Page 106 of Wretched Thorns

“Beautiful.” His voice came rough at the edges, worn down to something I had never heard in it before.

I leaned my forehead against his chest and breathed in his scent. I was really here. He was really here. This was real.

Two women stood behind the screen door. One of them was the woman from my dreams, the one who had poured chicory coffee grounds into my hands in a warm kitchen that did not exist. Tara’s grandmother. I had never met her in the waking world. The other I knew. Miss Delphine, who had woven the ribbon crown onto my head at the festival, whose name Jasper had said with fondness. Standing there shaking in the cold, I could not have told you whether either of them was real, or whether my mind had finally started handing me the dead and the dreamed to fill in the holes the night had torn in me.

Tara’s grandmother lifted her hand toward my face, held it an inch from my cheek, and let it fall, as if touching me might undo us both. Miss Delphine came around her and set her hand at the small of my back, and without a word she steered me through the screen door and into the hall. The warmth of the house came up around me all at once, like a hug. A sound came out of me I had not meant to make. Miss Delphine kept her hand where it was.

“Upstairs, baby. One step at a time.”

The stairs were harder than I had braced for. Each step took both hands on the banister and an effort I had to talk myself into. Whatever I had found inside myself to stand against Marcus had burned down to nothing on the drive home, and what it left behind was this weak, scraped-out woman hauling herself up a staircase one riser at a time. Tara came up behind me. Miss Delphine stayed at my elbow. The brothers were somewhere below us in the warm, bright belly of the house, and they were not following me up, because they knew the climb was mine to make and that watching me struggle through it would only cost me more.

We reached the top. Tara opened the door to the guest bath.

“Tara.”

“I’m in the next room when you’re done.” She did not hug me, and she did not reach out to put a hand on me the way people do when they are afraid you might come apart. She stepped back into the hall and gave me the one thing I needed more than touching, which was room.

Jasper leaned in the bathroom doorway with his hands shoved in his pockets, waiting for me to look up at him. He did not ask me to. He did not crowd the doorway or rush to fill the quiet. I kept my eyes on the floor tile.

“I need to be alone for a minute.”

He did not move.

“Jasper.”

“Yeah.”

“I need to get in the tub before you come back in.”

He did not ask why, and he did not nod like he was granting me something. He stepped clear of the doorway, drew the door most of the way shut behind him, and stayed on the other side of it, close, because going any farther away wasn’t what I wanted either, and Jasper had always had a knack for reading me.

I stood in the bathroom longer than I had intended. The shirt was worse to get off than it had been back in the garçonniere; my arms shook the whole way, and my ribs lit up where Marcus had cracked one. I worked it over my head and held the warm cotton bunched in my fists for one slow breath before I let it fall. The bra came off easier. I lowered myself into the tub.

The water was hot enough to hurt. It found the rope burn first and then the rib, and the sound I made as I sat down into it was not a sound I had given permission for. I let it out and let the water close over the worst of the ache.

The door opened a quarter inch.

“Serena.”

“I’m in.”

“Yeah.”

“You can come back.”

He came in. For a long while he did not look at my body at all. He looked at my face, then at the lip of the tub, at the basin and the folded cloth Tara had set out, at the soap, and only then did he let himself look at the rest of me. The gold rose in his eyes a quarter of the way and went straight back down. He did not take the half-second he usually took. He did not need it tonight.

He knelt at the side of the tub. “Tell me when to stop.”

“I know.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Okay.”

He picked up the cloth and started at my hands, working each finger one at a time, slow and silent, cleaning away the lines of dirt and ash and the dark crescent of a bite. Then he moved to my wrists. When he reached the rope burn he stopped, and held the cloth in the air above the raw band of it, his eyes turning a bright gold.

“Jasper.”