Page 39 of Elanie & the Empath
Cave. What was a cave? It was a word. But what were words? And why did everyone use so many of them? Different languages, different dialects, different ways to say the same things. Or to not say anything at all.
Nobody ever said what they really felt. Nobody ever told the truth. Maybe this was why there were so many words, so the entire Known Universe would never run out of ways tonottell each other how they really felt.
There should only be twenty words.Maybe fifty. Fifty was all any being should ever need.
I pulled my shirt away from my chest, suddenly sweating and unbearably hot.
“Are you all right?” Elanie asked, her hair whipping around her head like a halo of spun sugar.
“I’m good!” I shouted back at her, smiling, feeling my teeth beneath my lips. Teeth were weird. Why did we haveso many of them? Every species I’d ever known, heads justfullof teeth. I tried to run my tongue over my own teeth, but my mouth was too dry. “Thirsty, though,” I called out. “And hot!” Pulling my foot up out of the snow, I shook the clunky shackle around my ankle. “I think I need to take these off. They’re too hot. I need to cool off.”
“Do not touch those,” she snapped, marching back to me, her steps crunching in the snow like cymbals crashing between my ears.
Stumbling toward her, I sighed. “Look at you. You don’t have too many teeth. Your teeth are perfect, like pearls. Like little baby pearls. And your eyes…” I pulled my hands from my pockets, wanting to cradle her face with them. But my fingers wouldn’t open. “Your eyes are so beautiful, Elanie. So rich and bottomless. Like caramel. Like coffee. I want to drown in them.”
Grasping my hands, she rubbed them between hers. “Stars above, Sem. You’re freezing. I think you might be going hypothermic.”
Hypothermic.While she held my hands to her chest, I realized that I knew that word. My body was losing heat faster than I could generate it. Advanced stages caused vasodilation in the extremities, which led to a sensation of overheating. Which I was suffering from now. But it was just another word. Only a word. Only?—
Understanding rammed into me so hard I staggered a step. “It’s your eyes,” I gasped. “Your eyes are the reason why there are so many words. I was wrong. I need more than fifty. I need them all. Your eyes deserve all the words.”
Her frown was a tragedy. She should never frown. She should never worry. Never be sad or stressed or anything but perfectly safe and warm and happy.
“What happened to your blanket?” she demanded, searching the snow around us.
“Wind took it.”
Cursing under her breath, she undid the buttons on her pajama top and slipped it off her shoulders.
I nearly fell to my knees.
My planet didn’t have goddesses, only Saints. But I was a believer now. Because the woman standing half naked before me while the windblown snow flurried around her was a goddess. And I wanted to worship.
“Magnificent,” I whispered, then I closed my eyes when her gentle fingers wrapped her shirt around my head. I felt swaddled, blessed, immersed in her delicious cinnamon-vanilla scent. “You’re magnificent.”
“You’re delirious,” she returned.
“Am not,” I insisted. “Just need to lie down in the snow and cool off. Just for a minute.”
“Dammit, Sem.” She rubbed her hands over mine again.
I barely felt it. I barely felt anything at all.
Interlacing our fingers, she pulled me along behind her like a child. Or a pet. I didn’t mind. I would be her pet. Her little puppy, jumping up when she came home, carrying her slippers to her in my mouth, making sure she never felt alone.
“Walk, Sem. Keep walking, as fast as you can.”
“Okay. I will. But I’m so tired. I’m so—” A jaw-cracking yawn cut me off.
“Walk!” she barked, letting go of my hand and moving behind me, shoving me onward.
“Okay, okay. You don’t have to be so mean about it.”
“Please, Sem.” Her voice was softer now, gentler. Like the breeze lifting off the waves. The kind that carried mist up onto the shore, onto my cheeks. That was always my favoritekind of breeze. My favorite kind of Elanie breeze. “Please walk.”
And so I did, one foot in front of the other, Elanie urging me on when I slowed.
“We’re almost there,” she promised me again and again.
