The Children(81)

Her brain was racing with words. They’d broken the skin of her sleep. Guin tensed in the familiar pressure and despaired. She wouldn’t sleep again until she wrote.

Writing had been a joy once. When she was a child. A phrase that referred, of course, to the first eleven years of her life. After the fire, her childhood was through.

It had been a long time since writing brought her joy. But sometimes the urge to put words on paper felt physical. It held sleep and thought hostage until she gave in. And everyone had their compulsions, right? To eat, talk, run, drive for miles. To type and type and burn the pages. Just in case they were—just in case.

Rising on an elbow, she traced Hank’s sleeping face. The powdery fans of his lashes, the places—divot above the mouth, dip at the outer corners of his eyes—where he was cut so finely his beauty was hard to bear. Then she slipped softly from the room.

Guin tried to type quietly, but caution slipped as time lost its shape. She wrote, and her bare feet chilled on the floor. Her neck craned, her wrists ached. She noticed none of it until she was through.

She rolled her wrists, blinking dry eyes. The pages swarmed with cramped words she wouldn’t read. Tilting her head way back, she caught the black blot of an insect crawling over the crown molding. Its shape clarified as she stared: a bee. The blot halved itself. Two bees.

Guin watched their progress for a moment. Then she folded over the typewriter, stifling a little cry of fatigue and unhappiness as she turned her neck to crack it.

Hank stood in the doorway.

She sat up fast, one hand going out to cover her pages.

He was sleep-tousled, wide-eyed. He looked like a little boy. One who snuck down to spy on Santa Claus and found his parents instead, bickering as they stuffed the stockings.

“I called your name,” he said. “Three, four times. You didn’t hear me.”

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

“What is that? What are you writing?”

“Nothing.” Beneath her hand the paper felt satiny, warm as skin. “A story.”

They stared at each other, trapped in the absurdity of the moment. She was writing a story. There was no lie here, no straightforward betrayal. She watched him struggle to figure out what to ask her.

“What’s it about?” he said helplessly, at last. It halfway broke her heart.

“Nothing. Really, love, it’s nothing.”

“Can I read it?”

“No.” The response was too hard, too swift.

He responded with equal hardness, revealing a suspicion that must have been there for a while. “Are you writing the last Ninth City book?”

“The sixth book?” She spoke with genuine surprise. “Why would you think that?”

“Why wouldn’t I? What do I know about what you do?”

“Baby,” she said. “Go to bed. I’ll be there in two minutes.”

Hank shifted on bare feet. “What are you gonna do with those?”

She glanced at the pages. “Nothing. I don’t know.”

He breathed in sharply. Almost to himself, he said, “That’s what you burn. You come in here and you type like you’re possessed and then you burn it. And you say nothing, like I’m not right down the hall. Like I won’t smell the ashes.”

Anger hit her in a rush of pure oxygen. “It’s my apartment. My words. My ashes!”

Hank smiled. A small, unhappy gotcha smile she’d never seen on his face. “I have a question for you.” His tone was conversational. “How well do I know you, would you say?”

This was her cue to comfort him, appease him. Guin knew that, but she wanted to give him something honest, too. And—if she was really being honest—something a little bit cruel.

“Of course you know me,” she said. Then added, “To a point.”

By the flash in his eyes she knew she’d miscalibrated. It was more than a little bit cruel.

“To a point.” His voice dead, flat, the circle of sea around a flagging ship. “To a . . . Jesus Christ, Guinevere, you’re wearing my ring!”

His voice went up as he spoke, unhinging itself.

And she liked it. She liked the raw red fury that gleamed from his center. What if there was a secret ugliness in him, too? One that could rise to meet her own?

Though desperate and unlikely, the notion propelled her across the room. She dropped the pages and let them lie messy as she reached for him, ran her hands over his stomach and up. She was terrified he’d push her away again, yell at her, leave. He only watched her, raising his arms so she could pull off his shirt.

His eyes were dark, hungry, and with a click of sorrow Guin saw she’d never really hidden her fucked-upness from him. He didn’t like and love her in spite of it, but in part because of it. She’d always known he was the white knight kind. Maybe her damage had become a grail for him. Maybe some essential thing between them would be lost if he ever managed to discover and dispel it.

Her shirt was off, engagement ring glinting between her breasts. Hank took it in his fist and broke the chain in one hard jerk.

“I want this back on your finger.”

The swelling on her hand was down, the ring slid home without resistance. She let him press her to the floor.

There was something new between them, toothed and dangerous. She sensed he wanted her passive and refused it, meeting him with ferocity. The pages crushed beneath them and inked their dampening skin. At the end he made a sound in her ear she would return to many times, a far-gone cry that made her whole skin go electric before she followed him.