Chapter 17: The Cost

"Do it," I said.

It did not take long.

He cut his own palm with a letter knife in the bedroom, and mine opened again under the bandage, and he laid the two cuts together.

"Close your eyes," he said.

I felt a pull behind my ribs.

Then something quiet went out of the room.

I had not known it was there until it was gone.

For three days there had been a faint extra weight in my head, a feeling of being listened to, and now there was only me.

I opened my eyes.

Edmund stood in front of me, pale and still, with a tiny line between his brows.

"Say something," I said. "Think it at me."

"I am," he said. "Nothing is arriving."

"Nothing is arriving here, either."

We looked at each other.

I had not known I would mind so much.

"It is only words," said Edmund.

"It was you."

"It was a crack in a wall." His voice was rough. "I would rather have the door."

He put his hand on my face, and I leaned into it.

"Come here," I said, and my voice shook. "Come here and say it with your mouth."

He kissed me slowly.

It was not like the night before, when we had been two angry people trying to eat each other alive.

He kissed me as if he had all night, and all the nights after that.

His thumb stroked my cheekbone, and then my lower lip, and then his mouth followed it.

"I have been thinking about your hands," I said against him.

"Oh?"

"All six months. How they'd feel. And then you were awake and I had no idea what to do with them."

"You could put them on me."

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