I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
She knows nothing of the war inside him.
She just stands there and absorbs the aftershock.
She mistakes his anger for something that it’s not. She remembers the way her father would snap at her – so very rarely – when his worry swallowed him whole. When she strayed too far off the beaten path and he’d have to fetch her when she inevitably got herself tangled up in thick vines of ivy. He’d snap at her for being so careless and then immediately soften, apologize. He’d say, ‘I just thought I’d lost you’.
She knows that this stranger, tucked safely behind his wall of fury, does not care about her. But it does not stop her from leaning into his anger. Because it reminds her of her father, it reminds her of being cared for, and that is enough. It is enough to reorganize her pulse.
He does not soften but he does not continue to rail against her. Perhaps aware that the foundation of her is beginning to splinter. Maybe he can see it in the soft set of her mouth or the silent plea in her eyes.
She casts a glance over her shoulder back at the water, the gaping hole in the ice. The smaller hole where she’d stumbled backward and stepped through it, plunging her foot into the water and arresting the breath in her lungs. She wants to ask him what he would have done when he found the ice along the river’s edge. But she doesn’t, stuffs down the question instead.
She shifts her focus back to him just in time to see the wings’ transition from something thin, feeble into something more substantial, something feathered. She tries to swallow her wonder. How unbecoming, to be so enamored by these things.
She doesn’t expect it, the way he so freely offers his name. It is accompanied by a sigh and she thinks herself such an insufferable inconvenience. But she says, “I’m Lilian,” anyway. “I didn’t know where else to go,” she admits finally, quiet, ashamed.
lilian
