His body felt like it was turning into one of his own moons, his skin and muscle a frame of paper, his heart a lit candle.
Her eyes were half-closed, her shirt and jeans patched with stains that were drying red-brown. A slick of new red, wet and bright as pomegranate seeds, covered her forearm.
Her rose. It had been pulled out by the stem, and its absence was costing her all this blood.
“What happened?” he asked. “Who did this to you?”
She opened her mouth like she was trying to answer, but there was no sound except her breath rasping against her dry lips.
He saw his hands doing the things he knew to do. Unbuttoning his shirt, wrapping it around her forearm, tying it to slow the bleeding. Taking her arm, the one not coated in blood. Putting it around his shoulder. He felt her damp skin, sensed his hands moving.
But the candle at his center had turned cold, a wick darkening to an ember and then going out. And all that cold pulled so deep into the core of him that he didn’t even feel the bite of the air against his bare forearms. He didn’t feel the chill of the earth against the shins of his jeans, or through his undershirt and his binder.
“Hold on to me, okay?” he said, and the words were as unsteady as his breathing. There had to be a way to move her without hurting her more. They had to be able to help her before the empty place in her forearm gave up all the blood she had.
Her body trembled against him, the movement slight as her petals underwater. Sam held on to her, trying to steady her, her wrist held between them. The wound let off water and blood. It soaked through the shirt he’d tied around her forearm.
Sam found the recognition in her eyes. The hollow in his chest turned tight and hot.
Her roses were as much the life in her as her heart. And the way she bled was killing her.
Miel grabbed Sam’s other hand, the blood on her palm slicking his. She held on so hard her fingers trembled.
He tried to ease his hand out of hers. “You’ve got to let go, okay?”
She didn’t loosen her grip.
“Please don’t leave,” she said, the words dry and wrung-out.
She put all the force and will she had into holding his hand, hard enough that he could feel her slowing pulse against his palm. Hard enough that he was losing the feeling in his fingertips.
“I’m not leaving you,” he said.
But her eyelashes flickered, the recognition leaving her. Her skin felt damp, fevered. She was too far away to hear him, but close enough to hold on to his hand so hard he couldn’t get his fingers back without hurting her. He needed both his hands to help her, but she held on so tight he felt it wringing the blood out of her. She was giving what little strength she had, the force left in her heart and her breathing, to keeping her grasp on him. And if he waited until she was weak enough that it slackened, he’d lose her.
He was losing her, this girl who built with him each night a world so much softer and more beautiful than the one he woke to in the morning. She was the wild blossoms and dark sugar that spoke of what the world could be. She was the pale stars on her brown skin.
She was the whole sky.
That was the cruelest thing about losing someone. In being lost, they became so many different people, even more than when they were there. To Aracely, she would be the lost sister who had only begun to understand that the woman she lived with was made of a boy name Leandro, and a hundred thousand yellow butterflies, and the bright, wild wish to be as she really was.
To Sam, she was the girl who gave his moons somewhere to go. She was the dark amber of beechwood honey, the caramel of sourwood, and the bitter aftertaste of heather and pine. She was every shade of blue between two midnights.
And she was slipping from his grasp because she would not let go.
lake of perseverance
The world darkened and brightened. The wind cupped the thread of her mother’s crying, weak and soft.
Only the slowing rhythm of her pulse in her wound made her sure she was still alive.
His hands on her took her out of these woods, back to a night when he left a rose moon in the beech tree outside her window. And she let herself slip out of the feeling of bleeding from her wrist, and into that first rush of light that had made her wonder if it was spring. It had brought the sudden feeling of being in a different month. Thinking winter was months away and realizing it was October.