The clearing comes upon us suddenly. Or maybe it seems that way to me. I’m not sure how long we’ve been walking, and I have no idea where the road is, but without warning, the trees fall away. I nearly run into Roya’s back. She’s standing with her arms by her sides, her eyes closed, her chin tipped back. She’s breathing slowly, and every time she exhales: magic.
It’s nothing I’ve ever seen her do before. Roya is frenetic energy, hunger, anger. But in this place, she’s still and calm. Every time she exhales, a bare hush of a breeze stirs the leaves that are littered across the grass of the meadow. A loose tendril of hair plays across her forehead in the breeze, and a whisper of light suffuses her skin.
It’s not that she’s more beautiful than usual. She’s always beautiful. But she’s still, and I get to look at her without reservation, without worrying that she’ll think it’s weird of me to stare. I didn’t realize how thirsty I was, but now I’m offered the opportunity to drink her in. And I take it.
When she opens her eyes, I don’t look away. She looks right at me, and I’m certain that she sees the longing on my face. I don’t try to hide it. For the first time ever, I don’t try to hide it. My hands are shaking. My heart is shaking.
She smiles.
She bites her lip.
“Sorry,” she says. “I just … I like to take a minute when I first get here. To be present.”
“No worries,” I say, my voice rough. “Take all the time you need.”
“I’m good,” she says. And then she holds out her hand.
I look at it. She’s wearing the gold bangle with the dark green stones. The lines of her palm are dark. The skin of her wrist trembles with the force of the pulse beneath the surface. She twitches her fingers, and I realize she’s waiting for me. I reach out my hand and put it in hers.
Her fingers curl around mine, and she leads me toward the center of the clearing.
“I like to come here sometimes,” she says. Her thumb is tracing the curve of my knuckle. I can’t breathe. “When things get tough. It’s where I first did magic, did you know that?”
“I thought the first time you did magic was at a family thing? The barbecue with the dropped cake … ?” I hear myself say the words as though from a distance.
“I always say that, but this is really the first place.” I realize that she isn’t looking at me. She stops in the middle of the clearing, and she doesn’t look at me, and she traces the line of my thumb. “I got separated from my parents on a camping trip, and I wound up here. I could hear them looking for me, but I stayed quiet. I remember being scared that if they found me, they’d get mad and send me away.”
“Oh.” It’s all I can think to say. Roya sinks to the grass and sits, still holding my hand. I sit across from her. Our knees are less than one inch apart, but there’s no way for me to scoot forward without it being obvious that I just want her to touch me. I just want her to touch me.
“Yeah,” she says. She’s still not looking at me. “Anyway. I fell and skinned my knee on the way here, and it was bleeding like crazy, but by the time they found me, it was totally healed. No blood, no scar. Nothing. I remember trying to tell my mom about it, and she was sure that I had just gotten scared and imagined it, but I know it happened. That was the first time I did magic.”
“How did you get lost?” I ask. My knees feel warm and I look down and realize that somehow, she has come closer. We are touching. Our knees are touching, and our hands are touching, and she’s grabbing my other hand too. Holding it. And she finally looks at me. My breath catches when our eyes meet.
“I walked off,” she says. “I was looking for my mom.”
“Where was she?”
“No, you don’t understand,” she says, shaking her head and looking at me intently. “I was looking for my birth mom. I dreamed that she was in the woods, and I wandered off to find her. It was the middle of the night.”
“How old were you?” I ask. The first time Roya did magic in front of me, we were eight and she still needed two nightlights. I can’t imagine her in the woods by herself, in the dark. No moonlight would be enough to keep the shadows from looking like monsters.
“Four,” she whispers. “I was so scared of the dark, but I wanted to find her. I wanted to find my birth mom. And I stayed here because I thought she was going to come get me.” She squeezes both of my hands, and I squeeze hers back. She’s looking back and forth between my eyes like there’s something there, some answer to a question she hasn’t asked yet. “I come here sometimes to think about stuff, or to be alone. I’ve never brought anyone here before.”
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know why she’s showing me. All I can say is “Thank you.” I run the pad of my thumb across the palm of her hand, and she bites her lip. I’m stuck between absolute certainty that I’m imagining something between us and absolute certainty that I’m not imagining it at all.
“It’s a magic place,” she says. She lifts one of my hands to her mouth and presses her lips to my thumb, still staring directly into my eyes. My breath is loud in my ears. “Of course I wanted to show you,” she whispers to the curve of my palm.
“Roya,” I start to say,
