After (55 page)

Close enough at last to see the man painted yellow by his candle's light, she peered from behind a stout tree trunk, watched his movements, strained to see whether he would leave a note or some marker, or whether he would go still, cross his arms over his chest against the chill air, and wait for the others. The men he'd betrayed her for.

Her skin went tight, as if in that silence, in that dark parted only for the few feet within the frail grasp of Artel's lone candle, the invisible hairs on her neck and arms sought to feel the vibrations in the air, like antennae, to alert her to danger. To her prey.

The gun was heavy in her hand. Cold and hard and comforting.

His delicate yellow light wavered from its nest of writhing roots and variegated leaves, up the rough girth of a stalwart maple, its bark dark and thick and fissured, and held Artel there, too, in that golden aura. His fingers, long and pale against that brown-black bark, touched that rough texture, traced with the tip along a crack where the maple's umber skin had split. His caress went so lightly over the arbor's scaly flesh that at first she thought he only let his hand drift through the air near the trunk, as if to sense whether it gave off warmth. From the way his fingertips lifted and sank over the scars of seasons and age, though, she knew he was touching. His eyes followed as his fingers went along, then as he brought his whole hand against the thick, insulating crust.

The shadows playing over his features were burned away as he tipped his face down to the candle's light, and bent his brow to his maple. His arms circled around, his head turned toward her and her heart cramped, but his eyes were closed as he pressed his cheek to the bark. His stillness danced in the fluttering light at his feet.

When he turned again, when his soft lips grazed the rough bark, when his lips parted and touched the bark again, her face went hot, and in her gut there was an echo of the shame she'd felt the week before, at embarrassing him, hurting him, making him come.

He shrugged off his jacket, his shirt, and embraced the tree again, letting the rough bark dig into his naked chest and belly, the tender white of his inner arms, his cheek. Where his hand reached around, almost lost to the candle's light, his fingers caressed, light as ever, up and down. As tenderly as one would stroke a newborn kitten.

When he'd stripped naked and even his feet were bare and sinking into the mud and the wet, soft leaves, five fingers of red and yellow clinging to his blue-veined feet, to the hollow between tendon and ankle, he offered himself to the embrace of a low branch, sliding his waist into the crook where the tree's arm angled out from the trunk.

He clung, naked and shivering in the shuddering light of his candle, the bark digging into his tender flesh, chaffing over his soft, parted lips, scraping over his brow, lined like an older man's, over his cheek, shaded with two days' growth of his dark beard. For a long time, he let the tree hold him that way.

The dark swallowed the man, the tree, the clinging stemmed stars of yellow and red. The night swallowed them all, and spit them up again as wax hissed against flame.

His pale hip hollowed dark, a shadowed valley sank into his thigh. Breath steamed out from between parted lips, from flaring nostrils. His whole body a slowed heart, pulsing its bloody rhythm, his hips hollowed, he carved that shadow into his thigh, nestled into the clutch of the tree, trailed fingertips up and down the bark, seeking the rise and fall of that dark, rough flesh, breathing it, sighing into the mouth of a lost limb, trembling in the crook of that gnarled arm, chafing himself raw in that embrace his sap flowed over the maple's dark husk, spilled among the clinging stars and dark earth and worms and flowed into the water to be drunk by thirsty, writhing roots, pulled up vertical veins to feed the fresh green stars in spring.

As if that spilled sap had been the force holding his body erect, he sagged, and his stalwart maple caught him. Except for the silhouette of his drooping frame, the sides of his star-stuck feet, his calf, his flank, his scarred and muscular side, his arm lifted overhead, hiding his face, he'd sunk into shadow. But she could see the flex and shudder of his belly. Hear the first few dry rasps, then the deep, wet sobbing.

* * * *

He was lying there with another one of his ratty old paperbacks.

“Do you know what they used to call pairs who fucked?”

“What?”

“Lovers.”

She laughed. Lightly, at first. Loving and fucking were like polar opposites. Then her laughter turned sour. It didn't have to be that way, but that's how it was.

* * * *

“Nix.”

He'd come close, but that was all. He was almost as careful of her name as he was of her body. He'd voiced it only three or four times since she'd given it to him. She waited, but he was quiet until she met his gaze.

“I don't want to hurt you.”

An inauspicious opening. She went on meeting his gaze. Waiting.

“But,” he paused for a long time, staring into her eyes like he was taking a very precise measurement, then went on, “there are things I want. From you.”

The muscles in her abdomen went tight and it got hard to breathe.

“I would have kept quiet, I would leave you alone, if I didn't think sometimes that you want these things, too.”

He was quiet for a long time. Her nerves were wound tight and her muscles were all flexing against nothing and her body felt cold. Shaky. His hand moved in an aborted gesture. Maybe he'd been about to touch her. But he drew his hand back and folded it under his arm, against his chest.

“Reading that book I found upstairs, thinking about what you said about your mother and father, being here with you,” he'd looked away, over at some picture on the wall or some knick knack on the little table, but now he brought his eyes back to hers. “I feel like I haven't been a human being, ever. And I feel like I could be one, with you. And I want that.”

Her jaw ached. She tried to stop clamping down so hard.

“Do you want that?” he asked.

“I . . .”

All she'd done was open her mouth. Make that one small sound. And tears were streaming down her face. But she was tired, fucking exhausted, of being so hard, so dry, so closed. Of fighting her own feelings on top of everything else there was to fight.

So she unclamped her will, and let go. Let herself be small and soft and weak. Let the tears fall and fall, warm and wet, down her cheeks, running down her neck, dripping from her chin, dropping onto her chest.

“I think,” she sobbed, and gasped in a big breath, “you should go to town,” the words shook out of her, “and steal someone. Someone young. Not a wife. Someone on the way down, but not too badly damaged. Someone like your first girl. You'd be saving someone from an awful life. At least for a while. And you could be human with her.”

“I could have done that years ago if all I wanted was to be with someone. That's not what I'm saying. What I want is to...be close with you. You, Nix.”

“I don't think I can.”

“Nix.”

His voice was soft and low. It seemed to wash under her, then rise up around her, warm and gentle. Like bath water.

“I know. For you, being touched, being hurt, there's no getting those things apart.

They're the same, for you. Maybe that can change. I don't know. I don't expect things to go a particular way. I just want to know if you want me close, or if you want me to keep away.”

He was looking at her through his usual, stoic mask, but behind it his eyes were bright with feeling. It was hard to move, she was so scared. As scared, now, as she'd been of him the day they'd delivered her to him. But she made her body move.

When she touched him, he went still. Even stopped breathing, maybe. The feel of his skin—warm, yielding under her fingertips—sent a jolt through her. Warning. Life.

Something big. She kept herself from pulling back. Down the inside of his forearm she ran her fingertips. And he stayed still. Not breathing. Only when her fingers moved over the heel of his hand, across his palm, and along his long fingers did he move, the tiniest bit, like he'd thought she might hold his hand. But her fingers dropped away, and he didn't try to catch her hand.

* * * *

That night she heard him again, creeping over the creaking floor, coaxing the rusty latch from its catch. The image of him flexing into his hand in that surge and ebb of yellow light, of him sinking into darkness, the sound of his sobs singed her cheeks with shame, for following, full of hate and accusations, for watching through it all, long after she knew he hadn't gone to sell her out. But there was still a pull, half fear, half want, tugging at her, coaxing her back into the woods.

She fought it. Stayed. Heard him return thirty or forty minutes later.

The next morning, after they'd eaten, she stared past her dirty plate, past his, watched his eyes move across the words printed on the yellow-brown pages of his book. Then they flashed up, caught her stare. He didn't smile, exactly, but his mouth softened.

“Have you ever...”

He waited in silence for her to ask her question.

“Have you ever had a lover?”

In the long, dark quiet she waited for his answer.

“My whole life—at least as long as I can remember—no one has ever really touched me. I've never just held someone. And all the times I've touched someone, it's never been their choice. Not really.”

* * * *

They were nearly out of food. The canned goods that had sat on the shelves at the grocery down the road would be a gamble at best, after all these years. And the citizens of that little oasis in the middle of nowhere hadn't thought to leave them an apple tree or carrot patch, the way the farmers had. So Gareth trekked into town.

“Be careful,” she warned before he left.

“I will.”

“I don't just mean... On your own like this, you know you're vulnerable, too.”

Men without money, men who needed more sport than a sex hotel or a pillory offered hunted strays. Men. In pairs, in threes and fours they hunted the drifters. Men who found life among the people of the towns so unbearable that they risked living outside the safety of their borders.

“I know.” He smiled. “I'll be careful. For both of us.”

When he was out of sight, she gathered her things and set out for the woods.

She'd gone, promising herself it wasn't because she didn't trust him, that it wasn't images of him talking to the men in town, telling them where she was, that drove her out of their little nest in the ghost hotel. It was just that, this way, if someone followed him back, she'd see. Or if they figured out who he was, if they beat him, tortured him, forced him to lead them to her, she was saving herself from his weakness—the weakness they all shared, in the end. Saving him from hurting her, when he meant to help.

Now that she was out of the hotel, away from him, among the tall trees with their fluttering golds and crimsons, there was a pull, an urge to move. To go. To sling her pack onto her back, to take her bearings, to leave him and find the others.

But it was too soon. Waiting there, waiting here, tactically it made no difference.

But she told herself it was too soon.

So, she set her back at the base of an old oak, and settled in. Just before sunset he emerged from the woods on the other side of the field. Alone. Unfollowed.

* * * *

“Gareth.” He turned his gaze to her, and she almost lost her courage. But she willed her voice. “You don't have to be so careful. Never to touch me,” she finally managed, her voice evened by effort.

His face stayed bust-like for a few seconds, then a smile bent one corner of his mouth.

“Alright.”

Until two days later, it was like she'd never said anything. Even when there might have been some accidental, incidental contact, his body would bend or drift away, as if they were mutually repelling magnets, and they never touched. But then late one afternoon, she was standing by the window, watching three crows hopping and flapping and cawing and tearing at something out in the yard. Gareth came up beside her. He just stood beside her, gazing out at the twilit world, like her. He was quiet. She was quiet.

Having him near, lately, made her feel strange. Physical sensations in her chest, in her gut, that she'd never felt before, except when she'd imagined a love like her parents' love and dreamed of a first, future lover before she'd been turned out into the world of men, and those few, early minutes with her husband, before he'd hurt her. And that time Artel had kissed her.

The feelings gave her a strange urge to touch Artel. To move closer to him. Two or three times she had even imagined, for a few seconds, what it would be like to let Artel have her. Then a flood of sickening rage would crash over her. An objectless rage that made her think of a tired child that cries and screams and shakes despite being fed and warm.

Now his look was on her and she turned. Watched his hand float toward her, found his eyes searching her face. She waited. The tip of his index finger touched her shoulder, just over the blade. Her brand. She forced her body to be still. Her heart hammered so hard and fast her chest hurt.

“The day they brought you to me. I watched from my room. What they did to you down in the courtyard when they brought you in. They were so, so hard on you. Not just the warped ones that always get off on being as vicious as they can be. The whole pack. While I watched, I wondered what had them so riled. Later, before they brought you up, I heard men talking in the hall. Heard what you'd done. Then, in our room—I don't know how you could even stand—you turned to walk to the shower. And I saw this.”

His finger slipped under the strap of her tank and traced the ring of scarred flesh.

Traced the encircled S within.

Still. Stay still.

“All my pity drained away. I was in awe of you.”

His finger left the brand. Left her body. She took a breath.

“And I still am.”

* * * *

She waited for days, until he went to the woods again. After, when he'd crept up the stairs and gently shut the door to his room, she went to him. She gave his door two soft knocks, and went in. He was awake, reading by the light of his candle. Breathing hard, he fixed his gray eyes on her. Watched her come toward the bed.