Status Updates From Your Blood, My Bones

In the rearview mirror, a last line of smoke rose into the sky. Wyatt said a silent goodbye to the boy who’d lived there. To the girl who’d dreamed there. To her heart, left in the garden to grow into something new. And then she went home.

She thought of him out in the henyard, naming all the chickens. The way the goat followed him from room to room, chewing at his sleeves. The way he’d sharpened himself into something cruel, to hide the fact that all he wanted was someplace soft to land. He’d never wanted this for himself—to be a killer. He hadn’t wanted it, and yet she’d made him into one anyway.

Peter was suddenly shrouded in light, looking every bit the exalted saint they’d imagined him to be. All that was left of him now was a body, filled to the brim with the rage of the girl who’d loved him.

He fell asleep curled beneath Wyatt’s canopy and didn’t tell a soul that Peter had been there, too, his arm curved around her in the dark. He stood guard at the barn’s crumbling loft while Peter tore the blue button eye off of Wyatt’s favorite bear, and felt a little zing of rapture in his belly.

“One arm lay outstretched, his fingers furled as though he’d been reaching for her.

He could only remember this lifetime. This maddeningly slow grind of the earth on its axis. He could only remember James. The way he laughed, lit from beneath by a winking firefly glow. He could only remember Wyatt, and the way the skies thundered when he’d kissed her that first impossible time.

Wyatt hovered nearby, caught by the quiet sight of them together—a boy pieced together with salvaged parts, and a boy who’d become equals with death. And then there was Wyatt, packed to the teeth with something she didn’t entirely understand. Something that popped out of her in sparks and in shimmers. In fragrant blossoms and in mildewed sprawls.

Loving Peter had always felt a little bit like poking at a bruise. Impossible to stop, even when it hurt. But nothing had ever hurt quite as badly as this—kissing him at the world’s end, surrounded by a living monument to all their wasted time. It felt like a goodbye, and that, more than anything else, set her entirely off-center.

“You think just because I wasn’t warm to you, that I didn’t see you. But I did. I saw everything. The way you followed her. The way you watched her. You saw in her the same things I saw. You know, too, that without a keeper, the dark of the forest will bleed and bleed. Eventually, the guild will come looking for someone to stanch it.”

Sprawled across the cushions was Peter, fast asleep on his stomach, his right arm crooked under his cheek. Something unidentifiable swam through her at the sight of him. He’d come after her. He’d followed her. She’d left him to rot, and here he was.

One of her fingers had begun to bleed. She kept picking at it, oblivious to the beads of crimson that dripped into her lap. Reaching for her, he folded her fingers in his. She tensed up immediately, stiffening like a hare. She didn’t pull away.

Between them, Peter had gone as still as stone. A marble boy, mired in his own personal mausoleum. Her starved god. Her secret saint. Her killer. His hands were balled in trembling fists. A single tear tracked down the side of his face. He let it fall.