The Calyx Charm

by May Peterson

  “Father raped me.”

  Each word rolled up mass like a snowball, cracking the floors and walls with their sudden velocity. I felt nothing but certainty in those words as they flew. Yes. He raped me. It wasn’t I was raped, like being caught in a rockslide, only tangentially connected back to him. It was something he’d done to me.

  Tibario’s absolute silence was terrible and gentle and hilarious, as if I might have gotten the words wrong after all and he was confused. So I went on, rolling pebbles into boulders. “It was a little while after I went back to school, when the war was done. It was shortly after the calyx charm left me. I think...” My sense of time abruptly blurred, and I shook the present back into view with a shrug. “That confirmed for me that my power was gone.”

  Maybe I should have waited. Maybe ask Tibario to hold me again and let me cry one more time. I had so many tears waiting to be cried, in the rivers of my body, soaking me to the core.

  Then, he did something so strange it forced me to look up. He asked, soft as a breeze changing, “What response from me would help you the most right now?”

  I gaped. That knifing sympathy was still there, but he wasn’t forcing it on me. I took a few breaths. “I‒I don’t know.”

  “That’s all right.” The faintest spark of a smile. “That’s a perfectly fine answer. You don’t know—not a problem. Do you want to say anything more for now? I’ll listen to all of it.”

  I laughed. Actually laughed, shaking, letting my muscles relax as I drank in his attention. “Maybe. I want...to rage. But I’ve spent so long raging, in my head. I’m afraid of how it sounds, when I let it out. Rosalina doesn’t seem to think poorly of it, but she’s seen an awful lot.”

  Tibario chuckled as if matching me. “I’m glad Rosalina is your friend. I’m glad you’ve had her.”

  I nodded, sniffed, aware of tears coming up again. Not yet. I held myself, breathed. “I wish I’d had you like I have her.”

  I thought better of it the moment I said it. That had to hurt. But he only said, “I wish for that too. I wish that every day. I think of all the years we could have had together, if I’d been brave enough to be honest with myself about what I wanted. Maybe it wouldn’t have all worked out, but I shouldn’t have kept distant from you.”

  For the moment, that seemed to be all there was to say. The four walls of my emotion—gratitude, anger, sorrow, joy—closed around me protectively, and inside them I was absurdly empty. Tibario sat there and was empty with me. Now he knew.

  I was glad I’d told him. There was a sudden outrageous tragedy to the counting down of the days, to all the scars I was still hiding that would go unseen when the last day fell. I wanted him to know this one, for it to be charted between us, so he would remember the geography of me. So my dear friend of long ago would not die without having seen what I really looked like.

  I was glad he knew my real name.

  “I’m sorry he did that to you. You did not deserve it.” He wasn’t quite looking at me, maybe aware of how sharp his kindness was to me. “And I’m sorry for suggesting you were protecting. It was ridiculous.”

  “No, it wasn’t. Magic is a strange, wild thing. It does things without explaining why. But it doesn’t let us cheat who we are.”

  “The noble spirits seem to be the same way.” Tibario’s grin in profile was appropriately catlike. A tiny fang peeked out adorably. “I could walk through literal fire now if I wanted; I’ve survived more than I thought any one human body ever could. But my family is torn apart, my city is starving from greed, and there’s fuck all I seem to be able to do for them. For them, or the girl I love most in the world.”

  If I’d had any response to that, his affection would have knocked it from me. I’d dreamed of him talking like that about me.

  I didn’t know how to have this conversation, to face the truth that had lain between us for years. He was rueful about not trying to bring us closer together, but hadn’t I wanted him to stay away? I had told him I wanted a dream over him. Wasn’t this just another way for me to avoid my own life? Maybe it was my roundabout version of the suicide I’d spent years resisting. So that no one could blame me for dying.

  Tibario stood and, amusingly, dusted his trousers off with his tail. “I should let you have some time alone, if you like. Do you want me to bring you anything?”

  I breathed for a moment. “Tibario. I think I know what reaction would help me the most after all.”

  “Oh?”

  We had no time. No more lying to myself. “Will you hold me?”

  His eyes searched mine for a string of seconds, perhaps plumbing for signs that I meant it. Then, like a shadow becoming velvet all around me, he was at my side, exuding tension and warmth and the scent of newly born things. So slowly it may have been the motion of a dream, he brushed the hair from the corner of my face. Then rested an arm around my shoulders. As gentle as the first touch of sleep, he pulled me against him, and nestled our faces together.

  My breath had the fervor of an escape. But I wasn’t running. This was more intimate than our hug at my door, but he didn’t push. He did exactly what I asked: held me, held me like this was the end. Like this was the last chance he’d ever get.

  I let him be my shield. Faint tufts of hair tickled my ear, and all I had to do was be still. There was something marvelous and clean about that, the sense that for once I could do nothing wrong. His breaths shook as mine did, both of us enclosed in a moment without time.

  I let my tears fall free. He caught every one, and never said a word.

  * * *

  An hour or an infinity later, we had melted into the sofa, curled into each other. My head rested on his shoulder, his arm supported me, our breathing synchronized. The skin above his half-unbuttoned shirt smelled good, and my hair pooled over us like a spell.

  If only for now, I didn’t have to hold time together.

  He kissed the top of my head. The purr of his chest was soft against me, and I drifted through hazy patches of sleep. When I opened my eyes, the room was mostly dark, only a lamp brooding quietly in the corner. Tibario encircled me.

  He may have sensed me waking back up, because he breathed into the shadows, “I wanted to offer. A hug, an arm, something. I didn’t know if touch was something you’d want, or if it would be a burden to have it offered.”

  There seemed no pressure to answer, as if we were trading thoughts with the night air. “It changes. For a while I couldn’t be touched at all without fear. Without becoming numb. It took time for friendly touch to feel safe again. Now...friendly touch is all I want. My skin is so empty, all the time. I want so much no one could ever give me enough. I know I tire people out.”

  He hummed, stroking his hand up and down my arm. “Has anyone said that to you? Has Rosalina?”

  “No.” I frowned. “Maybe I shouldn’t say I know that. That sounds like an accusation. I fear that I tire people out. All I seem to want to do is cry, and be held, and there aren’t enough shoulders and arms in all the world to make it right.”

  “Maybe friends will sometimes be tired of being there. But we get our strength back. And you’re tired too. Isn’t that why you need it?” The way he said this changed the problem into something incidental, natural, like waiting for flowers to regrow.

  “I depend on others too much.”

  Now his hum had the tune of a question. “Really? You seem to less than I do. Once you sat at the top of the city and shielded it all from destruction. Seems we all depended on you for everything then, and you were only eleven.”

  Hm. “That was a lifetime ago.”

  “A lifetime is bound to make you tired.”

  With nothing to say to that, I waited until another thought bubbled up. “There were others. Lovers.”

  Tibario chuckled low in his throat. “Violetta. I pined after you for years, but I never had any feverish hopes that you
were saving yourself for me like some prize.”

  I smiled into the cover of his body, into the complicated territory between us. It was so sweet to hear Tibario say he’d pined for me. And that desire hadn’t changed, now that he’d seen the real me.

  “I was also afraid I could never be touched again, that it would always...remind me. I was afraid Father had poisoned me forever, and that nothing would ever feel right again.” My skin had seemed—still sometimes seemed—like wasteland. “I wanted my body back. I tried to let people in. Men who saw me as a conquest, a fantasy they only had to live once. Women I might once have met at a society party. Some of them seemed very enamored of the idea of the Honored Child being a lowly mollyqueen. They weren’t all bad, but kind or cruel, their touch had the same effect. I’d freeze. It was like I couldn’t relax, couldn’t respond.”

  Tibario’s quiet thickened, became careful. “Will you say if you feel like that now?”

  “Yes.” That might have been a lie. I hadn’t proven able to explain my reaction to my various conquerors and suitors, some of whom were very patient, others punitive. “This all taught me something: I didn’t have to accept someone’s mistreatment. I didn’t have to be touched because they wanted it. The first other mollygirl I had feelings for...she was different. She understood. When I turned to stone, she recognized it for what it was. I didn’t ask her how she knew. But she held me and said it was all right. Like you are now.”

  Each admission brought the feeling of a sleeping region within me waking up. It felt heavy, mystical. But Tibario seemed prepared for it, blessed with the intent born of our long years of alienation.

  Maybe there was a dream that was safe to dream with him. Maybe a life could exist with us, in the sliver of time we had left. With ravishing urgency, I wanted that as much as I longed for touch.

  Maybe these would be the last days of my life, and maybe they would matter the most.

  Tibario breathed honey and darkness. “I take it things did not work out with her?”

  He sounded vaguely jealous, but less like he was resentful, more like he was hoping he could do better. It was impossible not to find endearing. “I was never really in love with her. But she was the first one who broke the spell. It wasn’t just that Father had made me afraid to be touched again, but afraid that my body wasn’t made to be loved. Being wanted and being hated seemed to go together in my mind, like no one could want this and not hate it. Then she reminded me of what it felt like for someone to see me and not hate me.”

  “You must have felt so alone.”

  I didn’t answer right away. I only sat and let that coil around me, one with the weight of his arms. It all seemed less frightening, just then. “What about you? I don’t think you precisely had it easy.”

  Thoughts shimmered in his eyes like flashes of bright fish. “It’s an ocean away from being the same thing, but I’ve always had a similar fear—that I would never be touched truly again, like a wall sat between me and the real world.”

  “Again?”

  The shadows of his face suggested a grin. “After childhood. You touched me like no one else. All the boys I knew—well, not just boys—were either raised with mafiosi or to be leaders of a country. There’s this mythology that mafiosi are made of the toughest stuff. Hardening under pressure, like diamonds. The men have to be hard, but no one is more like a diamond than Mamma. She was my model of how tough to be. And then you came along, not hard at all. You’d leap at a spider on your bag, cry if a toad was stepped on, grab my hand if we were walking alone in the dark. You were soft with me, and then you let me be soft with you. I want that. Whatever I am, it’s not a diamond.”

  “I’d rather have you than a diamond.” If I could ever have him, even the traces he left behind.

  One cool hand stroked my cheek. “I’ve never told anyone this before, but I had my own dream with you. Mamma wasn’t always hard. I still remember her mind being joined with mine. It never occurred to me that there was anything unusual about a mindlink with one’s mother.”

  My eyes widened. “You mean she took control of your mind even then?” The horror was incomprehensible—what secret could the occhiorosso find in a two-year-old?

  “No.” His laugh sparkled. “It was so peaceful. I always had her, and then Mio, inside—like I could simply turn my attention to her, and we would touch. Distance made no difference. I was never alone, and if she was able to control me through that link, she never did. It was like her magic was a different animal when we were small. Comforting and warm and wonderful. But it was never going to last. My mind was fully separated from hers by the time you and I were in school together. I’ve never been quite the same. I’ve had to learn to be alone, with no one inside when I turn within. My heart used to have my family living inside, and they abandoned me to their own private bodies. That was how I saw it for years, anyway.”

  This story settled in me strangely, as if he’d told me he’d once had glass wings. So much more gentle than it’d sounded at first, but also quietly frightening if only for the delicate sense of loss in it.

  I may not understand having been born into telepathic union. But I understood alone. I understood there being a precious, glowing thing that bled out of your life.

  “That sounds like a unique kind of trauma.” I snuggled closer, ran a fingertip along the muscles of his arm.

  He shrugged. “Seems a far better hand than what you were dealt. But this was my dream: I hoped I’d find that closeness with someone else again before I died. Almost sharing thoughts. I think—I hoped I’d have that with you one day. You were magical, and seemed so like me, but so different. Maybe that’s all that love, attraction, is for me. The hope that I’ll be let into someone’s heart again one day.”

  I pondered. “You wanted that with me?”

  “Still do. You see the problem? I wanted you to be my shelter. But you deserve someone who will shelter you, treat you as more than the antidote to being alone. You, also, deserve to be real. Not the vessel of my dream.”

  You deserve someone who will shelter you. Those words panged my heart like starbursts, each one spreading fire and color across my dark expanses. Did I deserve that? What room was there in the mythology of the Honored Child for shelter?

  “Maybe we are both just dreams,” I said into his neck. “The dreams of our parents of what we could have been, only we became nightmares, and now the dream is ending. The world will wake up and we’ll be gone forever.”

  His eyes were as wide as oceans, and as full. We could have been sixteen again, counting the days until we woke up.

  He was the last country I yearned to explore as ruin pelted toward me. In our final days, maybe we would not be alone.

  Shaking, I kissed him.

  His shocked mouth opened, heat swarming forth to penetrate me, swallow me. Then his lips closed with mine, his tongue became eager, and he was kissing me back. He was cold and hot and the moon and the night, the terminal hope of my abandoned life, and he was kissing me back. Then his long fingers were around the nape of my neck, cradling my head. I lost track of my body, became a sprawl of sensations. He held me together so tenderly it burned. He brought me onto his lap, hands in my hair, stoking witchfires under my nerves.

  We seemed to melt together like twin pieces of ice finally being reconciled. The feel of his arms took me back, through the years and empty loves and callous hands, to something like joy.

  I stiffened involuntarily, a wave of anxiety surging without warning. It may have been too fast. Tibario startled, our mouths parting, and in the next instant, his grasp loosened. His touch became strokes of reassurance. “It’s all right,” he whispered, so low it could have been telepathic. “We don’t have to go any further. I’m sorry, Violetta. We had two full conversations about why we shouldn’t do this, and yet.”

  “And yet.” I laughed, at ease in spite of it all, my sadness and our doom. “T
o be fair, I started it. I...always wanted to do that with you.”

  His fangs glittered sweetly in the lamplight. “Very glad to be able to fulfill one dream, at least.”

  Our separation followed like the cessation of the tide, the logical falling back of rising things. We were apart on the sofa, solid ice again, and he straightened himself and rose. He unceremoniously smoothed his clothes, barely hiding stiff evidence of his arousal. That sparked a crackle of satisfaction in my belly.

  “But dreams we must stay, if we are ever to be real. It seems absurd to say this when we are literally counting down nights to an apocalypse, but I should probably meander my way back home. If for no other reason than to...” He sounded like he was thinking to fight the temptation to kiss you again. I hoped he was. “Mamma and I should discuss things. Put our heads together.”

  I nodded. “Will you come back tomorrow night? We’re having a birthday celebration for Rosalina. It’s a small thing, all told, but I’d love for you to be there.”

  The mouth of the Deep opened behind him, but before he passed through, he bowed. “I’d be honored to.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Tibario

  Sometimes I imagined I was still dead, and this was my afterlife.

  It wasn’t exactly paradise. I wouldn’t call it hell, either.

  Mio was still gone. That was a hole I’d always feel, like an interruption in the way my body should naturally work. I had two lungs, two hands. I had a heart that beat. I had Mio.

  Now, I could go from two hands to four paws and a tail, and Mio was gone. The emotional barrier I’d left him behind meant he may as well be on the other side of the world. Papa was gone.

  Violetta wasn’t gone. On the contrary—she was finally here. I’d finally made amends with the boy of my dreams, only to find she’d always been the girl of my dreams, standing there in plain sight. And while the sun set on everything I loved, I could still hold her in my arms.

  Definitely not hell, then.