i know i'll never see you.
The night is not still, and the lake is not calm, but she is slate-smooth and emptied enough to make both of them curl brokenly around her and not be moved herself. The water laps at her bare feet like a lost cat, and she would pull it into her lap if it had a form she could hold. (She thinks things like this, not-so things, cats in the water and voices in fire; she is always flinching, split-mouthed. She needs to remember the water is only water. Mostly she succeeds.)
Tonight she finds out of she will die or not, and she can't care, but her fingers worry the metal band on her left hand anyway. It slips from base to her first knuckle, then back, the only thing besides her fingers that moves on her. She's wearing something but she can't remember the last time she changed dresses; she doesn't care about that, either, and it is shocking, that she would let good cloth go to such ruin. There are eyes, golden-bright, resting on her hands, but these eyes look where they want and she has never been able to stop them from seeing her before. It doesn't matter.
Why do you still have that? He asks.
It's mine, she says.
*
Ashley is always bringing her things, these days, just little things he notices her eyes falling on: ribbons, bracelets, poems. They'll come back to wherever they're staying that night and his hands open, suddenly full, the best trick any magician ever managed, and she laughs until her hair is put up brightly, her wrists gleam, and she reads slowly to him with her tongue tucked in the corner of her ripe mouth.
"What am I even going to do with this?" She asks, of what she can know tell are real diamonds (she learns fast, and her eyes are sharper than her tongue), holding them at arms' length.
"Wear 'em?" He suggests from the bed, sprawled out and declining to even take his boots off with his arms folded beneath his head, and she perks like a bird trying to get a better look at something, eyes wide and almost guileless.
"Close your eyes--and no sneaking looks, Ashley, I want to wear this with my blue dress." He obliges - being, she's noticed, the obliging type - and she clasps the necklace around her throat and disappears behind a screen. She expects him to be looking from under the veil of his eyelashes; he never made a promise not to, she noticed that. Undressing takes too long, as usual, all these layers of lace and cloth and ties that bind her in.
"So," she says, naked save for her jewelry at the foot of the bed, "What do you think?"
He pushes himself up on his elbows, mouth opening--
*
Voice is the first part of memory that dies. She can remember the play of candelight on his tongue, the clean flash of his teeth, the tugging curve of his mouth (tugging on what? on her?) but his voice is gone. Her heart is a crucible, this is the fuel.
*
You don't need that.
Does it matter? It's only jewelry.
Then give it to me.
She is stiller than still; if she had a heart it would stop.
No. No no no no no and only the first word is voiced, the rest beating against her throat like trapped birds, clotted red and humming, birds with long curved mouths for sugarwater and blood. No. They drink from flowers. They eat flowers. She has to remember. The scrublands take everything. They take your flesh and leave you bleached bones, they take color and leave you the corpse lights of stars. The clouds drown the sky grey. She looked up and the stars were gone with the moon. The sky was black. Was this hell, then? The fire beside her was nothing. The sky was gone.
(Smoke. It was smoke. Stop it.)
He is faster than she can follow, and her finger breaks cleanly so that it can't curl and save itself from being left bare. But she isn't slow herself, and she strikes like a scorpion, like her teeth are full of poison, like this saved her the last time he took something from her that she needed. He switches hands and she is not slow but she is not fast enough to catch the metal that glints from his hand when he throws it
into the water.
I'm going, he says, shaking her off his arm, and she could try to kill him, and fail, or she could wade into the black water (styx) and--she doesn't hope, she's only a mute needle, dragging herself towards north. You can make needles magnetic, she recalls, this is a scientific fact. When do they stop chasing the true direction? When will this stop? The water closes over her head, and she fills her lungs, for weight and the taste of living water. Not yet. She's pulled forward, slipping blindly in the murk that rises around her, and there is no light to see by this deep. There are things down here with her.
*
She remembers the lines of his palm beneath the rings, worn deep with use. Her mother would have called them hands you could trust, forgetting that hands like that could close into fists as easily as any other, but his never did. They could have, and she would have let them, but instead they cupped her jaw and smoothed her hair. That was more important than anything he gave her, and she'd laugh about getting sentimental if it wasn't true.
Rings meant: no questions about them being together, safety in good company, respectability in business, no need to slip a few extra dollars to the people renting their rooms, a shield from speculating eyes. Rings meant you're mine, and everyone can see that. Rings meant I'm not ashamed to be with you.
She could tell herself that the old, rotted-tooth words didn't mean anything to her anymore, but whore is a word that digs deep like a worm and festers, an ugly word for ugly mouths. Wife, though--
She didn't know any wedding vows, but she laughed, happy and terrified, through ones she made up, tucked into drifts of white sheets with her hands balancing on his shoulders. Things like this don't happen to girl-monsters like her, no one loves them, no one gives them rings, and she reminds herself this is for their cover, they don't need anything so human to keep them together. They already have each other--like it doesn't matter, like this doesn't bloom like heat-ghosts in her chest. He made her remember being warm, whole Texas summers in his smile.
The ring fit, of course.
"Mrs. St. Clair," she said, holding her hand out, her fingers spread wide and framing his blue eyes just beyond them. "I like it." Summer, breathless open skies she's only seen here.
*
He comes back as the sun is starting to warm the horizon and finds her dripping mud on the beach, curled up tightly and staring into the water. When did she give up? Or did she always know she wouldn't find it, with a whole lake bed to search? A fish could have swallowed it. It could have been caught under a branch. She couldn't see anything through the mud, even with blood-flushed eyes.
I hate you, she says, tonelessly. That was all I had left.
You were over attached. He stands beside her; she refuses to look up. You will thank me. When you are sane.
It wasn't hurting anyone. And it was mine. You didn't have the right.
You came to me. I have every right over you. He pauses. You think too human. That is why you are here, in your trouble. It's blood, crow, not water. Beasts don't weep. They bleed. You forget the difference.
Her eyes are limned in reddish mud, like wet clay. She didn't know she was crying. She looks at the proof streaking her fingers and tastes it, to be sure it's real.
You go to the Lasombra tomorrow. You owe them a blood-debt. Do you want to die, crow?
I want to eat my heart, she says, wishing for breath to choke on. There is still water low in her chest. I want to tear it out and burn it.
Then do it, he says, but stop wasting your time.
I loved him, she doesn't say. There are things she can't explain, things he already tore out of her when she wouldn't give them up on her own where have you been and nothing in her wanted to tell him, but it doesn't matter. One way or another they get what they want. Maybe the only way out is to be nothing anyone wants, or to be nothing they can hurt. Maybe he's right. She forgets differences. Things blur, these days, peonies spreading in the corners of her eyes--or the sunrise.
Like every morning, she thinks about meeting it.
He didn't love you, crow, he says, and walks away to disappear into the soil without another sound.
Her heart splits cleanly, like a shell.
She wants to prove him wrong, hold her hands up, but her hands are bare and the sky burned and what if? Can she remember otherwise? Can she hear a voice telling her the truth?
I love you, she says, I love you. I love you I love you I love you. Was that how it sounded, pleading? Her tongue tinting it with sharp ice crystals? Her heart was dusty and vast, warmth clinging to the sand after sundown; her voice is bringing it back wrong. She sits quietly and closes her eyes, and builds him in her mind. She starts with his hands.
The light is brushing over her skin with intolerable heat as the sun hovers barely below the skyline, like she's a little bread girl in an oven, when she's finally ready to try again.
"I love you, don't you forget that," she says, hugging her knees to her chest. "Don't forget that."
"I won't," she answers, "I won't, Ashley, but I don't know what I'm supposed to do, and I know you're not here and you won't say a word to me I don't make up and I can't lie for you. In your place. You were better at that than I ever was. Isn't that funny? I thought it was funny, once." She crawls backwards to stretch out on the soil and not the rocks of the beach, the mud coating her flaking into a thousand crisp insectile wings and taking off. She's burning, slowly.
"I bet you'd tell me not to give up so easily. Knowing you. That I shouldn't get this way. You'd be right, we'd both know it, but I'd have to sulk half the night and drive you up the wall before I'd admit it--" She breaks off, arching her back and biting her tongue; is her hair on fire? It must be. But her mind is clear for the first time in--she can't remember that, but it's one of those things that really isn't important. She's here, inside of herself, and there's a band of metal around her heart that can't burn or be lost, or taken, or broken. Not unless she gives it up.
So it hurts. So does light, and fire, and a thousand other things that are worth less to her. She hurts every night, she can bear this. Water pours from her mouth and she closes her eyes, accepting this, and chooses (as she always has before, like she always will until one day she doesn't) to persist.
She sinks down into the dark safety of earth. Someone loved me; it's enough.