A pair of staggering steps. We fetch up against the porch balcony. I set her down. Her lips are swollen and red, like her eyes. She says nothing, just looks up at me. Waiting, again.
Because I pull away every time. Because I feel the blood that she has spilled, and the blood that I have spilled for her. I don’t know if my desire is truly for her anymore or just for all of our endings.
“What can I do, Dev?” A knife in her hand. I didn’t see her pull it. But then, I never do.
“Do you want me to hurt, is that it? Do you still blame me?”
The knife hovers above her left wrist, casual, deadly. If I do nothing, she will cut herself just to make me move. She will give me her blood, which she has somehow divined is exactly what I desire. My love is overmatched. She will make it easy for me.
Lightning strikes the river and throws its light between us. Her hands are delicate. Thinner than I remember, veins and muscle and bone latticed beneath what she calls high-yellow skin. A scar rings her left wrist like a bracelet; a keloid star dimples the skin between her right thumb and forefinger. I have seen, once, the last decade of scars beneath the coastline of her clothes. I hate to look at them. The body records its pain. I don’t need the reminder. But she has been unmistakably marked by my years of silence.
I put my hands over hers. She moves the knife just enough, so it kisses the first layer of my skin without breaking it. Her eyes are wide and dark and wet. We wait.
I lean in to kiss her. My tongue stings where she bit it, it swells uncomfortably. I press it against her teeth and blood breaks through again, a warm demonstration. I hear an echo of Victor (I will haunt you), but in this moment he’s just a gnat in my ear.
“Oh,” Pea says, and sucks on the corner of my mouth. “Oh. Fuck, Dev.”
The knife pricks the tip of my pinky. She lifts my hand, watches my face as she smears that trickle of blood across her lips. It goes on dark as earth.
Mortal, mortal, like that kid goat I killed when I first understood that death would come for me one day. Mortal like my father, whose ashes we shipped to my aunts in Bombay days after he had first let me try a turn in the Chrysler. Mortal like Victor, whose blood washed away as easily as Pea promised.
Everything dies, and love only makes the blood spill faster.
I yank up her skirt, she grapples for my erection, pops the tongue from my belt in her haste. I thrust outside—she’s as slippery as half-cooked okra. One hand—hers?—passes it inside. I don’t look at her, I just hold on. We are two mortals, whatever the rest of the world calls us. Two creatures of bones and skin and bellows and blood. Two creatures full of love, watching it drip between our fingers.
“Look, the cucumbers are ripe. How old is that smoked salt in the pantry?”
“Pea, they’re still white.”
They look bizarre, misshapen tumors nestled against dark-green vines.
“They’re called dragon’s eggs. That’s how they looked on the package.”
“And you bought them?”
“I met Mae Spalding in Craver’s store that day. The hell-child’s mom, poor thing—she told me she used to grow them. Don’t be prejudiced, Dev.”
I consider this. Her smile is just a twitch in the blues and browns of her sun-haloed silhouette.
“What’s that, Pea? Some hopelessly naïve American aphorism? Don’t judge a book by its cover?”
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, how about.”
My fingers walk the waistline of her blue jeans, mine two weeks ago. “I wasn’t planning on knocking them, either.”
Pea doesn’t laugh like someone who could even imagine doing what we did two nights ago. But she did. We did. And this beautiful, sun-lit innocence is just as much a part of her as the knives, and who they’ve cut.
“The salt?” she says, and slices a cucumber from its vine. I like the way it looks in her palm. It reflects a smeared curve of her plum-red lips.
“Two, three years?” I bought it in a summer market, right after Tamara came to the Pelican. I don’t tell Pea that—I don’t like her to think of what Tamara meant to me. And it does me no good either.
Pea shrugs. “It’s just salt, right?” She cuts a stalk of the purple-green basil, fat and bowed with flowers. She’s like my grandmother in this small way, knowing each plant by its rhythms and its fruit. A sightless caress of my forehead and she walks back into the kitchen. I wait in the garden. A peaceful hum descends, the kind of trilling, buzzing susurrus that passes for silence in the countryside. Beetles root in the dirt. A ladybug eats a greenfly. Violence is peace. Even here.
“Dev, there’s someone on the line.” Her voice wakes me, not her hand on my shoulder. She regards me at her most unreadable.
“Who?”
“A man. It sounded official. I can wait outside.”
I get up very carefully. She reeks of basil, of sweet pollen and earth bitters. A maddened corkscrew just above her ear is knotted with a flower, blush pink.
“Pea…”
What does she think? What explanation can I give? I can only hide in the game, my second skin.
“Probably some city officer. They’re not supposed to call me, but—”
“I love you, Dev,” she says, her face averted. She might even know. My saint’s hands only touch the frigid air of her withdrawal. She curls against the wood slats of the garden chair and tosses the knife high. She catches it without looking, but
