Marked By Tide

Chapter 13 - The First Conversation

Soren's POV

The door of the healing room is in front of me and my hand is an inch from the wood and I have been standing here for three full seconds, possibly four, because my body has stopped responding to instructions and my brain has stopped issuing them.

I knock.

Two knocks. Light. The way Mom taught us.

A small voice from inside says: "Come in."

I push the door open.

I step inside.

I close the door behind me.

I do not move from the doorway for what feels like a long time. I do not know how long it actually is. The bond is doing something in my chest that I do not have the bandwidth to manage and *think* at the same time, and the bond is taking priority over the thinking, and the result is that I am standing inside the room with my hand still on the doorknob and my body refusing to walk further into the room, and the woman in the bed is looking at me, and I have no idea what I am supposed to say.

Reef, in the back of me, says — quietly, very quietly, the way he says things when he knows I cannot afford volume — *Soren*.

*Reef.*

*Walk into the room.*

*I am trying.*

*Walk into the room. The chair is six feet from the bed. Walk to it. Sit in it. Look at her face. You can do this. You have walked across rooms before.*

*Reef.*

*Walk.*

I walk.

I cross the floor to Tamsin's chair — the chair Cassian was in, the chair where my brother had this conversation half an hour ago, the chair I now know does not crowd her because Cassian has reported back about it. I sit. I rest my hands on my knees because that is what Cassian did and Cassian is the one who is good at this and I am going to follow his template until my brain comes back online.

I look at her.

She is sitting up in the bed. The pillows are behind her. The too-big shirt is on her shoulders. The braid Tamsin did is across her left shoulder, the crooked end of it on her sternum. Her hands are folded in her lap. Her eyes are on me.

Her eyes are *grey-green* and *here* and they are looking at me with the same evaluating quality Cassian described, except — except they are also looking at me with the small extra thing I had not been prepared for, which is *recognition*. Not the recognition of a person who has met me before in any place she can name. The recognition of a person who has *held the memory of me* in her body for six days and is now confirming the body to the memory.

She remembers.

She remembers me crouching by her face.

I have known this for the past thirty minutes — Cassian told me — and I am still not ready for the look she is giving me now, which is the look of a woman who has *checked* and *found me to be the same person*.

I open my mouth.

I say: "Hi. I'm Soren."

It comes out flat. Flatter than I meant it. The flat of a man who has not slept properly in six days and has just spent half an hour holding a bond against the door of a room he was not allowed to be in, and the bond is now inside the room with him and the bond is *louder* than it has any business being, and the flat is the only register I have access to.

She says: "I know. Your brother told me."

I look at her.

Her voice is — small. Careful. But the response itself is — *teasing*. Not really teasing. The very-faintest-thing that could pass for teasing in a woman who has not used the muscle for teasing in five years. She is doing the dry-Tamsin thing — testing whether the dry register works on me the way it worked on Cassian half an hour ago — and she has done it so lightly that I might have missed it if I had not been watching her face with the intensity of a man whose entire life is in the room with her.

I do not have a response.

I have nothing.

The bond is loud and Reef is holding and my brain is processing the fact that *she just teased me* and I have no way to respond to it because Cassian would have laughed and the laugh would have been the right thing and I cannot laugh because my throat has stopped working, and the silence that follows the *I know your brother told me* is longer than it has any right to be.

I clear my throat.

I try.

I say: "How are you feeling."

It is the worst possible question. It is the question every healer and every doctor and every well-meaning stranger has asked her for years, and I am the man whose bond is so loud in my chest that I cannot think of anything more original than the question her abuser's neighbors probably asked her at the grocery store after she came in looking tired. The question lands in the room with all the grace of a stone dropped onto a wood floor.

She says: "Better."

That is all she gives me. One word. She is being polite. She is being *kind*, even, in the small way a person is kind to a stranger who has just said something not quite right and the person is going to give him the smallest possible benefit of the doubt before deciding whether to keep doing so.

The silence that follows is *long*.

I cannot break it. Reef cannot break it. I have not made conversation with a woman who is not in my family in — possibly years. Possibly ever. I have always been the brother who lets Cassian do the talking, and Cassian is not in this room, and I am alone with the woman who is the entire content of my chest and I have no idea how to use my mouth.

She says, eventually, in a voice that is — not unkind. Maybe even a little gentle. Maybe she is, despite everything, working harder on this conversation than I am because the work-of-being-in-it is what she has been trained to do for five years:

"You don't talk much."

I say: "I'm not good at it."

I say it before I can stop it. The honesty comes out the way the honesty does when the bond has stripped the muscle that filters before-saying. I have not given anyone that sentence in years. I have certainly not given it to a woman I have known for ninety seconds whose hands are folded in her lap and whose face is doing the thing of a person who has just been handed a small piece of someone's interior they did not expect to be handed.

She looks at me.

She is quiet for a beat. Then she says — and this is also softer than it has any right to be:

"Neither am I, usually."

She has just given me a piece of *her* interior.

It is not a big piece. It is three words. *Neither am I.* And the *usually* is the part that is going to sit in my chest for the next six months, because the *usually* implies she has done some talking today, which means the talking has not been her usual register but has been the register required by the morning, and the morning has cost her, and she is — *tired*, with me, of the talking, in a way she has not been with the others, and the tiredness is the closest thing to *trust* I have been given in this conversation, and the bond does what the bond is going to do.

I look up at her.

She is looking at me steadily. The grey-green is on me. The crooked braid is on her sternum. The shirt is too big. Her hands are still folded in her lap.

I am, in this moment, completely undone.

I say — and I do not decide to say it, the words come out the way the *I'm not good at it* came out, the bond has my mouth and I am following:

"I'm glad you're alive."

It is the wrong sentence.

It is the *right* sentence — it is true, it is the truest thing I have said in six days, it is the only thing inside me right now — but it is the wrong sentence for *this* room, this morning, this version of her, who is sitting up for the first time and is *just* meeting me and does not have the bandwidth for a man she has known ninety seconds to put *I'm glad you're alive* on her table with the weight I have just put on the words.

I see her blink.

Once.

Her eyes do something complicated.

She does not flinch. She does not pull back. She does not look away. But the steady-on-me look does the smallest possible *recalibration* — the way her face has recalibrated to every new piece of information she has received in this room since she woke up — and she sits with the sentence for a long beat.

She says: "Me too."

The two words come out quietly. Not the polite-stranger *better*. Not the careful-evaluating *I know*. Something — *underneath* the words. Something that means she has heard what I said and is *also*, herself, glad to be alive, and is also a little surprised by being glad about it, and is letting me know.

The bond, which has been loud, goes *deafening*.

It is not flaring the way Cassian described it flaring through the door. It is doing the thing the bond does when the body it is bonded to has just responded to it directly, when the bond has felt the *answer* across the space and is now amplifying because the amplification is what bonds do when they have received a response. It is humming in my chest at a register I cannot live inside and continue to be a person in this room.

I stand up.

I do it too fast. The chair scrapes back against the wood floor. I see her flinch — small, barely there, the small flinch of a woman whose body still remembers what a chair scrape in a closed room can precede — and the seeing of it makes me want to claw my own skin off because I have just done the one thing I was not going to do.

I do not sit back down.

I cannot sit back down. The bond is going to make me do something worse if I sit back down. The bond is going to make me say *the bond is humming in my chest right now and you are the reason* or *I have been waiting six days to be in this room with you* or *I am going to kill your brother*, and I have not been authorized by anyone, least of all by *her*, to say any of those things this morning, and the only thing I can do to prevent saying them is to leave the room.

I say: "I'm going to let you rest."

I say it in the same flat I used when I came in. The flat is worse this time because the flat has the chair-scrape behind it and the *I'm glad you're alive* behind that, and the flat now has the shape of a man who is *fleeing*, which is what I am doing.

She does not respond.

She does not have time to. I turn. I walk to the door. I open it. I go through it.

I close it behind me, quietly, because the quiet of the close is the only kindness I have left to give in the moment, and I owe her the kindness because I have ruined every other part of this morning.

---

Cassian is on the porch.

He is standing — not in his chair, *standing*, because Cassian heard the chair scrape and Cassian heard my walk-out and Cassian has been on this porch since he came out of this room and he knows the difference between a Soren-walk-out that means *I got too much* and a Soren-walk-out that means *I ruined it*, and the walk-out he just heard is the second kind.

He looks at me. His face is open and worried and the worry is the kind only a brother can do, which is the worry that is *both* about him and about her at the same time, because the bond is in both of us and Cassian's bond has been *humming* in his chest since I went into that room and has just been *struck* by the way I came out of it.

He says: "Soren."

I keep walking.

I walk across the porch. I walk down the steps. I walk into the path that runs east from the healing house toward the woods, because the woods is the only place in this pack heart where I am going to be able to think for the next twenty minutes, and the thinking is going to involve language I would prefer my mother not overhear from her kitchen window.

Cassian, behind me: "Soren — "

I say, without turning: "Not now, Cassian. Give me an hour."

He gives me the hour.

He does not follow. He stands on the porch and watches me go and the twin bond carries his worry forward into mine and I let it carry because there is no point fighting it — *yes, Cassian, I know, yes, I will be back in an hour, no, I am not going to do anything stupid, yes, I love you, no, I cannot talk about it yet*. He absorbs the rapid stream of unspoken response and does not press, and that is what makes him my brother, because Cassian is the kind of brother who knows when to give an hour.

I walk into the woods.

---

I do not go far.

I cannot go far. The bond is, despite the leaving, *still tethered to her*, and the tether does not stretch past a certain distance without doing something to my chest that I cannot let it do today. I walk maybe four hundred yards into the trees east of the healing house. I find a small clearing I have been finding since I was eight years old, a clearing with a fallen cedar log angled across it that has been my *thinking log* since I was a child, and I sit on the log and I put my elbows on my knees and I put my face in my hands.

Reef sits down inside me.

He does not say anything for a long time. He knows me. He knows what kind of quiet I need. He gives me the quiet.

I think.

I replay every second of the morning. I replay walking into the room. I replay the *Hi. I'm Soren.* I replay her *I know. Your brother told me.* I replay *how are you feeling*. I replay her *better*. I replay the long silence. I replay her *you don't talk much*. I replay my *I'm not good at it*. I replay her *neither am I, usually*. I replay my *I'm glad you're alive*. I replay her *me too*. I replay the chair scrape. I replay her flinch.

I replay the flinch a great many times.

The flinch is the worst of it.

I am going to have to apologize for the chair scrape eventually. I am going to have to find a way to do it that does not put more weight on her than she is ready to receive. I am going to have to do it without explaining *why* the chair scraped, because the why is the bond and the bond is not something I am allowed to explain yet, and the explanation is going to be Cassian's or Mom's or hers-to-find-out-on-her-own-timeline, not mine.

I am also going to have to apologize for the *I'm glad you're alive*.

I do not regret saying it.

I regret the *weight* I put on it.

A different version of me — Cassian's version, perhaps, or the version of me I have not yet learned to be — would have said it lightly, the way a person says a thing that is true but does not have to land *like* it is true, and the lightness would have given her the room to receive it or set it down without the weight of *what does he mean by that, what is he, why is he looking at me like that*. I did not give her the room. I gave her the truth at full pressure. She is recovering from blade wounds. She does not need full pressure.

Reef says, after a long beat: *Soren.*

I say: *Reef.*

He says: *It was not as bad as you think it was.*

I say: *Reef, the chair scrape — *

He says: *It was a chair scrape. She flinched the way a person flinches at a chair scrape. She did not flinch the way a person flinches at violence. She has the body of a woman who has been hurt and her body is going to flinch at chair scrapes for years. You did not do that to her. The chair did. The room did. The body she came into the room with did. You did not.*

I say: *I startled her.*

He says: *Yes. You did. You did not hurt her. There is a difference. You are going to learn the difference over the next year because the difference is going to be the entirety of how you live with her.*

I sit with that for a long beat.

He continues, quieter: *The other thing — the I'm glad you're alive — was not a mistake. It was *premature*. There is a difference. You said too much, too early. You did not say something untrue. You will get the chance to say it again, later, when she is ready to receive it without the weight. You will say it better next time. You have not ruined anything that cannot be — *

I say: *Don't say recovered.*

He says: *Recovered.*

I say: *Reef.*

He says: *Soren. You are nineteen years old and you have known her for ninety seconds of awake conversation. You are going to ruin a great many things in the next two years. You are also going to *recover* from ruining them, because she is going to give you the chance to. The bond is between her and you and *both of you* are going to do the work of building this. You did not ruin it. You stumbled. There is a difference.*

I take a long breath.

The breath does the thing it always does when Reef has just told me something true I did not want to hear, which is to *settle*. The settling is small. The settling is enough.

I sit on the log for a long time. The morning sun moves across the canopy above me. The bond keeps humming, quieter now, the way bonds hum when the bonded body is at rest some distance away — and Nerida is, I can feel through the line, *resting*. She has gone back to sleep. The bond carries the *resting* like a weather report from a place I am not allowed to be.

She is sleeping.

She is *alive*.

She is alive and she is in a bed in Paloma's healing house and she is *resting*, and the resting is the thing I told her I was glad about half an hour ago, and the resting is going to keep happening for the next several weeks until she is well, and I am going to spend that time learning how to be a man who walks into a room without making the chair scrape.

I sit on the log.

I let myself feel it for one more minute.

Then I stand up. I brush the bark off the back of my legs. I walk back through the woods toward the pack heart.

I have an apology to plan. I have a brother to thank for the hour. I have a long afternoon of being a man who has done a thing wrong and is going to spend the next several days figuring out how to do it right, and I am not going to be very good at the figuring, and I am going to be patient with myself the way Reef has been patient with me, because the alternative is the kind of self-loathing that is going to make this worse, and the worse is not what she needs from me.

I walk.

The pack heart comes up out of the trees. The healing house is small at this distance — small and steady, the porch lamp still on against the noon, my brother still on the porch where I left him, his arms folded, his face turned toward the path I am walking out of.

He sees me coming.

He stands up. He does not move toward me. He waits for me to come to him.

I come to him.

I stop on the bottom step. He stops three feet from me on the porch. I look at him. He looks at me. The twin bond carries everything.

He says: "How bad."

I say: "Medium."

He says: "Can it be fixed."

I say: "Reef says yes. I am choosing to believe him."

He says: "Good."

He puts his hand on my shoulder. He does not say anything else. He does not need to. He goes back into his chair. I take the porch chair next to him. We sit together. The bond hums.

Inside the healing house, the woman who is the entire content of both of us, sleeps.