Page 73 of House of Crimson Kisses
She disentangles herself from me and disappears. I clamber onto the bed and lay myself next to Eleanor.
I tug the pillow until it enables me to be pressing against her body. I stroke my fingers down her arms and lace our hands together, and that’s how I fall asleep.
For three more nights, I sleep there praying and hoping she will wake, but with each passing night, I lose a little piece of hope.
Time loses its sense of meaning. Days melt into nights, creams and pastes and potions into learning the physical movements they put Eleanor’s body through to prevent muscle loss. I don’t venture outside; the nurses sneak me food when they can, and I spend my idle hours reading healing manuals and books I find discarded around the ward.
I find it remarkable that time can elongate itself, an impossible elasticity that draws into weeks and months in the space of just a few days. But then ask anyone grown of a few decades and they’ll tell you time has a strange stickiness. A duality that enables one to be old in body and young of mind, tired and full of memories with a heart desperate for adventure. If this stay has taught me anything, it’s that time doesn’t quite work the way it should. Moulding this way and that, sometimes it stays upright and daylight and other times you blink and find yourself in an evening two days later.
That’s how, one morning, I peel my eyes open to the sensation of being stroked, of someone’s thumb rubbing circles on the back of my hand.
It takes a moment for me to recognise it’s not happening in my dream but in the now, in the here.
I sit bolt upright. “Eleanor?” I gasp.
“Hello, Cordelia,” she says, her voice cracked and dry with lack of use.
“Oh, my gods,Eleanor,”I wail.
I break into the most unladylike tears. Giant heaving sobs that sound much like the women warbling and puffing on the birthing ward when it’s their time, wrack my exhausted body. Giant tears plop onto the bed and splash Eleanor’s arm.
She smiles at me. Her lips don’t quite pull into the same smile she had before. She has a scar running through her top lip that makes her face even more radiant.
That’s what I kiss first. The one tiny imperfection that is already my favourite part of her.
She kisses me back, gently at first, and then hungrier. We lie back on the bed, our arms wrapped around each other. She strokes my hair back from my face and kisses my cheek, my eyelid, my brow, and finally my nose.
“What happened?” she asks.
It’s funny how we can hope for something so desperately. And I assure you, I’ve prayed to the gods night after night, begging them to return me to her. And yet, now the moment has come, I find myself dreading the truth that lies between us.
I dread spilling the awful secrets that led us to this place, and yet I cannot lie to her. I cannot keep in what must be told.
For even though I have trekked across cities and villages, spent days searching for her, I’m no longer sure whether I made the right decision.
Not because I don’t love her.
But because I do.
I take a deep breath and tell her everything, pouring all the awful moments out. I explain why her body was bruised, broken and burned.
“It was my family, Eleanor. It’s all my fault,” I say.
She shakes her head. “You are not your family.”
“I know. And yet, if it weren’t for me, my family wouldn’t have done this to you. I love you more than anything, but I am wondering whether I made a mistake. Whether my being here has put you in further danger.”
“Cordelia, if you have done as you said and travelled across cities for me, stayed by my bed and cared for me while I slept, why would you leave now? Why would you think that I would accept your leaving after you sacrificed so much for me?”
But before I can answer, the nurse who has always been kind to me flusters her way into the room.
“You need to leave, miss...”
“Pardon?” I say, pushing my still-wet locks out of my face.
“Now, m’lady. Please.”
She’s hopping from side to side. The urgency in her tone sets my alarms alight. Goosebumps fleck up and down my arms.
