Page 14 of The Last Feast
“What does that mean?”
“Have you ever been hungry?” she asks instead.
He shakes his head.
“So hungry that you hug yourself to stop the noises your stomach makes?” She continues mapping his features in her blood. “So hungry that when you hear a fly buzzing, you try to catch it because you’d feed anything to that angry beast roaring inside your stomach?”
“Have you?”
She slowly meets his eyes and simply says, “I have. It taught me that when you do get food, you have to take breaks. And if you keep eating, pushing more and more inside your body, it will hurt. This is your break, my sweet thief.”
He smiles at that. Not the fact she knows starvation or hunger—he smiles because Hana doesn’t want to hurt him.
And she smiles back when Odette stops her mumbled screaming. Everyone can see Auguste belongs to Hana. He’s no longer the same man who walked into this fear factory. Hana has made him better, truer to the man he hides deep within himself.
“We can get something to eat,” he offers.
“No. I’m not done with you yet. Tell me your secrets.”
Hana watches him, taking note of how his eyes dim and his breathing seems to pause. Placing her hand on his chest to feel his heart beating, she slowly lifts her head and licks his cheek.
“A secret,” he whispers, burying his nose in her hair. “I have many, but they’re not what make me.”
“Who hurt you, Jamie?”
“I’m not hurt,” he lies to them both.
Hana knows pain. It’s an emotion she’s closely intimate with, one of the first things everyone experiences. The baby taken from a warm, secure womb to a cold, harsh world cries out in pain as they grow, only to then stumble when learning independence. But as they become aware of the world, that’s when they encounter true pain, the kind that burrows through skin, flesh, sinew, and bone to sit in their marrow, forever a part of them. Forever changing how they understand the world around them.
She may not have been raised with the usual milestones—crawling, walking, talking—but she still had them, from the Sisters teaching her how to clean herself after the priests’ visits, her uncle doing the same when he invited people into the home meant to be her safety. Her milestones were taken from her body, teaching her that the word humanity is an oxymoron when no being possesses it. So, she stares at Auguste, waiting for him to admit he’s in pain too because she knows he hasn’t reached that milestone—admittance.
But he shakes his head, lying to her again.
“You are,” she softly argues as she presses her hand harder to his chest. “I can feel it here.”
“Som-someone hurt me a long time ago,” he stutters, each word pained, as though he’s reliving it.
She doesn’t ask for more as she feels the erratic thuds of his heart. They both remain silent?—
Hana waiting for what he’ll admit, Auguste telling himself not to say anything further because uttering the words are hard enough, but the heartache of not being believed is worse.
He knows what she’ll say, how she’ll look at him in that way that screams he’s a liar, because being touchedin that wayisn’t something boys have to worry about. It’s a fear for little girls and their parents, just like his grandfather said. All the arguments of a child begging to be believed repeat as he silently pleads with Hana not to ask anything more.
Don’t lie for attention.
It’s ill-mannered to speak about those things.
Stop crying.
Stop speaking.
Stop lying.
You’re not a girl, so nothing happened.
Boys are always more interested in their bodies.
You misunderstood.
