Winterlong by Elizabeth Hand Read Free Book Online

Dr. Harrow had shown up once again with the NET , and wheeled the splintering cot from its closet, and otherwise behaved as though we were going to proceed as planned.
    “Are we ready to start?” I asked.
    She sighed again, pushed her hair behind her ears, and removed her pince-nez. “Yes, I suppose so.”
    And though her hands were steady as she initialized the BEAM , I could smell the dreamy odor of absinthium on her breath, and fear like a potent longing in her sweat.
    “Emma,” he whispers at the transom window. “Let me in.”
    The quilts piled on me muffle his voice. He calls again, louder, until I groan and sit up in bed, rubbing my eyes and glaring at the top of his head as he peeks through the narrow glass.
    From the bottom of the door echoes faint scratching, Molly’s whine. A thump. More scratching: Aidan crouched outside the room, growling through choked laughter. I drape a quilt around me and lean forward to unlatch the door.
    Molly flops onto the floor, snorting when she bumps her nose and then drooling apologetically. Behind her stumbles Aidan, shivering in his worn kimono with its tattered sleeves and belt stolen from one of my old dresses. I giggle, gesturing for him to shut the door before Father hears us in his room below.
    “It’s fucking freezing in this place,” Aidan exclaims, pinning me to the bed and pulling the quilts over our heads. “Oh, come on, dog.” Grunting, he hauls her up beside us. “My room is like Antarctica. Tierra del Fuego. The Balkhash steppes.” He punctuates his words with kisses, elbowing Molly as she tries to slobber our faces. I squirm away and straighten my nightshirt.
    “Hush. You’ll wake Father.”
    Aidan rolls his eyes and stretches against the wall. “Spare me.” Through the rents in his kimono I can see his skin, dusky in the moonlight. No one has skin like Aidan’s, except for me: not white but the palest gray, almost blue, and fine and smooth as an eggshell. People stare at us in the street, especially at Aidan. At the Academy girls stop talking when he passes, and fix me with narrowed eyes and lips pursed to mouth a question never asked.
    Aidan yawns remorselessly as a cat. Aidan is the beauty: Aidan whose gray eyes flicker green whereas mine muddy to blue in sunlight; Aidan whose long legs wrap around me and shame my own; Aidan whose hair is the purest gold, where mine is dull bronze.
    “Molly. Here. “He grabs her into his lap, groaning at her weight, and pulls me to him as well, until we huddle in the middle of the bed. Our heads knock and he points with his chin to the mirror.
    “‘Did you never see the picture of We Three ?’” he warbles. Then, shoving Molly to the floor, he takes my shoulders and pulls the quilt from me.
    “‘My father had a daughter loved a man
    As it might be perhaps, were I a woman,
    I should your lordship.’ ”
    He recites softly, in his own voice: not the deeper drone he affected when we had been paired in the play at the Academy that winter. I start to slide from bed but he holds me tighter, twisting me to face him until our foreheads touch and I know that the mirror behind us reflects a moon-lapped Rorschach and, at our feet, our snuffling mournful fool.
    “‘But died thy sister of her love, my boy?’” I whisper later, my lips brushing his neck where the hair, unfashionably long, waves to form a perfect S.
    “‘I am all the daughters of my father’s house, And all the brothers too; and yet I know not.’”
    He silences me with a kiss. Later he whispers nonsense, my name, rhyming words from our made-up language; then a long and heated silence.
    Afterward he sleeps, but I lie long awake, stroking his hair and watching the rise and fall of his slender chest. In the coldest hour he awakens and stares at me, eyes wide and black, and turning on his side he moans, then begins to cry as though his heart will break. I clench my teeth and stare at the ceiling, trying not to blink, trying not to hear or feel him