Or is it just me she prefers not to share her thoughts with? I frown and begin to understand some of my brother’s frustration at not being able to know my thoughts without me speaking. After being so intimate with her body, I want to know all of her. Yet so much of her is still a closed-up box. A beautiful mystery.
The grains of sand fall so quickly through the hourglass, and I am greedy to know everything before she disappears. I’ll be left grasping for the shape of her memory, and it makes me even more desperate to discover her now while she’s here and real in front of me.
Moments later, she’s scrambling up and out of the covers. “We should get breakfast.”
I nod, quickly moving to help her with some rations from the pack. We work quietly side by side, but I feel as if there is a sea between us. It is painful after the closeness we shared yesterday, but I don’t know how to span the gulf to get back to her.
I move to the stove and add more wood so she can stay warm outside the sleeping bag. Then I start more water to boiling.
I listen intently as she crunches down on the trail mix Hannah packed and feel her eyes on me as I move around the large room. But whenever I glance her way, her eyes quickly dance to the ground at her feet.
My strained chest feels a little warmer to know that at least she is as much aware of me as I am constantly focused on her. Though we are not speaking, it nonetheless feels like we are engaged in a dance. Hannah taught me what it means when humans dance, which is what this feels like. I turn, and Ksenia responds. I listen for her breath and movement, then I exhale and shift.
