I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
She doesn’t know why she asked it.
The question had alighted on her tongue and plunged itself into the charged air between them before she’d even had a chance to think it.
Should it have been edged in hope?
Should she have asked it with some kind of glimmer in her eye?
It sounds like reassurance, the way he insists that the chances of them ever running into each other are low, but it brings with it no comfort. She resents whatever in her had told her to take that one shuffling step backward, away from him. She resents the darkness that had not allowed the last scrap of hope to leave her on the back of that question.
He had snapped at her, stopped just short of calling her a stupid girl, but he had appeased her, too. He had not softened but he’d offered her an olive branch in trying for a smile once, for entertaining the idea that the meadow was any kind of home at all. He has not been kind to her, except to throw himself down the bank toward her so that, if need be, he could drag her back to shore. He has not been soft but he’d insisted that he would not have let her drown. She thinks this must count for something.
She grits her teeth and she studies his face and she wants to look away, knows that she ought to, but she cannot force herself to drop her gaze. “What if I wanted to see you?” she asks and, for the moment, she is impervious to the self-loathing the surges through her, reckless and unfettered.
“Would I be able to find you?” She doubles down on her foolishness in asking, she knows. But she doesn’t know how not to ask.
lilian
