"I have apologized. There's emptiness in his eyes; he looks like a beaten dog, one who feels he ought to be punished. He -- he deserved none of it, Tennant. I polluted him. The wind and -- and nature whispered vapors into my bones, drove me to satisfy something I never wanted satisfied.
"How do you apologize," she asked, "to someone who believes he has earned being raped?"
Rape. It was a whip-crack collection of letters. The juxtaposition of the factors at play was a masquerade behind her eyes: Mister Catch, who she had broken, who in some fit of loneliness she had forced to be hers, sat alone in his shack, a victim; she, a criminal, a maggot, was having her lips treated with minty balms and given the warmth of another body to soothe her.
(But could you ever be so selfless, Glour'eya Wynsee, to say you did not wish to have Tennant's shirt here to dry your whore-tears?)
Tennant was years older than her, his clothes saturated with leafsmoke and his burning hair a beacon atop his scalp. The bed bowed underneath him. She leaned into his affectionate touches, imagining music played at the insistence of his comforting fingers. Her shoulder fit like a puzzle-piece into the flare of his ribs. This was how it ought to be, her mind told her; Cherny could have his laughter with Zinniah, Noura and Son could quell their darker needs in one another's arms, and she could be Tennant's. She could find that blemished little gem inside of him, that self-destructive drunkard, that lusty shard, and shatter it between her fingers--
They were all meant for lives experienced two-by-two. And what would Mister Catch be? Always the tag-along punctuation to the happiness of his friends, his family, his guardians? The rat'vak, the Catch-Catch-Catch of a portent Dream heavied by unnecessary chains?
A sleeve embroidered with orange blossoms dragged itself across her cheeks. She bit at a strand of bandage criss-crossing her handless arm. This she plucked from her teeth with the thumb and forefinger of her functional hand, then very gently reached up to cup the gauze beneath Tennant's bulging, misaligned nose. For all her trembling, her hand steadied as she cared for the ruin of his nose and the starburst of black and purple bruising that blossomed beneath.
Just two foolish children giving into misunderstood urges.
"How do I understand them," she asked. "These urges, these vile needs? Do I feed them or starve them? Do I drag the fantasies out of the compost in my brain and -- and give them life, or do I bury them?" She worked at his nose with all the tenderness of a girl who knew tasks of precision. Blunt as she was, she'd always had a touch for needles, embroidery, the minutiae. Give her a catatonic bee and she could pry the stinger from its abdomen. Bestow upon her a thousand grains of sand and she could extract from its brothers the brightest sibling.
"Elliot," Gloria said, smiling despite her damp cheeks. "Elliot. I never fancied him. But even if he's only a figment of a memory flickering between my ears, I'd loathe for my old friend to be lonely."
A few minutes of silence. His nose was broken, battered, and pretty. Her fingertips turned red. She didn't mind. The girl looked into him. She looked through him. She did not need to see the emptied bottles to know him.
"How do you keep on smiling. How do you survive, Tennant," she asked, "when you hate yourself so much?"