Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

by V.E. Schwab

“Careful. In nature, beauty is a warning. The pretty ones are often poisonous.”

Up until now she’s felt like the other girl is humoring her, like this whole thing was just another kind of game, but this time, as their bodies meet, Alice hears the other girl’s breath catching, a hitch of desire that makes her blush, makes her flush, makes her ache. (She is used to wanting plenty, but it is another thing to be wanted.)

fragments of music and rain and tangled hands, and heat, and if Alice didn’t feel like death, she’d probably play the whole thing over in her head, not to relive the good, but to assess the damage. Trace over everything she said and did, trying to decide if she’d made a fool of herself, what her classmates would think. Play out the scene with the girl in her bed—Lottie—until the pleasure of it soured, replaced by shame over the sounds she made, the sheer, mortifying abandon of being that other, reckless Alice. But embarrassment requires energy and she has none, and it doesn’t matter if she made an idiot of herself because Lottie is gone.

“Strange, isn’t it?” she says. “The more you taste, the more you want.”

“One can be alone without feeling lonely,” she muses. “One can feel lonely without being alone.”

Sabine has found she far prefers the taste of other women. Just as their skin is softer, she finds their life tastes sweeter, too. More earth than metal. Like burned caramel, perhaps? Hard to say.

she wonders how long they have been together, to fit like that, wearing space into each other’s bodies.

We are no monster, no mean thing. We are nature’s finest flower.”

That is the problem, isn’t it? She doesn’t know. Sabine is full of knowing what she does not want, but even after all these years, she hasn’t found the words for what she does.

Someone to share this life. Someone to make her feel anything more than hunger. Or at least, a different kind.

“One thing you learn when you live as long as we do, is that nothing’s permanent. Who you were isn’t who you have to be.”

Charlotte feels her cheeks go hot. She’s never been good at hiding her emotions, the way other girls do, not when they seem intent on hovering just beneath the surface of her skin.

Charlotte has always had a dreamer’s heart, an artist’s eye, the kind of imagination that unspools itself at the slightest touch.

As if love and horror could not go hand in hand.

She studies them, and tries to summon something. To understand what the girls find so alluring about this other sex. What makes their hearts quicken and their faces flush. Charlotte has read enough romance to know the way she should feel in their presence, and yet, while more than once the heroes in those books stirred her, reality does not.

“Some people keep their heart tucked so deep, they hardly know it’s there. But you,” she went on, turning back toward Charlotte, “you have always worn it like a second skin.” She ran a hand down her daughter’s arm. “Open to the world. You feel it all. The love and pain. The joy and hope and sorrow.” She pulled Charlotte close, carrying the scent of the garden. Of home. “It will make your life harder,” she said into her daughter’s hair. “But it will also make it beautiful.”

“Because you are the kind of bloom that thrives in any soil. And who knows, perhaps you will meet a worthy gardener.”

“The world will try to make you small. It will tell you to be modest, and meek. But the world is wrong. You should get to feel and love and live as boldly as you want.”

“The wonderful thing about luck,” she says, “is you can make your own.”

It does not matter where they go. They are an island, alone together in the vast wide world. And they are happy. Perhaps that is what makes them monsters—the fact their love is marked by violence, and death, and yet. And yet. She would not change a thing.

This woman, who is a force of nature. Who bends the world instead of bending for it. Who looks at Charlotte with such open want, and touches her without an ounce of shame. Who never steals a kiss, but instead lays claim to it, as if it is already hers. Sabine, who proves a master gardener. And Charlotte, so eager to be tended. So grateful she has found a hand that makes her bloom.

Charlotte often wishes she could feel the contours of her lover’s mind, read the outlines of her ideas, her hopes, her dreams,

Charlotte, who loves so hard it shakes her bones.

do they let each other in? Are their minds houses the other gets to walk through, exploring every room, while she is forced to stand outside the door and guess?

“—it isn’t safe for you to stay.” “Why?” asks Giada. Because I like you, she almost says. Because I want you. Because there are too many kinds of hunger, and I can’t pick them apart. Because I’m afraid. Because— “Because I’m hungry.”

Charlotte is so aware of Giada’s softness, how easily she’d bruise, that she keeps one hand braced against the bed while the other traces Giada’s curves the way her pencil did—conducting an artist’s study until the girl beneath her squirms, impatient, and guides her fingers lower, an invitation on her lips.

Now, with Giada spread beneath her hands, she isn’t quite sure what to do. But she has always been an eager student, and Giada shows her what she wants, and how, guides her with her rising breath, her arching back, her pleasure curling thick as smoke as she tightens around Charlotte’s hand, her own teeth raking Charlotte’s shoulder as she comes.

Charlotte almost smiles, then. It feels like stone splitting. Like her body has forgotten how.

To tell or not to tell. To share the burden or keep it to herself. But she is so tired of carrying the weight alone. And what is a friend, if not someone willing to share it. It’s hard at first, every word takes something with it, but then it is like running downhill—she cannot seem to stop.

“you look like you are made of stars.”