sorry she is for the loss of his father but really she’s waiting for him to explain the boy. She feels the muscles in her cheeks straining and twitching, an aching pain beginning to radiate through her mouth.
He tips his head back, his cheeks damp. “I need to ask you something, my Tabby-cat,” he says, and she trembles, waiting for the words he’s whispered to her every night in her dreams—
She’s waiting for him to unlock the world for her.
“My brother’s sick,” he tells her.
She looks at the child, eyes wide. “Infected?” she breathes before she can stop herself.
Patrick shakes his head adamantly and tugs on her hands, demanding her attention. “Your village, they have medicine. They can fix him.”
She struggles away from him, but he won’t let go. He crawls after her on his knees.
“Please, Tabitha, please,” he says. “We don’t know medicine the way your village does.”
She jerks her hands until she’s free and stumbles away.
“I thought you were going to ask me to leave with you,” she says, her forehead crinkled.
“There’s nowhere for me to take you,” he says.
“But you talked about the world. The life outside the Forest.” The bindings around her breasts are pulling too tight, squeezing her so that it’s difficult to breathe. The little boy’s just standing there. Staring at her.
Patrick shakes his head. “I have to make my brother well first. I promised my mother I would take care of him. It was the last thing she asked of me before pushing me out of our village.”
A bright exquisite grief begins to wail inside her. She presses her lips together, doing everything she can to swallow the growing agony. She turns and stumbles away from Patrick. She wishes she had something to sag against, something to support her, because she’s not quite sure her legs will hold. But there’s nothing: just fences lined with the dead, waiting for any chance to sink their teeth into her.
“How did your father die?” her voice is defeated.
Patrick slowly walks toward her, she can feel when he’s just behind her. When he inhales, his chest brushes against her back and she closes her eyes, aching for him to take his finger and weave it around her spine.
“He was infected,” he says softly.
She clears her throat. She will not sound weak. “How?” she asks.
“Someone from another village. They’d checked her over when she arrived but she’d hidden the bite by cutting off her own finger. They thought it was under control after my father was ill but...”
Tabitha winces. “But your brother? And you?” She thinks about the book in the basement, the words of her village twisted around the words of God. It’s the way her world has always been.
“He’s not infected, Tabby,” Patrick says. “Nor am I. I promise.”
“The rest of your village?” She clenches her fists and prays to God that
“Chaos,” he says simply. “My mother shoved my brother into my arms and told me to save him. I ran to you.”
She clenches her teeth to stop from crying out.
She turns to face him. “Do you love me?” she asks.
His expression softens, and his lips part. “More than anything,” he says, tracing the back of his fingers down her face.
She feels the tears in her eyes. She doesn’t want to give up on the dream of running away with him. She doesn’t want to turn back to her village and its claustrophobic fences and rules.
But Patrick has asked for her help, and she loves him. “Then I will help you,” she says.
As planned, Patrick and his brother stay on the path until darkness falls and wraps itself thickly around the village. Tabitha spends the hours kneeling in the sanctuary. Her lips tremble as she prays, the words feeling hollow in her heart.
When she’s sure no one will see them, Tabitha leads Patrick and his brother into the Cathedral. The boy’s eyes are wide, astounded by the warren of hallways, the soaring sanctuary, and the dominance belief plays in her world. She takes them to her room and leaves them there.
“I have duties,” she says. She doesn’t know why it’s so hard for her to meet Patrick’s eyes. Maybe it’s because he’s sitting on the bed.
She shivers and looks down at her hands. If the boy weren’t there ... Would Patrick touch her like that when she returned?
“We’ll be okay,” Patrick says. His little brother sits next to him on the bed, silent.
“I’ll try to bring food,” she says. Patrick nods. It feels strange and wrong for him to be here, in the Cathedral with its sharp stone walls and ceilings, rather than on the path with the air and the leaves and the light and the freedom.
Tabitha walks to Midnight Office, welcoming the silence of thoughts.
Tonight she’s slow with her prayers. Ami and Ruth kneel beside her, their heads bowed, but she sees them glance at her and then each other. She knows they sense something is wrong, but she keeps her fingers twined tight and her lips moving in praise of God and doesn’t allow them the chance to interrupt.
When she goes back to her room there’s a promise of morning in the air, the sweetness of grass and dew. She slips open the door, and Patrick’s asleep under her blankets.
The hare moon is still in the sky somewhere, allowing her to see his face. She stands for a bit, the moans of the Unconsecrated threading through the fences as she stares. He sleeps with his lips parted, one hand thrown out to the side as if waiting for her to slip her fingers into them.
It’s like he cares for nothing. Has no fears.
Tabitha knows she sleeps curled around herself in a small ball, protecting herself from the world.
He opens his eyes, sees her.
She inhales at the intensity of his gaze. Something inside her flutters, warms, spreads. He doesn’t say anything as he slips from underneath the covers, the thin sheet trailing over his chest and down across his hips.
He’s wearing nothing. She swallows.
Her voice is a panicked squeak. “Your brother—”
“Is in the room next door. It looked vacant, dusty. Never used.”
She nods her head. No one’s stayed in that room so long as she’s been here. He comes closer. She swallows again. She’s still not looking directly at him, and he raises a fingertip.
He starts at her thumb, trailing his touch around her wrist, up the inside of her arm and across her elbow. Along her upper arm so that his knuckles brush against her bound breasts.
She’s not sure what breathing is anymore. What heat is.
His fingertips dance over her collarbone, slip just lightly under the hem of her tunic, over her chest. His skin is sleep-warm, his eyelids heavy.
“My Tabby-cat,” he says, lowering his face to where her neck meets her shoulder. Every part of her is alive and waiting for that first touch of lips to skin. When it happens she opens her mouth, her body unable to contain air any longer.
He kisses the line of her jaw and along her cheekbone. Into her ear he murmurs, “My love.”
She stands there, eyes closed, wound up so tight she doesn’t understand how his next touch won’t cause her to explode and end the world.
She wants to raise her hand and touch him. To wrap her fingers around his muscles and feel them twitch at her touch. She wants to make him catch his breath. She wants to make him feel as full of need and desire as she does at this moment.
His lips are just skimming hers. She breathes him into her, and he breathes her into him, and she wonders if anything can be more intimate than this: this sharing of breath that is life.
He slips a hand behind her neck, into her hair, untangling her bun. His fingertips dig into her scalp, and she
