by V. K. Ludwig
“Wow.” River folded his hands behind his neck and sunk deeper into his chair. “Talk about someone being in a bad mood. You’re not telling me the execution put a twist in your guts, are you?”
“No, I’m telling you to shut your mouth. I thought I made that one clear.”
He pouted his lips, and a slight shake wobbled about his head. Then he looked over at Rowan. “We can start now.”
Our chieftain sat with his elbows dug into his thighs, a constant jitter bouncing from one foot and his hands rubbing against each other.
“Rowan?” I asked.
“What?” He gazed up at me like startled prey. “Oh, yeah… right. Um… let’s talk about driving down to the burn pit and retrieving those bones. I wanna get that done asap, so we can give them a proper burial. Max will take care of the preparations by the church.”
“How many men will that take?” Oriel asked.
Everyone stared at me, and for a moment, I feared they could see right through me. Track down that failure I was with their over-observing pupils.
“For an area of that size?” I gazed at the ground for a moment, the smell of caked ash pushing back into my nostrils. “Two days. Two trucks. Ten men. We’ll have to dig carefully around skulls which will slow us down significantly.”
Max lifted his arm and pointed at himself. “Want me to come, too?”
“Nah.” Rowan leaned back and crossed his feet in front of him, his eyes red-rimmed and his lids dragging. “Prepare everything for the burial. The ground is frozen, so you’ll have to make a fire to thaw the soil where you need the guys to excavate. I’m not in the mood to leave bones lying around on flatbeds for too long.”
“When?” River asked, sending everyone into a communal state of pouting lips and squinted eyes.
“Why not now?” it blurted out of me, pushed over the edge by shame and a paralyzing impatience to escape from it. “Oriel can get the trucks ready and load what we need for the camp. We could be on our way in less than an hour.”
“I don’t mind leading it,” River said. “But I doubt one hour is enough to find nine volunteers.”
I tapped my knee. “Eight.”
River’s eye twitched. “Eight?”
“I’m coming, which means you only need to find eight more men. It’s only two days after all, and Ayana could come and stay at my place together with Ruth while we’re gone.”
“Ayanna loves sleepovers and shit like that.”
“Seven men,” Rowan barked, his gaze barely lifting from his toes. “I gotta get out of this place for a while. And digging up bones sounds like just the thing one does on a vacation trip.”
“It’s only six with me,” Oriel chimed in.
“Well, not really.” River said. “You’ll drive the truck down and then back once we loaded it up. Then come with the other one. Doubt you’ll spend a lot of time digging. But I can find six men in an hour, because I’m sure my uncle will volunteer, anyway.”
Rowan clapped his hands and jumped up. “Alright, let’s do this. Oriel gets the trucks ready, and Adair can get the gear from the warehouse. I’ll go and let Darya know to organize that sleepover thing.”
Everyone scrambled in different directions while I dragged my sorry-ass over to the warehouse. Nothing about the crooked red barn with tall double doors would have hinted at the treasures inside, which was just the way we wanted it.
Inside, camping gear slept on wooden shelves or hung from rusty nails. Everything was old as fuck, yet had been the crème de la crème at some point in history, back when people had money to spend on that crap.
Black tough-boxes stood stacked man-high and labeled in white, spelling nuts and bolts and fuel lines and spark plugs. A few engines rested on workbenches, disassembled down to the tiniest screw, some of their parts taking a dip in a lime solution.
I had hated this place ever since I was a kid. From the cobwebs on the rusty bed frames to the moldering and moth-eaten fabrics, it resembled nothing but a graveyard of humanity to me. But that day, I felt like I belonged.
“They told me you were in here.”
I didn’t look up when Ruth’s voice came from the gap in the doors, overpowered by the roar of the truck Oriel backed up against the barn.
“I asked you to stay at home,” I said.
Her footsteps were silent, yet I noticed each one of them as they warmed the air around me. She stopped less than three feet away from me, fingers fidgeting each other in front of her chest, and her gaze adrift on the dirt floor. “You’re leaving?”
“Why?” I grabbed a dark green duffel bag and dropped it by the truck. “What’s it to you?”
Chapter 15
Ruth
I walked up to Adair, my heartbeat such an uncontrollable mess, it showed in the way I couldn’t stop fumbling with my fingers. At the very last step, my chest constricted, the guilt inside me seeping from the gaps between my ribs. “You’re leaving?”
“Why?” he asked and grabbed a green bag, making me wonder how much of the strain in his arms came from its weight, and how much from my presence. “What’s it to you?”
His eyes caught mine, sending a rush of emotions into my limbs, which spiraled into my stomach and turned me dizzy. At that moment, I wanted to drop to my knees and beg him not to leave.
The moment I opened my mouth, something entirely different came out. “Who’s gonna protect me?”
“It’s only for two days.”
I shifted about the dirt floor underneath my soles, watching how he flung equipment onto the flatbed, the clinking of metal soon turning into something ear-shattering. His eyes trailed from gear to handle to truck, avoiding me like the sun because we both knew it might burn.
He gave a knock against one of the grimy wood stakes which lined the sides of the flatbed, yelling, “Full!”
Oriel’s head poked out of the driver’s window and gave a nod, then he set the truck back into a rumble and slowly drove off.
“Why did you come here?” Adair suddenly asked, his voice so rough it all but chaffed my ears. “Is there anything you want to say before I leave?”
Don’t leave. I had it on the tip of my tongue, waiting to be confessed. But he would ask me why, and the answer to that scared me to the marrow of my spine.
“I just…” I glanced over my shoulder to make sure Oriel had left, stepped up, and took Adair’s callused hands into mine. “I want you to be careful.”
“Why?”
His blue eyes locked with mine, a bit squinted but still unable to hide all the hope behind them. They carried a request, asking me once more to become something I never learned how to be.
“Because you’re my friend,” I said, forcing my voice into a cheerful tone.
“Friend…”
The way he had repeated the word had disappointment dripping from it, making the guilt inside me swell against my slowing heart.
Adair had been the wrong choice of a clansman to satisfy my foolish curiosity. For his own good, and for my sanity, because this man made me feel so many things I could barely confess to myself — left alone to him.
He dropped my hand, raked his fingers through his hair and grabbed it by the fistful, a desperate energy escaping him in a constant bounce of his heels.
“You know,” he said with a tear-choked voice, then let go of his hair and stabbed the air around my chest with his rigid hands. “You made me believe, for a moment, that I was finally good enough for something. Someone.”
“But you are good enough!” I blurted and let my hands dart for his once more.
“Why won’t you marry me then?” He shrank back and pulled his hands away from my reach, holding them palms up next to his head as if I was a weapon he needed a shield against. “And why can’t you love me back?”
But I do love you! My mind screamed what my mouth refused to confide because what else would it do but stoke his hopes?
No, a confession would turn things from bad to worse. I couldn’t be a wife. Didn’t know
how. Didn’t see why. But most of all, I didn’t know how much love was needed to commit myself to marriage.
“Hey,” River shouted from afar, his body creating a blinding outline against the sun. “We’re only waiting for you, brother.”
“Is there anything else you have to say to me?” Adair asked, his body stiff and his gaze not daring to come near me.
My body turned rigid, making the way blood pumped through my veins all the more noticeable. The silence between us turned more and more unbearable at each stroke of a breath. Me, trying to confess. Him, hoping to hear it.
Stay with me. It was right there.
Locked behind tightly sealed lips.
Guarded by a paralyzing fear of not being good enough myself.
He shook his head and sniffed sharply. “Guess my dad was right after all.” Then he gave a scoff. “Anyway. Thank’s for the fuck.”
At that, he turned around and caught up with River.
I hurried behind them both, only to watch Adair disappear into one of the truck cabins. The two vehicles drove off, their tires spinning before they rocked into motion, leaving traces of burnt diesel in the air and a knot in my throat too big to swallow.
With each gearshift of the engine that brought more distance between us, the roar of my heart thumped louder and louder in my ear, until my very thoughts turned into a static kind of white noise.
“… … exciting!” Ayanna’s arm landed on my shoulder, the wide grin on her face offering a stark contrast to the sensation of loss spreading through my core. She kept on blurting, her lips spilling over with a passion. “Chick flicks, marshmallows, camping in the living room… this is going to be so much fun. I don’t think the women here understand what sleepovers are. Maybe we can play truth or dare like we all do back home.”
A final puff of depleted fuel rose from behind the junipers. Adair was gone. And with him whatever he had given me to fill the void I had called curiosity.
Two hours later, music blared from the old stereo on the living room shelf while Ayanna and Hazel pushed one of the couches toward the front door.
“How many?” Darya asked from the kitchen, a steaming cast iron in one hand, and a clear bottle in the other.
“Let’s see…” Hazel gestured to the coffee table, which she quickly carried into the hallway together with Ayanna. “She and Autumn can’t drink. Ruth isn’t used to it. I’d say make eighteen or twenty.”
Darya gave a nod and placed the cast iron onto the counter, leaned over it and drizzled the clear liquid into the red goo. Then she grabbed the whisk from beside the stove and began stirring, filling the air with traces of alcohol and something tart.
I retrieved twenty tiny glasses, some with chipped rims and some with hairline cracks, and placed them in neat rows on the counter. “You don’t expect me to drink this, do you?”
Darya leaned over the glasses and lowered her eyes down to near-rim level, pouring the red stuff carefully into them. “Oh, you’ll love it soon enough, honey. Just don’t ask how I made the gelatin.”
“You didn’t use lingonberry juice, did you?” Autumn asked, standing by the shelf, the tips of her fingers gliding over the edges of knick-knacks and picture frames.
“Chokecherries, though I wouldn’t understand why you’d care,” Darya said and filled the last glass. “Voila! Jell-O shots apocalypse-style.”
“Sucks that we didn’t have this sleepover idea when I was a kid,” Autumn said. “Or when I wasn’t pregnant yet…”
“My dad would never have allowed it,” Hazel said, strolled over and gave me an intrusive stare. “Help me get Adair’s mattress, would you?” At that, she walked off, the certainty in her steps, leaving no doubt she expected me to follow behind.
Walking into Adair’s room was like swimming against the current, tiring my bones the moment I took in the fading scent of beard wax and fresh linens. Although I knew he would only be gone for two days, a feeling of foreboding made me flare my nostrils and take in what was left of him.
“Why so shy?” Hazel asked, grabbed the edge off the mattress, and pushed it off the frame. “I didn’t expect you having troubles touching his mattress, considering you spent all morning in it.”
My heart cracked against my ribs. “How did you find out?”
“He didn’t tell you? I walked in on you guys today in the morning after I got back from the execution. Not that it was necessary… I kinda had the idea that something was going on between you two for a few days now.”
I grabbed the other side of the mattress, and together we stood it up sideways. “And you disapprove?”
“Of you two being together in general? No.” She gave a tug on the mattress. “Of you turning his proposal down? Yeah, I absolutely disapprove of that.”
Uncomfortable heat swept across my cheeks, fueled by guilt and shame of being found out. Somehow, Hazel knowing what had happened made everything more real, bringing me face to face with what I had done.
I gave a push against the mattress, and together we inched it toward the door. “He told you then…”
“No, but it wasn’t hard to guess considering the way he packed his shit and left today. I know my brother, and he probably wouldn’t leave you alone for a second again if you had agreed.”
Her words dumped a load of extra weight onto my shoulders, making the mattress drag like a block of concrete as we worked it around the corner and into the living room. Together, we lined it up with the other three mattresses, while Ayanna tossed blankets and an array of colorful pillows onto the large, springy camp in the center of the room.
The moment Darya carried over the tray with soldiered-up shots, Autumn let out a squeak, her hands fumbling something small underneath a beaming face.
“I can’t believe he still has it,” she said, the excitement in her voice both lifting the mood in the room and, for some reason, turning mine gloomy at the same time.
We all shuffled over to the shelf, forming a half-circle around Autumn and her find: a cream-colored ring with a darker edge, resting inside a little black box.
“Huh,” Hazel took it out and turned it in her fingers, trailing the edge and the smooth-looking inside. “I saw how he made it, but I never got what it was for.”
“Adair once proposed to me with this thing,” Autumn said, sending my stomach into a spiral which didn’t stop until it hit the unforgiving tile floor underneath my feet. From there it boiled back up, bubbling and roaring and seeping into my chest like something septic.
The idea of Adair proposing to another woman made my innards convulse, confronting me with a thought I never had before. What if someone would gladly accept what I refused?
“That explains it,” Hazel said with a frown lining her forehead, a dart of her eyes brushing my shoulder.
“Explains what?” Autumn asked.
Hazel placed the ring back into the box and onto the shelf. “Half a year ago he flung it in there, shouting he won’t ever offer it again to someone who isn’t worthy of it.”
“He said that?” Autumn asked.
“Uh-huh…”
Autumn eyed the shots on the tray for a moment, then shook her head and sat down on a mattress. “Charming…”
“It’s too bad you don’t like him,” Ayanna mumbled and put a hand onto my shoulder, making me awfully aware of how wrong she was. As the jealousy ebbed away in my guts, it made room for a truth I was no longer afraid to keep suppressed: I loved him.
“Alright enough of this,” Darya said and placed the tray in the center of our mattress fort. “Rowan wants me back before eleven, so we better get started on these now.”
“It’s too bad Peggy didn’t want to come,” Ayanna said.
Autumn grabbed a pillow and shoved it underneath her butt. “She wanted to come, but Max mentioned Uncle Peter would hang out at our place while I’m gone, and she insisted on staying.”
“So…” Darya sat cross-legged in front of the tray and rubbed her hands. “How does this game work?”
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br /> Ayanna gave me a quick nod, and I started to explain, “We figured it would be more fun if Autumn and Ayanna get to ask the questions since they can’t drink. They ask us a personal question, and we can either answer truthfully, or we have to drink.”
“I’ll start!” Ayanna blurted and turned toward Darya. “What was the biggest lie you told your parents as a kid?”
“What?” Autumn scrunched up her face. “This question is so lame, I think you’ve been playing this game wrong all your life. Let’s spice this up a little, shall we?” She tapped her index finger against her lips, which made a smirk spread across her mouth. Then she leaned over and stared Darya dead in the eyes. “How loose are you down there, now that you had a baby?”
Darya arched a brow. “Huh?”
“Oh come on, you get what I mean. I’m about to have twins, and I’m starting to freak out a little.”
Darya’s hand wandered to the tray. She picked up a shot, poured it down her throat, and placed the glass upside down on the tray with a smile on her face. “Rowan never complained.”
“Hey, that’s not how this game works,” I said.
Darya shrugged, licking her lips and finishing it off with a giggle.
“Okay, but now it’s my turn!” Ayanna shouted, clapping her hands with excitement. “Hazel, did you ever catch your brother masturbate?”
Hazel’s fingers darted straight for the red shot.
“That’s definitely a yes,” Autumn said with a grin. “Sometimes, I feel sad for our single men.”
“What about us women?” Hazel asked, grabbed a shot, leaned her head back, and let the goo plop into her mouth. “I can’t wait to get married so I can finally experience sex. It’s not like our men are the only ones longing for it.”
“But they might be the ones who will never achieve being with a woman,” I said, my mind drifting off to how Adair wouldn’t be one of them.
“This game is getting depressing,” Autumn snarled and pointed at me. “Ruth, how long did it take for Adair to hit on you when Rowan made him your guard?”