Lover's Curse (Red Queen Awards Winner)

Chapter Six - Phantom Hands

It's time we danced with the truth                                                                                  - Sober by Lorde

Mare

Maven's touch flares anew after Iris exits, gentle, warm, and rancid.  I scrub my flesh, but he never leaves.  His hands ghost over my skin, everywhere a tentative kiss, a hesitant nip.  His sadness spills into me and onto the floor, and I'll never forget the look in his eyes as he begged me to stay.

Traitor.

Filthy traitor.

I sit in the shower an hour more.  Steam my nostrils.  Lather my skin.  He's in my head, and he's never coming out.  I scrub my arm until it bleeds.

The healer doesn't ask how I hurt it.

There's a new tension to our nightly sessions.  Maven stays later and later, never asking, always lingering longer than he should.  He knows it's a bad idea.  He knows he's picking at a wound.  It doesn't stop him.

He looks like a corpse.  Acts like one.  He stumbles through the day on less and less sleep, to my delight and Iris's dismay.  She comes when he does not, pacing, ranting, thankful to be with the one other person who can get away with insulting him.  So many mistakes for her to undo.

He keeps coming.

Maven slumps on my desk, breathing softly.  Moonlight washes out the cruelty from his face, Merandus eyes hidden from view.  Dark lashes nestle in the crook of his cheek.  If I didn't know better, I'd think him gentle.

I used to.

My eyes flicker towards him despite myself.  His arms can't make a comfortable pillow, especially not against hard wood.  He'll wake with as many aches and pains as I do.

That night, I kissed those lids.  I bade him lie as he does now and kissed away his tears, destroyed them until he had no more left to cry.  But grief can always dig a new well.

I don't wanna see this.

He wakes under a blanket, surrendered from my newly-bare bed.   His eyes flicker from it to me.  "I'm never cold.  You shouldn't have."

"I don't mind."

"You must have been freezing."  Maven tugs the blanket from his frame, shoving it my direction.  "Take it.  Please."

"Keep it."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"I don't want it anymore," I snap.  "You've touched it."

He stills.  I can't read the emotions in his eyes, the memories I have stirred.  I don't want to.  His eyes linger on the floor.  "I've touched you."

Neither of us speak as he exits.

_

I find them folded atop my bed, nestled beneath a note and a misshapen bottle.  Hand sanitizer, a label tells me, along with instructions for use.  In case I touch you again.

The substance stinks as I lather my fingers, but I don't care.  I don't care how painful the words must have been to write.  I don't care how soft the new blankets are, tightly woven with fleece and silk worth several years' wages.

His hands finally leave.  The rest of him does not.

_

My ribs hurt when I wake.  The Skonos that attends me now is not as skilled as Wren, though even she had trouble erasing all my aches and creaks.  I've aged 50 years in six months, and the morning threatens to add another ten.