“Thought I might find you here,” Attie said.
Iris glanced over her shoulder to see her friend standing on the back terrace, shielding her eyes from the afternoon sunlight.
“Does Marisol need me?” Iris asked.
“No, actually.” Attie hesitated, kicking a pebble with the toe of her boot.
“What is it, Attie? You’re worrying me.”
“Roman just returned from the infirmary,” Attie said, clearing her throat. “He’s resting in his bedroom.”
“Oh.” Iris returned her attention to the soil, but her heart was suddenly pounding. It had been two days since she had gone to him, letters in hand. Two days since she had seen or spoken with him. Two days since they had kissed like they were each starving for the other. Two days that she had spent sorting through her feelings, trying to decide what to do. “That’s good to hear, I suppose.”
“I think you should go visit him, Iris.”
“Why?” She needed a distraction. There, a weed to pull. Iris made quick work of it, suddenly craving another task for her hands.
“I’m not sure what has come between the two of you, and I won’t ask,” Attie said. “All I know is that he doesn’t look well.”
The words chilled Iris to the bone.
“Doesn’t look well?”
“I mean … it looks like his spirit’s broken. And you know what they say about injured soldiers in low spirits.”
“Kitt’s a correspondent,” Iris argued, but there was a splinter in her voice. She couldn’t help but glance at Roman’s second-story window, remembering the day he had leaned on the sill, tossing a message to her.
His window was shut now, the curtains drawn over the glass panes.
Attie was silent. The lull eventually drew Iris’s gaze back to hers.
“Will you please visit him?” Attie asked. “I’ll take over the watering for you.”
Before Iris could scrounge up an excuse, Attie had scooped up the metal pail and was heading to the well.
Iris bit her lip but rose, knocking the dirt from her jumpsuit. She saw how filthy her hands were and stopped to scrub them in Marisol’s wash bin, only to give up with a sigh. Roman had already seen her at her dirtiest. Her messiest.
The house was full of quiet shadows as Iris ascended the stairs. Her heart quickened when she saw Roman’s bedroom door, closed to the world. She paused before the wood, listening to the ebb and flow of her breath, and then she scolded herself for being cowardly.
I won’t know what I want to do until I see him again.
She knocked, three times fast.
There was no answer. Frowning, she knocked again, harder and deliberate. But Roman was unresponsive.
“Kitt?” she called to him through the wood. “Kitt, will you please answer me?”
At last he replied in a flat voice, “What do you want, Winnow?”
“May I come in?”
Roman was silent for a beat, and then drawled, “Why not.”
Iris opened the door and stepped into his room. It was the first time she had been in his quarters, but her gaze went directly to him in the dusky light, where he was lying on his makeshift pallet on the floor. His eyes were closed, his fingers laced over his chest. He was dressed in a clean jumpsuit, his dark hair damp across his brow. She could smell the soap on his skin, which was uncommonly pallid. His face was shaved and his sharp cheekbones were sunken, as if he had become hollow.
And she was right; she knew exactly what she wanted to choose.
“What do you want?” he repeated, but his voice was a rasp.
“Good afternoon to you too,” Iris countered happily. “How are you feeling?”
“Peachy.”
A smile flirted with the corner of his lips, and the pit in her stomach began to ease. But his eyes remained shut. She suddenly longed for him to look at her.
“Ah, there’s the Second Alouette,” she said, her gaze fixing on his typewriter. Her heart warmed to see it. “Although it’s far too dim in here, Kitt! You should let the light in.”
“I don’t want the light,” he grumbled, but Iris had already parted the window curtains. He raised his hands to shield his face against the stream of sunshine. “Why have you come to torture me, Winnow?”
“If this is my torture, I would hate to see what my pleasure would be.”
Roman made no reply, his hands remaining splayed over his face. As if the last thing he wanted was to look at her.
She walked to the side of his pallet, her shadow spilling across his lean body. “Will you look at me, Kitt?”
He didn’t move. “You shouldn’t feel obligated to visit me. I know you hate me right now.”
“Obligated?”
“By Attie. I know she told you to come. It’s all right; you can return to whatever important task you were busy with.”
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to see you,” Iris said, and her chest tightened, as if a thread was wound about each of her ribs. “In fact, I came to ask you a question.”
He was quiet, but she could hear the curiosity in his voice as he said, “Go on, then.”
“Would you like to go on a walk with me?”
Roman’s hands slid away from his disbelieving face. “A walk?”
“Erm, maybe not a walk, exactly. If your leg … if you don’t feel like it. But we could go outside.”
“Where to?”
Now that his eyes had locked with hers, Iris felt seen, down to her bones. She could hardly breathe and she glanced at her dirty fingernails. “I was thinking we could go to our hill.”
“Our hill?”
“Or your hill,” she rushed to amend. “The hill that nearly bested me. Unless you think it’s destined to get the best of you now. If so, I think it can make the headlines by tomorrow.”
Roman was quiet, staring up at her. Iris couldn’t deny it a moment longer. She met his gaze and tentatively smiled, extending her hands to him.
“Come on, Kitt. Come outside with me. The sun and fresh air will do you good.”
Slowly, he lifted his fingers and wove them with hers—fingers that had typed letter after letter to her. And she raised him to his feet.
* * *
He was insistent on walking, and he used a crutch to avoid putting weight on his right leg. At first he moved with a strong rhythm, swinging himself forward. But then he began to tire, and their pace slowed. Fifteen minutes down the cobbled street, perspiration shone on Roman’s face from the heat and the effort. Iris instantly wished she had thought better of her offer.
“We don’t have to go all the way to the hill,” she said, glancing sidelong at him. “We can turn around halfway.”
He huffed a smile. “I’m not going to break, Winnow.”
“Yes, but your leg is still—”
“My leg is fine. I’d like to see the view again, anyways.”
She nodded but fiddled with the end of her braid, anxious about overworking him.
They turned onto the street that would gradually build to the crest. For the first time since she had met him, Iris didn’t know what to say. In the office at the Gazette, she always had a retort ready for him. Even when she was writing to him as Carver, the words had spilled out of her onto the page. But now she felt uncommonly shy, and the words were like honey on her tongue. She desperately wanted to say the right things to him.