by Elin Peer
Willow still refused to look at me, but the way her jaw tensed told me I had her full attention.
“I’m sorry, Willow.” The words hung in the air for a long time. “I’m really sorry.”
“You should be.” In a slow movement, Willow got up and walked to stand by the water, her arms hugging her waist. I gave her time and didn’t force the conversation.
“I trusted you.” Her words were low, but I heard them.
“I know.”
“You told me you’d protect me.”
I groaned and looked down. Every fucking night before going to bed, I blamed myself for what happened that day she got hurt.
“I could have died, you know that, right?”
“Yes.”
Willow turned her face and gave me another accusatory stare. “We had no business being alone in a huge forest. We were children.”
“That’s not true. I was seventeen and stronger than most adult men.”
“But I was only fifteen.”
“So what? You were a woman. You told me so when you started bleeding, remember?”
Willow turned to face me. “Because you would never stop talking about our future.”
“But you said that you were a woman. It was your exact words.”
She threw her hands up in the air. “Getting your period and being capable of reproducing isn’t the same as being a grown-up.”
I counter-argued, “You can’t put an age on when you’re ready for love. Everyone is different. I was ready to be with you when I was fourteen. You were fifteen when we ran away, and you always said that girls mature faster than boys.”
With an outburst of frustration, Willow walked closer to me. “Don’t talk about love. What you felt for me wasn’t love, it was an obsession.”
I jerked my head back and swallowed hard. “An obsession?”
“Yes. You were jealous of any other boy who spoke with me and you wanted me to commit to marrying you when we were only kids. Who proposes to a child? That’s just sick.”
All the blood left my face and I fisted my hands. I understood anger, but to call me sick was unfair and unexpected. When I didn’t respond to her accusation, Willow turned back to the brink of the water, letting me sit to think about the time we were younger and I proposed to her.
“We shouldn’t be here. What if someone sees us?” Willow whispered and giggled low with her face turned up to meet mine.
I peeked out from the wall we were hiding behind. “They’re all watching the movie.”
It had become a tradition to have movie night every Thursday and because of the warm weather, we were watching it outside with us kids sprawled out with pillows and blankets on the grass.
When Willow had gone to the rest room, I had taken the chance to have a few stolen seconds alone with her. For weeks now, we’d been holding hands in secret, but I was dying for something more.
“Willow, I really like you.” My eyes were glowing with intensity as I took her hands.
“I really like you too, Solo.”
My body stiffened at first when she reached up on her toes and hugged me. I had never been hugged by her and I knew it was forbidden. Still, my arms wrapped around her and I hugged her back. Her hair smelled amazing; her body was a perfect fit to mine. And then she kissed me – a soft kiss to my cheek that had me lifting my hand to feel the spot while looking at her with awe.
“You kissed me.”
“Is that okay?” Her sweet smile was worthy of an angel.
My brain reacted by instinct and made me lean in, stopping only when I was nose to nose with her. It was enough time for Willow to move back or stop me if she wanted to, but instead she slid her arms around my neck.
That’s when I kissed her.
It was like I could touch the tips of the trees in the forest that surrounded us. I was flying high with euphoria that Willow had let me kiss her on her lips.
“I love you,” I whispered and kissed her again.
She smiled up at me with those green eyes that changed color depending on her mood and the light. “I love you too.”
No one had ever spoken those words to me and in that moment, it made complete sense to me that Nmen had fought and given their lives for hundreds of years to be with a woman. The rush of Willow’s soft smile and sweet words overwhelmed me with emotions and hopes for the future. I sank to my knees and hugged her waist while pressing my face against her belly. “Do you mean that?”
Willow caressed my hair and giggled again. “Why wouldn’t I?”
I looked up at her. “Do you mean it? You really love me?”
She cupped my face. “I love you, Solo.”
Still looking up at her, I felt my heart hammering in my chest. “Will you be mine?”
“Yours? Do you mean your friend?”
“My wife. Will you be my wife?”
Willow frowned. “I’m not old enough.”
I got up and squeezed her hand. “Will you marry me when we’re grown up?”
“Oh.”
“I’ll fight for you in a tournament if you want me to, but you’re a Motlander; you can choose to marry who you want.”
“I can?”
“Yes. Pearl married Khan.”
She widened her eyes. “You want us to be like them?”
“Yes, Willow. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I love you.”
“Oh, okay.” She smiled. “I guess we can do that.”
I lit up. “So, you’ll marry me?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s make a pact then. Let’s be together for the rest of our lives. Like wolves. They mate for life too.”
Willow bit her lip. “But what if you change your mind? I think some of the other girls like you too.”
“I don’t care. I only want you.”
“Okay.” She hugged me with excitement. “And I only want you.”
We nuzzled our noses against each other and kept smiling, my chest exploding with happiness as I let out a deep breath. “I want to fast-forward and marry you right now.”
“Me too. Can I tell Hunter and my friends?”
“You can tell everyone that we have a pact and that when you’re eighteen we’ll marry.” I held her hand. “We’re mates now. I belong to you, Willow. I always will.”
“I was in love. Not sick.” My tone was harder than intended and it made Willow turn around to face me again.
“Oh, so we’re talking again?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been quiet for ten minutes.”
“I was just thinking about the time I asked you to marry me.”
She snorted. “You mean pressured.”
It was like getting stabbed with a knife. “You think I pressured you to agree?”
“Yes. You’ve always been domineering and pushy.”
Unable to sit still, I got up and shoved my hands into my pockets. “I’m not going to deny that I know what I want and that I go for it. It’s the quality stamp of an Nman.”
“Hunter isn’t like that and he’s a fine Nman.”
I scoffed. “How did you think your brother became one of the biggest soccer stars in our country?”
“Talent.”
“And determination. He wanted it and worked hard to get there. You can’t blame a man for that.”
“I can when he pressures a child into marrying him. Good thing that I was lucky enough to see in time what a colossal mistake marrying you would have been.”
Needing a bit of time to calm myself from the insults to my person, I walked to the water.
“Solo.” Willow was standing behind me, closer than she had been before.
“Yes.” I kept my back to her.
“Why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Ask me to run away with you.”
My shoulders lifted in a deep intake of air and I spoke on the exhale: “You know why.”
“Most of what happened, I don’t remember.”
&n
bsp; “Yeah, well, I remember everything like it was yesterday.”
Willow moved to stand by my side, her arms wrapped around her waist again. “Over the years I’ve suppressed a lot. That’s why I have questions.”
I turned my head to give her a quizzical look. “You really don’t remember?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
She broke the eye contact and squatted down to pick up a stone that she threw into the water. It was a soft throw and the stone landed with a plop.
I squatted down too and picked out a stone that was small and flat, throwing it in a perfect skip that made it jump over the water five times before going in.
“You were always good at that.”
“Ah, so you haven’t forgotten everything?”
“No. Not everything.” She turned her face and gave me a cold stare. “I still have memories that haunt me.”
CHAPTER 5
Questions
Willow
“I remember pain. Lots of pain.”
Solomon frowned at my words, picked up another stone, and threw it in the lake. “Pain because of your broken arm?”
This time the stone didn’t skip across the water but made a splash and disappeared. Part of me wished I could do the same and escape this confrontation with the man I had once had childish notions of spending my life with.
“My broken arm was only one of the things that hurt.” I sat back on the grass, crossing my legs in front of me. “Being on the run was painful. The endless hours of walking and running, the sleeping in the wild and getting eaten by mosquitos, the bathing in ice-cold water, and the fall where I broke my arm and got a concussion. “All I remember from those eight days is pain.”
Solomon, who had been squatting, sat down too when I continued, “I wasn’t in the same physical shape as you were. You painted a picture of lazy days swimming in rivers, roasting food over a fire pit, and snuggling at night. But that’s not what happened.”
“I told you we’d have to get away from them first.”
My eyebrows rose up. “As if the grown-ups would have ever stopped searching for us.”
“If you hadn’t gotten hurt, Willow, we could have hidden for as long as we wanted to. The woods here are endless and with time everyone would have assumed us dead.”
My answer was a low sneer, “Which is exactly what we would have been.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Come on, Solo. You’re no longer a naïve child. We would have been miserable and starving as soon as the winter set in. We would have missed our friends and family.”
Solomon looked down. “I didn’t have a family to miss.”
“Well, I did, and you took me away from them.”
“We said that we’d start our own family. Don’t you remember?”
I widened my eyes at him and made a “pst” sound. “Do you even hear how crazy that sounds? Giving birth in the forest with no doctors around. How is that protecting me… or our child for that matter?”
Solomon was tearing at his hair and had his elbows on his knees looking down. “I already apologized. What I did was wrong.”
“So why did you do it?”
“Because I panicked. You were going back to the Motherlands and I thought I’d never see you again. Maybe if Lord Khan hadn’t changed the rules, but with the new bridal law we couldn’t marry until you were twenty-one. You were fifteen and I knew if we had to spend another six years apart, the chance of you changing your mind and not wanting to marry me was huge. Motlanders don’t like Northlanders and once you lived there long enough, I’d lose you. The thought of never seeing you again, Willow… it…” Solomon sighed and trailed off. “It made me fucking desperate.”
I’d known this part and yet hearing him say it mattered to me. For a long while we didn’t speak. I lay down flat on my back, closing my eyes and soaking up the morning sun.
I should get up and walk away. I hate Solo and nothing he can say will change that, my mind argued, but my body didn’t want to leave. Despite the long silence between us, being close to this giant of a man brought me a sense of peace that I hadn’t felt in a long time. It puzzled me that after all these years he didn’t feel like a stranger. The only explanation I could come up with was that I had idolized him for three years while I was at an impressionable age.
“I should thank you.”
Solomon’s mutter made me squint one eye open. “For what?”
“You saved my life.” He rolled onto his stomach and plucked at the grass. “If you hadn’t pleaded for the soldiers not to kill me when they found us, I would be dead now.”
“That’s right. You can add that to my long list of painful and traumatic moments with you. I was terrified.”
“You were brave, Willow. Remember how you stepped in front of one of their guns?”
“I remember you pulling me away and not understanding that I was trying to save you.”
Solomon smiled at me and it made me look away. I couldn’t afford to let my front down around him. His smile had once had the power to make me turn my back on everyone else in my life. My anger was my shield and I held on to it for dear life.
“It wasn’t that I didn’t understand what you were doing. I just couldn’t allow you to put yourself in danger because of me.”
“What happened after I was sent back to the Motherlands? Did you get punished?”
“Of course.” His voice remained flat, but his face hardened and his fingers curled into his palms. It was clear that my question had brought back memories he preferred to forget, but this wasn’t some cozy talk and I didn’t care if my questions made him uncomfortable.
I gave him a sideways glance. “How bad?”
Solomon intertwined his fingers, bending them backward with cracking sounds. “First, Hunter attacked me when I tried to apologize to him. I assume you know about that. Later, Magni wanted me to promise that I wouldn’t seek you out again. When I refused, he beat me half to death.”
I lowered my brow. “What’s wrong with you Nmen? When did violence ever solve anything?”
Some new light entered Solomon’s gaze. “Magni’s partially deaf in one ear because of that fight we had. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“He says he wasn’t trying to kill me, but it sure felt that way.”
I tilted my head. “That’s why I never heard from you. He beat you into submission.”
Solomon turned to look at me with his brow lowered. “I was seventeen, and I stood my ground like a pigheaded fool. It cost me a week in the hospital. After that they placed me under a restraining order.”
“What does that mean?” I pushed up on my elbows, giving him another sideways glance, but seeing Solomon’s bulging triceps stretching the sleeve of his t-shirt, I averted my eyes again.
“I was banned from entering the Motherlands or contacting you in any way. Even if you had come to the Northlands I couldn’t have gone near you. The restraining order was basically their way of honoring your wish not to kill me, but only as long as I kept away from you.”
“Then how come you can talk to me now?”
“Khan lifted the restraining order.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
I was quiet for a long time, thinking about all the times I’d wondered why he never reached out to me.
“You said you had questions.”
I nodded. “It’s all a blur to me. Maybe it was my way of processing it, you know, to block it from my memory. But over the years I’ve had nightmares and I’m not sure what’s real or fantasy anymore.”
He waited for me to ask a question.
“Solomon, did we…” I paused, not sure how to phrase it. “Did we have sex?”
His face stiffened. “You don’t remember?”
“No. I have memories, but they’re unclear and foggy. I know we slept together for a week under the stars and there was a lot of kissing, but did we go all the way?”
A
s if I had offended him, Solomon pushed up from the grass and walked away from me.
“You said you’d answer any question I had,” I called after him and he stopped and turned.
“Let me get this straight. You don’t remember if we slept together but you have nightmares about it. Is that it?”
“Yes.”
“The thought of being with me wakes you up feeling scared?” His voice was strained, with gravel in his timbre as if it hurt to talk. “Or is it disgusted?”
“Just answer my question. Did we sleep together?”
“What do you think?”
“I think we did.”
Solo rubbed his forehead, his jaw tense.
“Hey there.”
We both turned around to see Mila coming toward us.
“I brought you some lunch.”
“I’m not hungry,” Solomon muttered.
“Suit yourself, but you’ve been down here for a while and it’s hot. At least drink something. Archer says people get grumpy when they are hungry or dehydrated.”
“Thank you, Mila.” I got up to take the basket.
“Willow, are you okay?” Mila whispered.
I gave her a reassuring smile. “We’ll be done soon.”
“Okay.” She brushed a hand over my shoulder and gave me a concerned smile before she left.
Solo and I didn’t talk until Mila was gone again and by then I’d opened the basket and was popping water balls into my mouth.
“You want some?” I asked. “There’s some fruit and cake too.”
Solo came over and picked up an apple. “So, tell me, what else do you have nightmares about me doing to you?”
“Taking me away from my family.”
He took a noisy bite of the apple.
“Why won’t you tell me if we had sex?”
“You know as much as I do, Willow. You’re just suppressing it.”
“So, help me remember.”
“Why would I when you’ve done such a good job at blocking what happened between us?” Solomon took another big bite and threw the apple into the lake.
“Okay, then tell me about the fall. I remember us being chased by a bear for days; is that why I fell?”
He scrunched up his face. “No, we weren’t chased by a bear for days. Geez, you’ve really got it all mixed up, don’t you?”
