Of Dreams and Rust - Sarah Fine Page 0,3

over his skin. I’ve memorized every flaw. It makes the perfect parts that much more exquisite, but as soon as that thought surfaces, I try to drown it. It would be utterly scandalous for me to be alone with a man, touching him like this with no one to supervise, but my father trusts us both. Bo is a patient right now, nothing more.

It is impossible to think of him as nothing more. But so is thinking of him any other way.

I remind myself to be like my father, to think like my father, and my movements harden. My hands become instruments, my thoughts technical . . . but with shamefully ragged edges. Bo clutches at his blanket with both hands. His face glitters with pinpoint beads of sweat. I’m hurting him, but Father said it would hurt if I did it right. What he didn’t say: how my stomach would knot, how my eyes would burn, how my precision would be worn away by the desire to smooth back Bo’s damp hair and kiss his forehead.

“You could take off your mask,” I tell him after a few minutes. It must be uncomfortable when he sweats like this.

“No,” he says in a choked voice. “I don’t want to.”

“I see only the parts you allow me to see,” I say, a warped echo, an accusation that I for once do not hold back.

“How can you possibly think it’s the same?” he whispers. “You hide beauty from me. The only thing I hide from you is ugliness.” A tear suddenly slips free from the corner of his tightly closed eye, and he swipes it away as his face twists with anger and humiliation. I bow my head because my own tears are about to betray me as well.

Bo sits up abruptly. “I’ve had enough.”

He says it so sharply that I freeze. For a moment there is only silence and stillness, but then he tips my chin up with his callused fingertips. I wonder if my eyes are red like his, if his chest is as tight as mine. His mouth opens, but his words are locked inside him. We stare at each other. I don’t understand why this happens, why we make each other fall apart, why it can’t be simple and easy. But as I look into Bo’s face, half handsome and half monster, the space between us fills with all the things we do not say. The things we’ll probably never say.

His hand falls away from me, landing in his lap like a dead weight. “I’ll be out in a moment.” His voice is rough, uneven.

I move quickly, eager to give him the privacy he needs so badly right now. While he gets dressed, I set a bun on a plate for him and start a pot of water heating on a small burner he keeps on his worktable. Once the coil flares red hot, I fill a large teapot with tea leaves and set out the strainer. “Someone saw you two nights ago,” I say, longing to steer our conversation toward calmer waters, to occupy Bo’s mind with the now, the real, the things he can control.

“Where?” he calls from behind the partition.

“Have you been to the construction site?”

His metal fingers click together, driven by the jolts from muscles in his shoulder, and he steps into the open, fully clothed once more. “I needed some tools.”

“One of the foremen was still there. He told his crew to be on the lookout for you. One of them was injured by a beam yesterday and told us the story while we were splinting his arm. Some think you were just a thief, but others believe the foreman saw the Ghost.”

Bo snorts. “ ‘Just a thief.’ ” He comes over to stand next to me as I prepare our tea.

“It’s safer for everyone if that’s what they believe,” I remind him.

“I’ll be more careful,” he mumbles. “I didn’t expect anyone to be there so late.”

“They have received orders to get the slaughterhouse running earlier.”

His eye bores into mine. “You know why, don’t you?”

“Feasting season, of course.” My heart skips.

“No, because they want to make sure they have rations for our soldiers on top of the demand for meat during the feasting season. Gochan One supplied much of the beef for the central part of Itanya, and with the need to feed an army moving west, it is indispensable.”

“We are not at war.” It is a silly thing to say and I know it. We