Hare Moon (6 page)
As she unties Patrick’s ropes she avoids his eyes.
But he grabs her and makes her look at him. “I didn’t know he was infected,” he says, his voice hoarse and lips dry. “My mother gave him to me, told me to take him away. I never knew.”
Tabitha nods. “I believe you,” she says. And it’s true.
“I would never lie to you, Tabby. I love you too much.”
She nods again. She understands this as well.
She tells him they put his brother in a special room—a safe place where Patrick can say good-bye. After he does, she tells him, she will lead him back into the Forest and away from the village and together they will find a way to live and love beyond this constricted world.
He doesn’t question her as she pulls him down the stairs into the basement, or when she pulls aside the curtain and unlocks the hidden door. He follows her blindly as she leads him down the dark tunnel. She stops at the stairs climbing from the ground at the far end.
They face each other and Tabitha inhales deeply, the scent of him mingling with the smell of old smoke and rot. She closes her eyes, trying to sear it into her memory. Slowly, she runs a hand up his arm, along his collarbone and around his neck until her fingers dig into his hair.
She thinks about the kiss they almost—but never—shared and she wonders if his lips could have been a part of her, if the two of them could have left this world before his infected brother Returned. If their love had been pure, maybe they’d have been able to stop time.
“I will love you always,” she says, pulling his lips to hers.
Through her kiss she tries to explain everything that words cannot. About love and duty and God and need and choices and memory and history. She wants him to taste her and understand her. In that kiss is everything she was and could be, all that she’s giving up in her life.
She needs to take this part of him with her because it’s the only way she can go back to the life she must live. To her duty to village and God.
When she pulls away she’s crying, and Patrick reaches up to her cheek and
catches a tear on his finger. He doesn’t realize she’s saying good-bye to him. “I will love you always,” he says, and she smiles, sad and aching.
She gestures for him to go up the stairs first and he pushes open the door. Without having to look she picks up the rope leading to the gate outside and twines it around her wrist. Before he disappears aboveground she presses her fingers to her lips and then against his spine. She pulls the rope and then he’s gone and she closes and locks the door behind him.
She huddles on the top step and listens to him bang and call for her and then to the sound of the moans. She tears at her clothes and her body, raking her nails against her flesh, hoping to let the agony pulsing inside her escape, but nothing can dull the torment.
Her hand shakes as she dips the pen into ink and holds it above the page. The printed words are impossible to decipher through the tears trembling from her eyes. Her body is wracked with sobs. Still, she writes:
There is always a choice. Choice is what makes us human. It is what separates us from the Unconsecrated. But that does not mean that choice cannot turn men into monsters. I have chosen survival over life
.
In her life, Tabitha has felt consuming desire only during those too-short moments with Patrick. She watches him along the fences with the others now, watches the way he grabs at the metal links and pleads and begs. She touches the old note from him, tucked against her breast under the cross she wears around her neck.
A part of her likes to believe that he’s different from the others, that he doesn’t moan for anyone but her. That he spends his days and nights trying to return to her.
He is always there for her, always waiting. The most constant companion anyone could pray for. One of these days she will return to him. She will feel that desire again, that need beyond human comprehension, and they will be together forever.
Born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina, Carrie Ryan is a graduate of Williams College and Duke University School of Law. Carrie now lives and writes in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can visit her at
carrieryan.com
. Read all of the Forest of Hands and Teeth books:
The Forest of Hands and Teeth, The Dead-Tossed Waves
, and
The Dark and Hollow Places
.
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