Matrix

by Lauren Groff

Some of it returns so vivid it is nearly a vision. Cecily, so young in the fields the days they fled the estate in Le Maine to Rouen, a sudden rainstorm, drops thick as spit, the horses urged to a trot as the rain came down hard, a field with hayricks, a tunnel into the dry interior of the haystack, where the girls squirmed out of their soaked clothing and pulled the woolen blanket over themselves, laughing at the closeness of the other body and the way their limbs knocked as they moved and the sound of the rain and the thick sweetness of hayscent. They lay back, pressed close for warmth, and Marie felt Cecily’s heart beating along the length of her, the pulse in her temple where it rested on Marie’s arm, and her smell was strong, the soap of lemon balm and lavender at the heart of her braid, skin with honey and wild onions and leaf rot in it. They had always rubbed together through their clothes, but they had never been naked like this; they would never have dared. Cecily blinked and her eyelashes brushed Marie’s arm. Marie held herself still, counting to a hundred. At a hundred, she would either move away or kiss Cecily. But at twenty-one, Cecily turned her head and pressed her lips to Marie’s throat and Marie lifted her hand and touched Cecily’s face, found her lips with her fingers, and there was no one there to see or stop them, no need for the breathless pulling away as the stable door cracked to sunlight and a silhouette was framed against the sky, nobody here below...