Movement Four — Somewhere Else, Someone Else

I watched the two of them go back and forth like that for a while — words first, and then, once the words had worn a little thin, something closer to looks, the particular silent argument two people who know each other very well can carry on entirely without language, a raised eyebrow answered by a narrowed eye, a small dismissive huff answered by an even smaller, more satisfied smile. I've always found something almost restful in watching it, the way you find something restful in watching weather cross a familiar landscape — you already know, more or less, how it's going to end, and the not-knowing of the exact shape it takes along the way is its own small, gentle pleasure.

The light had shifted, faintly, while they argued — not enough to properly notice unless you were watching for it, the way I happened to be watching for it, but enough that the particular gold slant across the grass had deepened by some small, imperceptible degree, the meadow settling further into that permanent held hour the way a body settles further into a chair it's already decided to stay in. Somewhere behind us, the old nameless tree shifted its leaves, once, in a wind I couldn't feel against my own skin, the particular small motion of something that has learned, across however many centuries it's stood in that same spot, to mark the passing of an afternoon in its own quiet language.

And somewhere in the middle of watching it, I confess my attention wandered.

I don't think I meant for it to. I want to be honest about that, because I think honesty is the entire currency this particular telling is asking of me. But there was something in the particular rhythm of their bickering — the specific cadence of a woman asking, again and again in her own oblique fashion, to be told she was beautiful, and another woman refusing, gently, to simply hand it to her the easy way — that pulled some old, half-buried thread loose in my own memory, and once it was loose, I found I couldn't quite gather it back in. It arrived the way memories arrive when they've decided, on their own schedule rather than mine, that the moment has finally come to be looked at again — not gently, not gradually, but all at once, a whole warm weight of it settling behind my eyes before I'd even properly noticed it approaching.

I felt my own face change with it. I don't know exactly what it looked like from the outside, but I felt the specific loosening that happens when your attention has quietly left the room you're sitting in, leaving only the shape of you behind to keep the seat warm.

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I was remembering someone. I didn't say so, not yet, not out loud. But I felt my gaze go soft and distant in the particular way it does when a memory has decided to arrive uninvited and hold the whole of my attention hostage for a moment, and I think — I know, actually, because she told me so herself, later, considerably more sharply than I deserved — that Vesper noticed exactly where my attention had gone, even before I'd fully noticed it myself.

She went still again, but it was a different stillness than before, sharper, colder, the particular stillness of someone who has just watched a door open onto a room she wasn't invited into. "You're thinking about someone," she said, and it wasn't a question.

I didn't answer quickly enough. I'll admit that too. There was too much of the old memory still sitting warm and heavy behind my eyes, and by the time I'd gathered enough of myself back into the present to actually respond, Vesper had already decided what my silence meant, and had already begun, with the particular deliberate cruelty of someone protecting something more fragile than cruelty usually protects, to pull away from the easy comfort she'd only just allowed herself.

She bit me. I want to tell you that plainly, because I think it belongs in the telling exactly as bluntly as it happened — her teeth closing, sharp and sudden, against the back of my hand where it rested near her shoulder, not hard enough to truly wound, but hard enough to make the point she'd apparently decided needed making. I made a small, startled sound, more surprise than pain, and felt her go rigid again beneath my arm, resistance flooding back into every line of her that had only just, a few minutes before, agreed to soften. I could feel, in the sharp pressure of it, something underneath the anger too — the particular desperation of someone trying to make a feeling stop by hurting the thing that caused it, however small and however unlikely to actually work that method has ever been.

Iris, beside me, only tilted her head slightly, watching the whole small drama unfold with the particular patient curiosity she brings to almost everything about the people she loves. "What were you remembering?" she asked, and there was no jealousy in the question at all, only the plain, open curiosity of someone who has never once needed to feel threatened by another woman's memory living somewhere behind my eyes.