When the Moon was Ours (20 page)

There were apologies too heavy for their tongues. Even too heavy for any one set of their hands. So this one, they shared. They carried it together. They interlaced their fingers, hers against his, and held it in their palms. They wore it on their skin. They guarded it in the breath of space between their bodies.

And this, their first apology in a language they were still learning, was a thing they stammered and halted through. But it stopped them from spinning out and losing each other. It kept them in each other's fields of gravity, finding each other.

 

lake of dreams

Still holding on to him, she'd begged him not to take her home. “Please,” she said. “I don't want her seeing me like this.” She didn't want this to be the way Aracely thought of her, shaking and still trying to get her breath back, her skin pale with salt.

She'd already wrecked everything with Sam. He'd seen the worst, cruelest places in her.

But with Aracely there was still a little left to salvage. She was still the girl who handed her blue eggs and lumia lemons. They were still something a little like sisters, standing at the stove together, melting the piloncillo into their coffee.

So now she lay on her stomach on a sofa in Sam's living room, her cheek against the cushion.

Sam sat next to her, his hand on her back as he asked her, “What happened to you? Who put you in there?”

She couldn't drag her eyes up to him. She stared at the woven rug under the coffee table, the knotted wool in reds and creams and deep blues.

It was so quiet in this house, empty except for them, and the two of them barely talking, that Miel could hear Sam's next breath out.

He pulled his hand back, and Miel couldn't move enough to tell him she wanted it.

His fingers slid off her. “What I said…”

Don't,
she tried to say. They had settled things, made their apologies, with their hands and their bodies.
You don't have to say anything.

“What I told you,” he said. “I didn't…”

She heard him blow a slow, soft breath out between his lips.

Her heart felt like a thing becoming glass, its flesh turning hard and fragile. She'd wanted this since the day he turned her skin into a brown sky dotted with pale constellations. But now she was too broken and brittle to take it. She wasn't a soft place he could fall. She was all edges, all fierce rivers and panels of stained glass. Only joints of rose brass held her together.

He sighed, standing up. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him slipping his hand into his pockets.

“Do you need more water?” he asked.

She shook her head. She'd already stood at the tap, drinking out of her cupped hand before Sam could hand her a glass.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Miel,” he said, and heat pinched the wound where her roses burst from her skin. “Miel, please say something.”

She needed to think about Sam's hair and skin, instead of the deep colors of that stained glass.

She needed to think of Aracely's soft gold hair instead of the brazen yellows of those trees.

She needed to think of her father's hands cutting a length of bandage, and not her wondering about where he'd gone, the hesitation that tinged her memories of him. She needed to remember her mother's laugh instead of her screaming, her soft voice instead of the rush of water over stones in a drought-stripped river.

That last one, her mother's laugh and voice, sparked a memory so strong Miel felt the air around her turning, everything becoming the flowered wallpaper of her mother's kitchen. She remembered the pattern even better than her mother's face, the flowers that must once have been yellow but that had faded to cream. That kitchen had held more of her mother's laughter than anywhere else in the world. It was where her mother sugared violet petals with fingers as skilled as a silversmith's. She added cinnamon and cayenne to mole. She let Miel and Leandro cover their hands in flour and powdered sugar when they made alfajores, the shortbread they spread with dulce de leche.

Finding that memory was as bright as catching trees bursting into bloom. It was a memory from when Miel was barely old enough to make them. After that, she would turn three, and four, and the roses would come, and they would take everything. But she could hold on to this, her hands and Leandro's pale with sugar and flour.

Alfajores de nieve, coated in powdered sugar so each looked made of winter.

She didn't have Leandro anymore, or his hands, smooth and dark as finished wood. But she had Sam, this boy, and his brown hands.

Miel pulled her eyes from the knotted carpet, and looked up at Sam. “I think I am hungry.”

“Yeah?” Sam's smile was slight, but without caution. “Anything in particular?”

Miel pushed herself up on her hands, her body stiff as if she'd slept on it wrong. “Have I ever shown you how to make alfajores?”

The way his smile shifted, she knew he didn't know the word. He probably thought she'd made it up, like one of her stories about stars. He'd had the alfajores she and Aracely made and brought over on New Year's Eve. But they'd never made them together, not like she'd shown him how to make recado rojo from achiote seeds and cloves and a dozen other spices. He didn't even recognize the name
alfajor.

She slid off the sofa, and the air felt thin and yielding, like she'd been walking in waist-deep water and now crossed dry ground.

She and Sam both knew where to find anything in each other's houses. He knew how Aracely arranged her spice cabinet. Miel knew the patch of the side garden where Sam's mother let borraja grow wild, the starflowers blooming pink and then turning deep blue. She picked handfuls, and hundreds of five-pointed blossoms still brightened the green leaves and wine-colored buds, covered in what looked like a coat of white down.

Sam followed her like they were dancing and she was leading him. He held the starflowers in his hands, and brought them inside with her. She pulled down flour, and he brought out the eggs. She looked for milk, and he set out the vanilla.

They washed the borraja flowers, patted them dry, brushed them with egg white and covered them in sugar. They mixed butter and flour until it formed into dough, soft and pale.

“What were you doing out there?” Miel asked, adding cinnamon and ground cloves like her mother had, not just to the dulce de leche but right into the dough. “Shouldn't you be in class?”

Sam worked in the dark threads of spice with the heels of his hands. “Woods sent me home.”

“For what?” she asked.

He cringed, his shoulders rising. “I might've gotten into a fight.”

“With who?” she asked.

“Does it matter?”

She touched the candied borraja flowers, checking if they'd dried. The sugar gave the pink and indigo petals the look of unpolished crystal.

“What were you fighting about?” she asked.

“Forget it.” Sam folded the dough over onto itself. “Point is, I'm supposed to be cooling down.”

Miel stirred the sugar and milk on the stove. It started off pale as the moon, and the longer they let it cook the darker it turned, deepening to gold and then amber. Aracely let hers cook for hours, until it was brown as hazelnuts.

Now heated, it let off the scent of the vanilla seeds she'd scraped into the pot, warm and sweet. She couldn't remember if it had been Sam's mother or Aracely who'd first taught her how to slit open a vanilla bean. It hadn't been her own mother. She'd been too young to hold the knife.

Miel's thoughts had barely flitted toward Sam's mother when they landed on three words, said in her voice.
He'll get there.
Those words had done nothing but frustrate Miel. His mother's calm and patience had not made her calm and patient. They'd made her unsettled, more in a hurry for Sam to see that
bacha posh
were not words that would make him something other than what he was. They were not a spell in a fairy tale. They would not make him want to be a girl once he was old enough to be a woman.

He'll get there.
Miel could still remember his mother's face when she said those words, her pale, dark-lined eyes full of a concern that was more care than worry.

He'll get there,
Sam's mother had tried to tell her. But Miel hadn't let that calm and that patience find its way into her.

Instead, when she and Sam had fought, she'd thrown it all at him. She'd forced him up against things he wasn't ready to look at.

She was no better than Ivy, no better than the Bonner girls sliding Sam's birth certificate across that wooden table.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

Sam looked up.

“I shouldn't have…” She stopped. She didn't know how to apologize without doing the same thing again. Bringing it up enough to apologize meant shoving it all toward him again.

Sam didn't move. He just watched her, his face open but a little tense.

“I shouldn't have pushed you that hard,” she said.

His jaw tightened, the way it had by the river.

“If I ever don't tell you something, it's not because I don't want to tell you,” he said. “It's because I don't know.”

Maybe no one else would've caught it, but in that flinch, she saw it, the fact that all this was breaking him.

The truth slid over her skin, that if she loved him, sometimes it would mean doing nothing. It would mean being still. It would mean saying nothing, but standing close enough so he would know she was there, that she was staying.

Sam took his mother's wooden rolling pin from the freezer, where she always put it, a trick she swore by for rolling out roti
,
but that Sam said his aunts considered just shy of sacrilege to the family recipe.

Miel felt the conversation evaporating, like water vapor boiling off the milk on the stove. She let it. If Sam didn't want to talk about this, she wouldn't force it. Maybe there was nothing else she could do for him right now, but she could do this, be there whether he wanted to stay quiet or wanted to speak.

He leaned over the counter, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, putting the weight of his shoulders behind his hands. The line of the muscle in his forearm stood out as he worked the rolling pin.

He caught her watching him. “You'll never look at me the same way after this,” he said.

“Are you kidding?” she asked. “There's nothing more alluring than a guy who knows how to work a rolling pin.”

He laughed without looking up.

Her own words, said without thinking, brushed over her, prickling her. Even with his laugh. Worse, because of his laugh. Was she flirting with him? She couldn't flirt with him. He was Sam. Even after they'd slept together, flirting felt distant, almost formal, the act of a boy and a girl who'd just met. He knew all the things about her that made flirting impossible. There was only so much she could flirt with someone who knew that eating casaba melon made a rash spread across her stomach.

A flash of color made her check her hands.

A sugared starflower petal had stuck to her palm.

The rough, shimmering surface, edges deep blue, made her wonder how much she could touch Sam without him flinching away.

There was no flirting. They were years past that.

She came close enough to make him look up.

He took a step back, startled by the small distance between them. But she set the starflower petal against his lips, touching only the sugared surface, not his mouth, until he took it onto his tongue.

He shut his eyes, letting the petal dissolve.

Miel pretended, for that one moment of him closing his eyes, that the petal had come from one of her roses, that he was taking onto his tongue a thing she had grown from her own body.

She turned back to the milk and sugar simmering on the stove. The thought of being in bed with him, how his mouth had felt when she brushed her thumb over his lower lip, made her feel like the powdered sugar in the air, floating and shimmering.

The wooden spoon slipped against the bottom of the pot, and a slick of hot dulce de leche sputtered onto the heel of her hand.

She pulled away from the stove, a gasp whistling across her throat. The coin of heat burned into her palm.

Sam grabbed her hand and set her palm against his lips. His tongue licked away the dulce de leche, already cooling enough for his mouth when a few seconds before it had scalded her hand.

In that second of his tongue on her palm, she felt the new rosebud pressing out of her wrist. Even with the pain cutting through her forearm, she thought of kissing him until it was a full rose, bursting open.

She thought she felt his lips pressed against her hand, the place where the sugar would have worsened the burn if he hadn't taken it into his mouth. But he did it so quickly. Before she could be sure, he set the cold rolling pin against her hand.

Her fingers trembled from the dulce de leche's heat and the sudden chill of the wood.

She would never be Aracely. Fearless charm would never flow from her body like yards of chiffon. But Sam looked at Miel as if all her sharp edges and cursed petals, everything she'd tried to keep in shadow, were the glinting facets of unpolished rose quartz.

What Sam had told her the time she first kissed him, about pollinating each pumpkin blossom by hand, she knew it was true. He hadn't made it up. But now it felt like something he'd invented, a fairy story about an enchanted paintbrush that shimmered with pollen like gold dust. It covered her in the feeling that his fingers were brushes, and under them she was growing into something alive.

She stayed still a few seconds too long. A stricken look crossed Sam's face.

“Sorry,” he said.

He looked down at his hands like he didn't recognize them, like they were not his to move.

“Tell me to let go,” he said, his hand still on the back of hers, still pressing her palm into the cold curve of the rolling pin. She could feel the ridges of the calluses on his fingers. “Tell me to, and I will.”