Chapter 34: Little Guy

Movement One — Skin and Nothing Else

There is a rule to this telling, and Sorrel would want it kept, so let it be kept plainly: what happened in the meadow before this moment is not going to be told. Not because it isn't worth telling — very little that happens between the two of them isn't worth telling, in her opinion, and she has never once in her long existence been shy about saying so — but because some things belong entirely to the people who lived them, and this account has decided, out of a respect it doesn't often bother extending elsewhere, to let that particular privacy stand.

What can be told is this. The two of them lay in the grass afterward, bare skin against bare skin, the gold light of that permanent held hour settling warm and unhurried across both of them the way it settles across everything in that meadow, patient, indifferent to the passage of any clock. Sorrel's arm was draped loosely over Eremos's chest, her palm resting flat against him, and she could feel, beneath that palm, the particular steady warmth of him — not the ordinary warmth of a body simply existing, but something a shade richer than that, the kind of heat you'd find pressed against sun-warmed bark, or against soil that has spent a whole afternoon storing light it has no intention of giving back too quickly.

The grass beneath them held its own warmth too, dry and soft, faintly bent from the weight of the two of them having lain there long enough to leave a proper impression in it. Somewhere nearby, the low stone wall near the hearth caught the last of the day's accumulated heat and gave it back slowly, the particular unhurried exhale of stone that has spent its whole existence patiently absorbing whatever the sky decides to offer it. A breeze moved once across the whole stretch of the meadow, gentle, warm, carrying with it the faint sweetness of crushed clover and something else beneath that, something greener, the smell of a field that has never once needed anyone's tending to know exactly how to be beautiful.

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No thought is going to be offered to you here, not from him. That's the shape this particular telling has taken, and Sorrel, wherever she is now, would tell you it's the only honest shape available. Whatever moved behind his face in the minutes that follow, whatever crossed him and settled and crossed him again, stays entirely his. What you'll have instead is what actually passed between the two of them — words, spoken aloud, and the plain, unglamorous fact of two bodies still touching, the only sensory current running steadily underneath everything said: warmth, given and received, and nothing more specific than that.

Sorrel shifted, propping herself up on one elbow so she could look down at him properly, her long green hair falling loose across one shoulder, catching gold at its edges the way it always did in that particular light. She studied his face for a long moment before she said anything at all — an old habit of hers, looking before speaking, the specific patience of someone who has spent enough centuries watching things grow to know that most living things reveal themselves eventually, if you're simply willing to wait long enough without demanding it of them.

He lay still beneath her gaze, breathing slow and even, one arm loose at his side, the other resting lightly across his own chest. His eyes were open, fixed somewhere past her shoulder at the branches of the old nameless tree, and his expression held whatever it always held in quiet moments like this one — calm, unhurried, the particular stillness she'd come to know as simply his, whether or not it was telling the whole truth about what sat underneath it. His skin was warm beneath her fingertips wherever she happened to rest them, that same particular richness of heat, steady and unbothered, the kind of warmth that asked nothing of the hand touching it beyond the simple willingness to keep touching.