Page 37 of Sweet Silver Bells
Hunter stood, grabbing one of his t-shirts stuffed on the bottom shelf of his closet, followed by a pair of jersey shorts that fit him too snugly. He waited for guilt to hit him, to feel the blood on her hands staining his too. It never came, and that scared him more.
Where is your panic, Hunter?
“Here, you can wear this tonight. I’ll show you how the shower works in the morning,” he said, closing the distance between them and handing her the clothes.
Olivia stepped closer to him, letting the jacket she wore fall to the floor. The clothes crumpled between their bodies as she stared into his eyes, not smiling, not grimacing, but there was a light, a spark that flashed in her pupils.
“Your eyes,” he said. Lustrous, intoxicating, Hunter found himself falling into them again and again. Hot frothy espresso in a mug to greet him after being too long in the cold, ready to wrap him in warmth, in a blanket of terror and comfort, horror and kisses.
“What about them?” she breathed.
Hunter took a step back.
“You asked me what I saw in the car. It was a black hole in the ground; vines inched out, reaching, growing, threatening toswallow everything near. It felt like they were looking for me—the vines, the emptiness.”
“Hmmm.” She smiled, aloof, her gaze moving toward the ceiling as she got lost in the world that only existed in her mind. Her body bobbled, her eyelids fell closed, and she raised her chin as if she were standing in the middle of a field during a summer rainstorm. It was as if she were absorbing the environment around her, the stillness of the ceiling, and the light rapping of the wind on the shutters outside. "Maybe they were."
Olivia grabbed the clothes out of his hands with the speed of a cat, raising the shirt to her face in confusion. It would engulf her.
“Why do I have to wear this?”
“Because I’d expect more propriety from a woman born in the early nineteen hundreds,” Hunter said.
Olivia laughed in his face, her smile big and beautiful, filled with the light he would expect to see bouncing off a waterfall deep in a Scottish forest.
“It’s easy to forget that I’m not one of them,” she admitted.
“One of them?”
“One of the trees.”
Hunter put his hands over hers, gently removing the shirt. She let him, her arms dropping to her sides and waiting while he opened it from the bottom.
“Arms up,” he instructed, and she obeyed.
He slid the shirt over her head, getting her hands through the appropriate holes.
“Are trees quite scandalous then?” he smirked at his sarcasm.
“Oh yes,” she said thoughtfully. “You’d be surprised at their thoughts, communications, and rage.”
“Rage?” Hunter asked.
“Would you not have rage if you were a tree?”
He hadn’t thought about it.
Why would you think about it?
“Olivia,” Hunter said softly, opening the shorts as she stepped into them. “Can you explain again? Why did you leave the forest?”
“I thought that was clear,” she mused, now covered, the shorts barely hanging onto her hips. “You sang for me. No one’s ever sung to the trees like that before, no one’s ever come back and sung then, just for me.”
Hunter ruffled the back of his hair nervously.
“It’s not a traditionally manly trait, singing.” He laughed awkwardly, turning around. “But I used to sing to myself in the middle of the night as a kid. When I woke up scared, my parents' bedroom was far on the other side of a hallway. In the night, it felt like that hallway led somewhere else.”
He got lost in the memory, lost in that too-large house with the people that were supposed to protect him so far from reach.
