Sophie Littlefield - Aftertime

And then time passed and the breeze kept up its gentle journey and the tears-because yes, she’d sobbed when she came, probably she had been crying the entire time-the tears dried to salty tracks on her cheeks. Smoke held her, and when his hands found the wounds on her back he explored them with his fingers, so gently that it only tickled a little, and he murmured that he was sorry, so sorry, and she let him touch the entire expanse of what was ravaged and hurt. When she shivered from the night chill, he pulled the covers up over her body.

Then he stroked her cheek and she could smell her own scent on his fingers and she turned her face away and the shame was back, just like that.

“You shouldn’t…you put your fingers in my mouth.”

“You wanted them there,” Smoke answered, without any trace of regret.

“But I could be-”

“We could both be dead tomorrow,” Smoke said sharply. And then, relenting: “Besides, I didn’t kiss you.”

Cass considered that. Technically, it was true. He hadn’t kissed her on the mouth. But all it would take was the tiniest cut or scratch-oh, God, had she bitten him? She couldn’t remember; it wouldn’t surprise her-

But she had needed him in her mouth, only it wasn’t his fingers she longed for, and as images flashed across her mind she felt herself blush and then she pushed his hand off her hip and wrapped the bed linens more tightly around herself.

“What,” Smoke said, allowing himself to be pushed away.

“You didn’t…you know. I was…that was all about me.”

Smoke shrugged and settled himself on his back, making do with the short end of the blankets that Cass had left him. “You’re keeping score?”

Confusion and uncertainty roiled and surged. “You say that like you think there will be a next time.”

“I have no expectations,” Smoke said wearily. “For what it’s worth…I enjoyed every minute of that. You’re an exceptional woman, Cass.”

I’m not, Cass screamed, but without words and without sound. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not . Long after Smoke’s breathing went steady and even, long after her own body went leaden with fatigue and only her racing mind prevented it from falling into a deep sleep, the voice inside her raged against its walls.

You aren’t exceptional. You aren’t anything. You were nothing. Now you’re diseased. You are the disease. You are the vessel and you are wrecked and poisoned and evil.

Calmed by the voice that was vile but at least familiar, Cass finally let go of the sheet she had bunched tight in her hand. She stopped scraping her nails savagely at the skin of her thumb as the voice lulled her to sleep with its familiar lullaby of self-hatred. This was a landscape she knew well. This was home.

But as she finally drifted off to sleep, the stretch of white sheet between them so inviolable it might as well have been a brick wall, Cass was unsettled to realize that there was a tiny tendril of hope twining up the walls around her heart.

RUTHIE WAS REACHING UP FOR HER, STAMPING her foot, stamping in frustration, her sweet little rosebud lips wobbling toward a wail. She was dressed, improbably, in the pink terry cloth onesie Cass had brought her home from the hospital in, a gift from Meddlin, who had been beside him self trying to keep the QikGo staffed while she was on her brief maternity leave.

Ruthie was a big girl now and the pink onesie had morphed into a bell-sleeved dress with a full skirt that swung around her chubby knees as she stamped and pouted. She was trying to tell Cass something but Cass couldn’t hear-it was as though there were a thousand layers of sound in her ears and she could hear none of them. Tears welled in Cass’s eyes and she tried with all her might to bend down and pick up her baby, or at least kiss her frown away, but she couldn’t move. And then the outlines of Ruthie’s dress started to break up and scatter and Ruthie began to fade, her cries turning to frantic screaming.

“Cass-Cass!” Cass felt a strong hand close on her shoulder and she fought her way awake, the horror of the dream falling away in shards. She blinked hard a few times and sat up, looking frantically around the unfamiliar room until she remembered where she was.

In daylight, the room was smaller than it had seemed last night, with a beadboard ceiling sloping toward the window, and rose-patterned wallpaper. The curtains that had drifted on last night’s breeze lay limp in the window, barely stirring. There was a white-painted dresser with a porcelain lamp and a basket of pinecones. A faint scent of dried eucalyptus tinged the air.

Cass rubbed her eyes and forced herself to look at Smoke. The stubble on his face gave him a raffish air, and his eyebrows knit in concern only underscored the effect of a pirate. His t-shirt had twisted during the night, and she caught a glimpse of his stomach, flat and hard with a line of black hair below his navel, trailing down. She felt the stirring inside her, a response that last night had sealed indelibly in her mind, and she fought it hard.

“You all right?” Smoke asked, voice sleep-rough but gentle.

Instead of answering Cass rolled away from him and un-tangled herself from the blankets. She stood, hastily pulling up her pants, and slipped out of the room.

She retreated to the bathroom and pulled the door tight behind her. Inside, on the closed toilet seat, lay a bowl of water and an unopened toothbrush and a fresh tube of toothpaste. On the floor was a second bucket; the waste bucket had been emptied. Lyle had been up before them, and the extent of his hospitality stopped Cass in her tracks and halted the panic that was threatening to careen out of control, dragging her behind it.

It wasn’t that other people hadn’t offered help. Some of the shelterers at the library made an effort when she first arrived, but she was so accustomed to keeping to herself that accepting an extra serving of food, a much-thumbed magazine from six months earlier, an invitation to walk around the courtyard in the evening…these were foreign notions, and it was so much easier to turn away than to risk letting a stranger get close to her.

What did it mean that she was allowing Lyle to help her now? Was she changing-had the brief contact with Smoke, with Sammi, with the women at the bath already turned her into someone different, a self that she didn’t recognize? Was she growing softer, weaker in her longing for human contact?

She picked up the toothbrush and peeled back the packaging, running her tongue over her cracked lips, her teeth. Yesterday the women had loaned her supplies and she’d brushed for what seemed like hours, trying to remove the weeks’ accumulation of matter from them. Among all its other properties, the kaysev stems’ woody fibers did a serviceable job of cleaning teeth, but the taste of toothpaste and the cool clean sensation afterward were a welcome relief.

She brushed slowly, savoring the taste. Then she used one of the folded cloths that Lyle had left to wash her face, her hands, between her legs, trying to get rid of every trace of the night before. She did not think of Smoke, and she did not think about the dream Ruthie, though not thinking about them took all her concentration.

She thought of the real Ruthie, the way she’d looked when Cass went to Mim and Byrn’s place to take her back. She’d been worried that the months of separation might have erased her from her daughter’s mind, but the minute Ruthie saw her in the doorway, she jumped up from the sofa where she had been playing with a thin gray cat and ran to her, blond curls flying, eyes wide with relief and joy.

Cass took a deep breath and looked into the mirror.

The first thing she noticed was how green her eyes were and for a moment she was electrified with terror until she figured out that it was only the pure strong light of morning that had shrunk her pupils. She cupped her hands around her face and leaned toward the mirror and her pupils expanded in the tunnel of dark she had created, and she exhaled with relief. Before the turn, her eyes had been a muddy hazel green; now they were the vibrant green of lemon leaves.