The Girl With Borrowed Wings (23 page)

“Tell me what happened,” he said. “The thing that Anju helped you with.”

“I defeated my father,” I said.

The blanket fell through his fingers and his eyes shot up to mine. The pain and the sweetness grew, and things were flowing into me.

“Your father?” he repeated dumbly.

“He’s not a god anymore,” I said. “He’s just a man. I told him that I loved him and I broke down everything he’d done. I’m not a figment of his imagination now, and he doesn’t have any hold over me, and every part of me is
mine
.” Nerves vibrating, I leaned over across the bed, leaning into the lamplight. Gingerly I took the blanket out from beneath his hands. I tried my best not to tremble. “It also means there aren’t any walls in my head.”

In pure astonishment, Sangris stopped breathing. “Nenner?”

Frangipani and darkness and heartbeats. On my knees on Anju’s bed, bringing myself closer toward him. The little room was absolutely silent.

“I’m sorry I made you wait,” I said, with the last of my breath. With a lightheaded feeling as if I was throwing myself off a cliff, I moved through the dark green air, leaned farther across the bed, and kissed him timidly. On the cheek at the corner of his mouth, first. Then, when he still didn’t move, I brought myself to his mouth and kissed him there too, my head tilted. There was a brief moment of sweetness and heat. Then I began to draw back.

But before I could, Sangris’s hands were on my back and he was leaning forward too. He kissed me and when he found that my mouth moved in response, his whole body came to press against mine and we fell backward onto the hard little bed as the frangipani burned, seeping its scent into the room.

A long while passed. Sangris wouldn’t let me talk. Or rather, I couldn’t talk because he kept distracting me. His fingers were in my hair, or stroking my throat, or at the base of my back, feeling through the loose cloth of my clothes. And his mouth—whenever I tried to catch my breath he pulled me back greedily. A slow crimson flame was beating between us. We drowned in the little dark green room. Occasionally I would resurface and see the brilliant white of the frangipani flowers before he drew me back, and the warmth of their whiteness stayed in my mind as I touched his cheek and found an area at his throat that made him gasp for air when I kissed it. He spoke occasionally, but most of it was incoherent, or mumbled into my skin. He said my name a lot; sometimes I heard him moan something about warmth and milk and honey. But most of the time we were wordless, cupped in the green hands of the room.

Because I was still me, I stopped him when his fingers unconsciously tugged at my shirt. “I’m seventeen,” I reminded him. He groaned and held me tighter. His eyes were shining canary yellow; they stood out above everything else. “And besides,” I added, “you have to give me a moment to breathe so that I can tell you I love you.”

Sangris looked down at me, his hair in disarray. “Say that again,” he said breathlessly. “What did you just say?”

I laughed and refused to speak.

“Say it,” he begged. I reached up and put my arms around him, curling, my insides fizzling.

“I thought we were too busy to talk.”

“Tell me!”

“Tell you what?” I said against his neck. “That I love you?”

“Yes. Tell me properly,” he said. “It’s not fair. You already know how
I
feel.” For a little while he lost track of his argument, because he’d dipped his head down. He didn’t seem to be able to keep his mouth away from mine for more than ten seconds at a time. But then he was insisting again, “You need to say it.”

He refused to be distracted even when I targeted that spot in the hollow of his throat. “Come on,” he said, though he couldn’t help tilting his head back. “Say it.
Please
.”

“Not here in Anju’s room. That’s weird.” I smiled at him through the drowsy light. “Maybe you should take me somewhere else.”

“Anywhere.”

“The sunflower field. It’ll be dark in Spain now, though . . .”

Sangris didn’t care. He picked me up straightaway, kissed me again, and brought me toward the window. I noticed his hurry and it made me feel as hot inside as if I’d swallowed the sun. At the last minute I remembered to ask, “Shouldn’t we say good-bye to Anju first?”

“I’ll bring you to see her in Qatar,” he promised. “We can thank her then, and you can chat and be polite all you want. But right now we’re headed for Santiago.” He already had me out of the window and in the scrubby herb garden near the flowers that gleamed white in the darkness under the acacia tree. “You’re not going to get out of this one.”

“Why would I want to?” I put my head on his shoulder, almost causing him to forget to grow wings before we took off. When we left the ground, there was a sensation as if someone had upended a packet of sparkles into my stomach. But maybe that wasn’t just because of the flight. It might have had something to do with the way that Sangris moved as his wings beat. I had never allowed myself to press close enough to notice it before. Looking up at his flushed face, I said, “And after we spend a while in Spain, let’s go to Thailand and see if the orchid gardens are open. Or maybe we could find a beach somewhere that’s quiet, with waves that glow green at night and sand that’s still hot from the day. I know a place near the Arabian Gulf.” I could tell, from the way he kissed me in midair, that he liked that idea.

But first he took me past Santiago, over the gold dust of city lights, to a place where the land was dark and the sky was cluttered with tiny stars like points of light shining through a velvet cloth, and everything else was hidden beneath blackness. We heard the roar of the oil-painted trees. I dipped my hand into the cold water of the well. I couldn’t resist splashing Sangris while he was impatiently waiting for me to say the words. He wrestled me down under the sunflowers. And there, in the place where my father had tried to plan me, with the roaring of the trees drowning out all other sound and the heavy petals of the sunflowers forming a second sky over our heads, I told him that I loved him.