[P] how do i love you? oh, this way and that way;

[Marisol]

I did think, let’s go about this slowly.
This is important. This should take
some really deep thought. We should take
small thoughtful steps.

But, bless us, we didn’t.

He is too kind. Too kind to her, too kind for the world; it is with a heavy heart that Marisol wonders (and fails to understand) how a man like this can rule a desert made for a death.

Or maybe she is oversimplifying. When people think of her home, do they think only of the hospital? Do they call it the swamp, the cliffs, these too-simple words? Now shame comes to greet her, a spine-deep shiver. An embarrassing silver-gauze threat of tears surfaces; it burns the corners of her eyes, the insides of her nostrils. Maybe she is the fool, for thinking Solterra is exactly what it looks or sounds like—blood, and sun, and melted steel.

Maybe Orestes would be upset, if he knew what she thought of this place.

When she swallows, it is painful: her throat is cracked by the dry air, the dehydration, the heat and the stress baked into her like sunlight. It is no sin to feel fear, he says, and—

Briefly—just the space of a heartbeat—she hates him for saying it.

She is thinking of Achilles and her own white heel. She is thinking of the scar on her shoulder, a river of silver. Of killing the man who ruined that word love. She is thinking of the spear she has left just outside the office door, sharpened to a shark-tooth point, worn by use until it fits like a second skin. She is thinking of her title—Commander—and the weight that it carries, an iron noose at the back of the neck.

When I was a child, my mother dipped me in the divine river, hanging by an ankle. 

When I was a child, they called me unlucky.

My name means lonely. 

My mother named me lonely, because she knew.

If fear is not a sin, then it is still sacrilege; a refusal of the white heel, of her goddess’ blessing, the drowning in the sacred water, a refusal of the title itself, Commander, Queen, Halcyon.

If fear is not a sin, it is only something worse.

The light is gone. Day has drained from the sky, and the room is dark but for the shine of Orestes’ tattoos. Dust swirls through the air in patches of faint gold. Marisol does not know what to feel. What to think. What to do. All at once she is nauseous, pained, exhausted and brightly awake; when he pulls away she only blinks, dazed, as if just surfacing from a dream. (Nightmare? Dream.) 

You cannot commit yourself to someone, he says.

Oh, and then he says other things—burdens, lonely, need beyond command, passion—but Marisol cannot hear it, cannot hear anything over the rising despair, the cold blue mania that begins to ice the inside of her chest, the ringing of her back right heel, 

the hot, stinging threat of tears rising to the surface,

the repeating voice: you cannot commit yourself, and neither can I.

Mari is grinding her jaw, holding it oh-so-tight, trying not to speak. A tense, blooming pain. The expression she gives him is almost hurt, but not quite;  almost asking, but not bold enough. 

Something in it is uneasy. A prey animal running. A thing which knows it is being hunted.

Again she swallows, with some effort, and oh she is in pain— struggling to contain the rising fever, the rotting ache, the part of her that only wants to beg for love

and love, and love again.

Mari’s dark brows furrow; she glances up at him, eyes vast, and nearly heartsick; her heart flutters in her chest, faint as a dying bird, and her voice almost wavers (or maybe, probably, it does) when she says, soft, “So.” A brief blink. A trembling lip. “I don’t understand. How to share a burden if one cannot commit.”

And now the rot in her is rising, aching, burning, and she wants to cry, or maybe is, despite her best efforts. She steps toward him. A sharp, hungry, pleading movement. 

“Orestes...“ Her voice is coarse, heavy, verging on a sin—there is a glow in the eyes, something dark and burnt and pressing—“I do not give my heart away easily, if at all. So I am not made for uncertainty.”

Another step. A too-quick brush of her lips against the base of his ear, a flash of teeth over the neck, and when she speaks again it is low and quiet, a kind of murmur, or purr, from not more than a few inches away: “So if it is desire only, or if you would rather return to your papers, then I will let you work. But if you would like to hear the poetry I have, or let me love you—“

Maybe her voice catches on that word. Love. Maybe it doesn’t.

“Then tell me you will stay.”

She is not brave enough to smile, yet.

“Speaking.”

credits