But I can’t undo it. And I don’t lean forward and kiss him under the weight of the sallow moon. I stare at him and wait for him to speak. And when he does, it’s like vinegar and salt, a wound that will never heal. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he says, his eyes sloped down at the edges.
“You won’t,” I say. As if I can be sure.
He looks back into the trees, and dread burrows into the marrow of my bones, writhing inside me like shipworms making tunnels in my flesh.
He shakes his head—he doesn’t believe me. “I don’t want you to be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid,” I tell him. But I know that I am, a wretched knot of fear growing in my gut. I’m scared to trust him, to let this flutter inside my chest become a hammer that will smash me apart. We love painfully, Mom always says. With our whole hearts. But we bruise easily too. She has always been afraid of her own careless heart, of past mistakes, of what she really is. And I don’t want to be like her: cynical and fearful and full of more doubt than anything else.
Oliver steps closer to me, and I think he’s going to kiss me, but his hand touches mine instead. “You’re shaking,” he says.
My body trembles, the cold sapping what little warmth is left inside me. But I say, “I’m fine.”
He squeezes my hand and pulls me to him, my head against his chest, his breath in my hair. He holds me to him and I want to cry—as if this will be the last time. “We need to get you inside,” he says. But I don’t want to, I want to stay out here with him and let the cold turn me to stone.
Still he pulls me back to the window, my muscles too weak to resist, and he lifts me up, placing me back through the open window into the loft.
My legs shake, and I crawl into bed, pulling the blankets up to my chin, while he shuts the window with a thud and locks it in place. As if to keep out the things we fear the most.
“Will you stay here with me?” I ask when he starts to move toward the stairs—my voice shaking. “Please.”
I don’t want to be alone, in this awful dark. With my skin like ice. I touch the place on my finger where my grandmother’s ring used to sit, feeling stripped bare without it. My accidental offering to the lake—just like the miners who used to drop things into the water to calm the trees.
Oliver looks back, his eyes coursing with something I don’t understand. A battle inside him. He wants to stay here with me, but he’s also afraid of what he might do. Or what he might say. He’s constructed an armor around himself, stone and metal and painful memories. Before, there was only confusion in his eyes—the void of what he had forgotten. Now, there is a wall of shadows. Tall and wide.
Still, he nods and crosses the room to lie beside me.
Maybe he doesn’t want to be alone either.
He smells like snow, and I fold myself into him—tiny like a shell. His arm drapes over my ribs, and his breath is at my neck. He could place his lips at the soft place behind my ear, he could run his fingers through my hair, but instead he only lies still. Warming my skin with his. Please, I want to say. Tell me what you did that night. Tell me what you saw out on that ice; tell me what you regret.
Tell me so I can build my own armor. A fortress in this tiny loft, a battlefield you cannot cross.
But I also know it’s too late for that now.
I turn, coiled in his arms, to face him. I take his hand and place it against my chest, over my heart. “I don’t know if I can trust this,” I say, I confess. “This thing inside my own heart.” I let myself bleed for him to see.
His mouth softens but he doesn’t speak, his eyes shivering.
“The women in my family always fall in love then find a way to ruin it.” I smirk, lips drawn up to one side. “I know you think I should be afraid of you. But you should be afraid of me.”
“Why?” he asks softly, carefully.
“Because I will end up hurting you.”
A smile forms in his eyes, and the space between us feels impossibly small. Only an exhale separating us. I don’t wait for him to speak—I don’t want to hear any more words—I cross the fathom between us and I lay my lips on his. And it’s not like before, not like when we kissed in my room to be certain we were both real. Now it’s a kiss to prove that we’re not. A certainty that this won’t last. That perhaps all we have left is here in this bed, lavender pollen against the pillows, air spilling from his lungs into mine. All we have left is this one, singular, fragile night. Snow on the roof and snow in our hearts and snow to bury us alive.
I kiss him and he kisses me back. And all at once, there is heat inside my veins, heat in the palm of his hand as he slides his fingers up inside my sweater, up along my spine. He wipes away the cold. And I feel my body shudder, pressing myself closer to him, touching his neck, his throat, his shoulders where they brace around me, drawing me to him. I exhale and kiss him harder. There is nothing but his hands on my bare skin. The weight of his kiss, of his chest breathing so deeply I can almost hear his lungs aching against his ribs.
Nothing but these slow seconds of time. Nothing but fingertips and swollen lips and hearts that will surely break when morning comes.
His kiss against my ribs, my fingers in his hair.
I close my eyes and pretend Oliver is just a boy from camp who never went missing. A boy I met on the shore of the lake. A boy with clear green eyes and no lost memories.
I pretend I never saw a bone moth in the trees the day I found him.
I pretend this room, with mountain moss and bleeding-heart acorns hung by string above my bed, is the only place there will ever be.
I pretend Oliver and I are in love. I pretend he will never leave—I pretend to make it true.
Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine
RUTH WALKER was born in late July of 1922 under a white deer moon. Her lips were the color of snow with eyes as green as the river in spring. But Ruth Walker never spoke.
Not once in her whole life.
Her mother, Vena, swore she heard Ruth whispering to the mice that lived in the attic and humming lullabies to the bees outside her window. But no one else ever heard such mutterings.
Ruth was short and beautiful with wavy crimson hair that never grew past her shoulders, and she clucked her tongue when she walked through the woods. When she was twelve, she began deciphering messages in the webs made by the peppercorn spiders.
The webs foretold the following year’s weather, and Ruth knew the dates of rainstorms and dry summer weeks and when the winds would blow away the laundry hanging on the line.
In return, Ruth fed the spiders bits of maidenhair mushrooms that she grew in a clay pot in the back of the loft closet. Much to her mother’s displeasure.
When Ruth was ninety-nine, she became tangled in a web while walking through the Wicker Woods. She died under the stars, as silent as the day she was born.
How to Read Peppercorn Spiderwebs:
Harvest maidenhair mushrooms (grown for nine months before picking).
Offer less than an ounce, more than a teaspoon, to peppercorn spider.
Sleep in soil beneath web for one night. Wait for dew to settle on silk strands.