Eight weeks.
That’s all we had left until my evaluations. And Max and I, armed with this odd new intimacy that Tairn and its aftermath had created in us, surged forward toward our goal with renewed focus. Our training days lasted ten, twelve, sixteen, eighteen hours, or as long as it took until one or both of us collapsed into an armchair in exhaustion.
Something had clicked into place. And neither of us seemed to be able to identify what it was, but we both saw it in each other — in the growing ease of our conversation, in the unspoken understandings of our training sessions, in the safety and silence of our evenings at home.
Our life settled into a pulse, a heartbeat, a collection of breaths. In the silence between them, I memorized the cadence of Max’s barefoot steps padding down the hallways at night, the way one single muscle in his throat twitched when he was stressed, the whisper of a laugh that always followed one of my quips (however unfunny). I learned that one side of his smile always started first — the left side, a fraction of a second before the right — and that he loved ginger tea above all else and the list of things he wasn’t made for.
And, in turn, he quietly memorized me, too. I knew he did, because one day I realized he had long ago stopped
asking me how I took my tea and that we mysteriously always had a never-ending stock of raspberries, even though I knew he didn’t like them. And he would ask me, in quiet ways, about my life — always in the sleepy moments at the end of the day. Tell me about Serel. Tell me about your mother. Tell me about Nyzerene.
And for my part, I did the opposite: treaded carefully along the edges of questions with raw answers, pulling my fingers away from seeping, carefully hidden wounds. Max’s past still held so many mysteries. But as much as my curiosity nagged at me, I saw those shrouded winces. I understood the value of the relief — the mercy — in leaving them unasked.
In this mutual understanding, we became each other’s stability. On the nights when my nightmares woke me, prodded me out into the clean air of the garden, he always found himself mysteriously restless, taking a walk through the night and offering me some quiet company.
My Aran improved dramatically. Still, every so often, I would unleash a string of truly nonsensical words that butchered every conceivable rule of grammar. On one particularly exhausting day, I committed one such crime when asking Max where the Stratagram ink had gone. (“Has gone where… black water?”)
Max hadn’t so much as paused as he reached into a drawer and produced the ink. At Sammerin’s look of somewhat horrified amazement, he shrugged and said, “After a while, you become fluent in Tisaanah-speak.” And we looked at each other and exchanged a small, proud smile.
The days slipped by, one after another, blending together. Days stretched longer, then curled shorter. A bite nipped into the air, warning of distant autumn. The garden grew wild and overgrown, vines snaking over each other, blossoms curling over cobblestone pathways in beautiful, feral greed.
We practiced amongst those flowers one crisp morning, one week away from my evaluation. I made some terrible joke and, in response, Max winced and shook his head. “Awful. Just awful.”
“You say this now,” I retorted, twisting air between my hands. “But what will you ever do when I’m gone?”
I meant it as a preening joke. But as soon as the words left my mouth, they landed like a thrown brick, striking us both with a blunt, unforgiving impact.
Max’s grin had stilled and wilted. One wrinkle formed between his eyebrows. We stared at each other in startled silence, something palpable and indescribable thickening in the inches between us as realization careened through us both.
We had carved out these small, intimate spaces for each other in our lives, and by some miracle of human denial, neither of us had thought about what that would inevitably mean. Now, for the first time, I realized the breadth of the gaping absence we would leave in each other.
That, at least, he would leave in me.
“I suppose,” he said at last, nudging a crawling vine with his toe, “I’ll finally get this garden back under control.”
I shut my mouth and feigned sudden interest in something on the ground, fighting an odd emptiness that suddenly caved in my chest. I had been so singularly focused on where I was going that I hadn’t stopped to think about what I would be leaving behind. The thought of it filled me with words I wasn’t ready to say.
