i'm here, i'm here to take you (Ib, Ib/Garry + Mary)
Title: i’m here, i’m here to take you
Fandom: Ib
Characters: Ib, Marry, Garry somewhat (Ib/Garry)
Rating: idk soft R, maybe
Disclaimer: Ib and its characters do not belong to me.
Summary: One summer, Ib tries to remember what she’s forgotten.
Word Count: 3651
A/N: Uses both “The Forgotten Portrait” and “Together, Forever” endings.
The art gallery closes forever in the summer. Ib, who has spent years walking those halls, the tap of her shoes on the smooth white floor so familiar it could serve as a lullaby, who has thrown out algebra and biology to make room for the names of paintings, comes every day. She stands for hours in front of the same piece, the one she always seeks out first and lingers with when she leaves.
“You shouldn’t waste your youthful summer here,” the movers tell her, but they don’t know, they haven’t seen the seasons pass while she stands here, haven’t seen her sprout from a quiet and wide-eyed child to this: still quiet and curious but taller, hair longer, features more defined but still dusted with wonder, slender limbs and movements like a solitary doe in the woods at dawn.
She’s memorized every inch of “The Forgotten Portrait” by now. She sees it when her eyes close. She doesn’t know what draws her to the man in ragged clothes but she loses track of time standing there, admiring his face and asking herself if he is sad or sleeping; and she doesn’t know why she’s never been able to shake the insistent feeling that she’s the one who is guilty of forgetting.
Oblivious to the boxes being built around twisted statues and the slow increase of empty spaces on the wall, she mourns for the loss of him. The others she will release when her mind is too full, but she will cling to him. She will remember.
When the last day comes and everything but him is packed away, the elderly gallery owner makes her an offer and she doesn’t notice she’s crying until she tastes the salt in the corner of her mouth.
[--]
She can’t decide where to hang the portrait. Her home is big, rich with colors and art and tidy perfection. He will fit in anywhere but where does he belong?
“With me,” she answers her own silent question with a whisper and a faint pink blush she can’t explain. And perhaps some of her decision is selfishness but the rest, she knows, is fear.
Mary steals. Their parents tell her she’s paranoid, that she’s most likely misplaced her belongings or maybe her sister has borrowed whatever has gone missing but certainly she will return it. Books of poetry, photographs she’d tacked to the wall, gifts from distant relatives-all have a habit of vanishing. When they were younger, Mary made dolls. Blue dolls with red bead eyes and crudely stitched smiles. Sometimes, Ib would find her things hidden inside of them, their doll stomachs fat with candy and lip balm or the jewelry their mother gave her.
She comforts herself with the fact that “The Forgotten Portrait” is far too big to fit inside a doll, but her heart still leaps to her throat when Mary comes into her room and sees it propped up against the wall.
“You actually bought that,” she says, her brows drawn in tight annoyance. “I can’t believe it.”
She sits on Ib’s bed with a huff and her canary-yellow curls bouncing. Mary has always been beautiful in a way Ib never hopes to achieve. A beauty both classic and cruel, warm sunshine and sharp thorns, depending on her mood. Her smile sets the earth moving and her glare stings fierce.
“You’re as pretty as a painting,” Ib told her once, and Mary pinched her skin until it purpled, then later kissed her cheek.
“At least you won’t have to drag us all out to that awful place when you want to see it.” Mary hates the gallery. She hates many things. Her love for most things is diminishing with age and there are times when her observations are made with the kind of disgust that says the world has severely disappointed her.
“But I love you, Ib,” she says every night without fail as they sit in their matching pajamas and she ties Ib’s hair back with a red ribbon. “I’ll love you forever. That’s a promise.”
[--]
For days, she doesn’t move the portrait. She opens her window to catch the rare breezes and lies with her belly pressed to the floor and her chin in her hands. She looks at him. She has high aesthetic standards when it comes to boys and she blames him. She can’t see his eyes but his lashes are long and she likes the way they fall on his skin, skin that is the same sort of flawless as her sister’s.
His mouth is set in an expression Ib’s never been able to identify. Sometimes she sees so much in the line of his lips, can pick out sorrow, longing, regret, hope, peace, pain-separate or all at once in a jumble of emotions that threaten to squeeze her heart until it bursts. Sometimes she sees nothing at all.
She hasn’t touched him, not directly; she’s afraid of damaging him. But her fingers itch, and he’s hers now, in a way, so she tells herself it’s all right, he won’t mind. One hand reaches out, index finger seeking while the others curl away in polite restraint. Her fingertip just brushes the stroke of his complicated mouth and she swears she can feel the touch all the way to her toes.
“What are you doing?”
Her hand drops. “Nothing.”
She listens to her sister’s socked feet come closer and feels the weight settle on the small of her back when Mary straddles her. Ib folds her arms and lets her head rest there, with Mary’s chin perched in her dark hair. Such closeness, while an occasional nuisance in this summer heat, is nothing new. Ib can remember when they were kids, waking up in the middle of the night wrapped in Mary’s arms and legs. She never protested, never pushed her off, because there would be such happy relief in Mary’s eyes in the morning, like she’d expected to be somewhere else, somewhere frightening.
“Spider hair,” Mary says, looking at the painting. Ib thinks his hair is lovely and imagines it feeling lavender soft, but she doesn’t say so. “What do you like so much about this, huh? It’s just a boring painting.”
“I don’t know,” and she doesn’t, really. She can’t explain this tug, this need.
“Ib,” Mary whines into the top of her head. “Let’s go out.”
When they fit together like this, Ib can feel the press of Mary’s breasts into the back of her shoulders. They’re bigger than Ib’s, rounder, and they used to be a source of great pride for her before she grew tired of them. Ib remembers the excitement; Mary’s first bra was blue and when she could fill it, her grin was moon-bright.
“Ib, look!” She laughed, blue lace hugging her new rosy flesh. “Look what’s happening to me! Isn’t it amazing?”
Mary’s thighs are squeezing her now, punishment for ignoring her plea. “Ib! Stop staring at this weirdo and come out with me!”
“Okay.”
Her agreement has Mary cheering, triumphant, as she jumps up and flounces out of the room. Ib stands to follow, faithful, but she has to look again and she’s stilled by what she sees. She knows this painting, knows it as well as her own reflection, and it’s different. The change is miniscule but it’s a change and that’s all that matters because paintings do not change and this one has.
His mouth has moved, just the tiniest bit, as if coaxed into more of a smile by the touch of her fingertip.
[--]
He doesn’t change again for weeks.
Ib keeps him sitting in that one spot on her floor, inexplicably afraid of disturbing his next disturbance. She never asks herself if she’s imagining things, if maybe his mouth was always threatening to smile and she was just remembering it wrong. Somehow, she finds it easier to believe it’s real, even if the reason is unexplainable.
She doesn’t point it out to Mary. She’s not keeping her door locked at night and some days Mary doesn’t even look at him, but when she does her gaze is hard and she asks “Aren’t you going to hang him somewhere?” in a voice that makes the air taste of resentment, and Ib still worries.
Mary’s prone to nasty bouts of jealousy, the kind that keeps Ib’s friends from coming over or inviting her out on weeknights. Mary went to dinner with a group of them once; once, and never again. If Ib listens to the deepest corners of her mind she can hear the way her friend screamed-high, pained, a wounded lamb-when Mary’s fork stabbed her in the cheek.
“You’ll forgive me, right, Ib?” She asked on their walk home, her hands wringing and knuckles white. “Because I’m your sister. And you have to choose me over anyone else. Right?”
Ib loves her sister. But she loves this painting, too. Sometimes, she thinks she’d hang herself rather than make a choice; but that’s silly, isn’t it? Still, she’s almost sure she means it.
Because he isn’t just a painting now. Perhaps he never was. She doesn’t know what he is, but she knows it’s something more.
She wakes early and stays up late, waiting for when she knows Mary is sleeping. She sits cross-legged in front of the portrait and touches him. Ginger touches that meet textured canvas for less than a second, just long enough for the lightning bolt to strike and leave her nerves tingling for an hour. She touches his long hands and tattered coat. The unruly hair, the slope of his cheeks and point of his chin. His nose she pictures wrinkling when he laughs too loud.
Her fingers visit his eyes last-the closed lids. She wishes she could see behind them. She wonders what color his eyes are, wonders if they’re the kind of eyes people talk about, the kind someone can get lost in.
They’re the next to move. Slow like molasses, it takes a day and a half before she notices the difference. The smallest sliver of white showing beneath the fan of his lashes. He’s trying to open them, she realizes with excitement nibbling at her spine. He’s trying to look at her.
[--]
This is the summer their mother asks them about boys.
“It’s about that time, you know,” she tells them. “Boys and girls taking notice of each other. And the two of you being so lovely, you’re bound to gain admirers. But make sure you don’t take kisses from just any boy! Your first should go to the most special person you can imagine.”
They’ve already had their first kiss, but they don’t tell her that.
Mary used to like playing house. “You be the dad,” she would say, handing Ib one of her dolls. “And I’ll be the mom.” The dolls would kiss each other when the dad left for work and again when he returned home, before the mom would inevitably kill him with a knife during dinner.
But Mary’s curiosity outgrew dolls and one day she asked Ib for a kiss.
“It’s okay,” she told her, “because we’re sisters! And we love each other, don’t we?”
Their lips fitted together gently, Mary’s hands holding Ib’s face with sweetness, until they fell apart laughing. Embarrassed, without really knowing why.
“Ib,” their mother asks, “are there any boys that have caught your interest?”
She says no, but it feels like a lie.
[--]
It isn’t long before the dreams start. They don’t come with the same gradual leisureliness as the portrait slowly changing in her bedroom; they flood her, assaulting, stuffing her head night after night. Most are nightmares. Shadows clawing at her ankle. Glass breaking. Books with words she knows but suddenly can’t read. She wanders in mazes, knowing something follows her, thinking she will die there. She’s trapped in rooms with doors that won’t open. Switches and keyholes and things that only seem threatening in her sleep.
Others are different. Others are nicer, softer, lit like scenes in romantic films. In those dreams, there’s no urgency, no rush to get free. She feels safe. Because he is there, in those dreams, the man from her painting. She doesn’t remember them as well, as often, which she finds terribly unfair.
But she does remember how steadily her heart beats when he’s there. He smiles at her like he knows her, like he’s missed her. Like he loves her. He reaches his hand out and her fingers dance over his palm before lacing with his.
One morning, she wakes with a slip of the dream caught in her hand, his voice in her head. It’s light, tender, when he says, “We’re going to have macarons together someday. Don’t forget, okay?”
She runs to Mary’s room, shakes her awake, demands to know what macarons are and if they’ve ever had any.
It rains outside her window but the night still drips heat and she lies restless beneath the sheets. There’s a cramp in her gut and she dreads the sunrise because she knows she will be bleeding. It takes hours for her to fall asleep. But when she does, he’s waiting for her and everything unpleasant dissipates with the gentle, lifting touch of his hand to her chin.
When he kisses her, it feels so infinitely different from what she and Mary did that she almost wants to give it another name, mark it as another gesture entirely. The heat and the pressure in her abdomen return, but even they have changed into an excitement that sets her writhing. His embrace surrounds her and she falls back, brings him with her, tastes him sweet like honey on her tongue. He trembles and his hair is soft when she strokes it. She can feel the both of them unraveling, coming so undone she can’t tell if she’s opening up to draw him in or if he’s growing to encompass all of her.
“Ib,” he whispers her name to her cheek as if it is the most important secret in the world, and he caresses the nape of her neck, her elbow, her thigh. “Ib.”
She calls out to him, his own name spilling out of her from somewhere she can’t reach by herself, and he answers her with a happy sigh. Then he moves and she feels tiny explosions that span the length of her being, from the blush in her cheeks to the curl of her toes.
Waking, she has to bite her tongue to keep from screaming. One of Mary’s dolls, hidden in the darkness save for the red eyes, is sitting on her chest. Its beaded stare seems hard, accusatory, and she can almost hear it threatening to tell someone. She doesn’t stop to wonder how it got there. She pushes it off, along with the bedsheets, and goes to the painting. The moon is hidden tonight so she can’t see him, not really, but she doesn’t need to. Her fingers ghost without making contact, space kept between her and his face, his hands, and she realizes she’s aching.
She’s forgotten his name.
[--]
The day she can finally see his eyes is one of the happiest days of her life.
They’re a deeper shade of purple than his hair and they hold the same knot of emotions that his mouth did, before it smiled. She wants to untangle that knot, or at least loosen it. She wants to solve all of his pain and tell him everything will be fine once she figures it out.
She locks her door and spends the afternoon looking at him look at her. Now she can believe herself, believe that it was just sleep all this time. He’s been asleep, waiting for her, but he’s awake now, at last. He’s awake and he’s ready for her and she’s ready for him.
“I love you,” she tells him.
And if she closes her eyes and leans in when all else is quiet, she swears she can hear a pulse.
[--]
“Ah, the flower shop! Ib, I love the flower shop!”
While other treats in the world have lost their flavor, flowers continue to enthrall Mary. Ib watches her turn into a giddy child once more, skipping from daisies to tulips, twirling around geraniums, giggling over orchids.
“After Ib, I love flowers most of all! Did you know that, Ib?”
Ib nods, but cannot be distracted.
Last night, she dreamt of empty corridors. She walked them while they twisted and turned, led to dead ends and holes in the ground. Beneath the nice shoes she hasn’t worn since childhood, the bare floors were then speckled with something small, thin and delicate and blue. The further she walked, the more she found, until the floor disappeared beneath a carpet of blue petals.
And now she stands before a grand display of roses, half-listening to the rhymes Mary composes for the peonies and sunflowers. There are so many and she looks over each great cluster. Red, white, pink, yellow, orange, tiny buds, wide blossoms. All beautiful, but none of them blue.
“Do you grow blue roses here?” she asks, and the shopkeeper shakes his head.
“Roses don’t grow blue,” he says. “Not naturally.”
“Ib, don’t look so sad!” Mary skips ahead of her on the way home, turns and walks backward, holding her large bouquet out between them. “Look at all these flowers I got! I think I’ll give this one to Mother… And this-wouldn’t this be nice in my hair? And see, blue is okay but see these yellow and red roses? I think they’re much prettier! Don’t you, Ib?”
Ib nods, but cannot shake the feeling that she’s failed somehow.
[--]
When his hand begins to move, she can’t hold it in any longer.
Sitting in front of the portrait, Ib watches him and not Mary, who is lying on her back in Ib’s bed. The flowers are dying by now, but she holds a wilted red rose in her hand and plays her favorite game.
“Ib loves me,” she chants. “Ib loves me not.” She lets each petal fall onto her face. “Ib loves me,” landing on the bridge of her nose. “Ib loves me not,” between her lips. “Ib, this isn’t looking good for you!”
Ib hears the warning and knows what Mary wants. It’s been like this for as long as she can remember. Despite knowing the stem trick, whenever Mary’s game ends with “Ib loves me not”, she fakes a heartbreak fit for Shakespeare. She throws herself to the ground. She pounds her small fists to the wall. She punches Ib’s arms, pinches her sides, pulls her hair, until Ib holds her and pats her head. Until she says, “Ib loves you.”
Mary whines her name now, but Ib doesn’t look away. With each passing day, she’s grown impatient, nervous, afraid she won’t know what she needs to do, she won’t remember what she’s forgotten, she’ll miss a new piece to this puzzle. She keeps a dream journal and she only blinks when her eyes sting; she can’t miss anything.
And then she sees it. Before, she always saw him after his change, the moment passed. This time, she sees it happen. The paint spread from his shoulder to his wrist seems to blur all at once, and all it takes is a second, and his arm moves. It’s a tiny move, inconsequential to someone who doesn’t know him, hasn’t watched him for an entire summer and not just a summer, really, years-but she can tell what he’s doing, what he’s trying to do.
He’s reaching for her.
She gasps, “Mary,” she can’t help it, she’s close to bursting and she doesn’t know why she’s not afraid but she isn’t, and she grabs at the folds of Mary’s skirt with one hand and points with the other. “Mary, look.”
“Ib loves me not.”
[--]
On the last day of summer, Ib gets a call from the flower shop.
“We ordered blue roses the day after you came in,” they tell her. “They’ve just come in.”
She runs there, but it doesn’t feel like running. It’s much closer to floating, she thinks.
That morning, she sat with her hand held out for the man in the portrait. She doesn’t know why, or how, but she sensed him straining, trying, but he wasn’t close enough, not yet. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll be here.”
She’ll wait. She’ll do anything, anything for him. Anything to make up for forgetting. Anything that will help her, finally, remember.
She buys every blue rose. She holds them to her nose and wonders if they smell like him. But when she gets home, all she smells is the smoke.
The thorns scrape her palms when she drops the roses and they’re bleeding when she reaches her room. Mary sits on her bed with a doll in her lap, its stomach ripped open; her fingers play with a lighter. Her face is dead, hollow, like she isn’t even real.
Ib cannot see him anymore. His open eyes, his smiling mouth, his reaching hand, they’re all lost in the flames. Pieces of him tear away and singe her floor, her wall, and someday she will see those dark spots and not know what caused them.
There’s a scream bottled in her throat and it’s useless but she lets it out anyway, and the scream is his name.
[--]
“I love you, Ib,” Mary says, several nights later, as they sit in their matching pajamas and she ties Ib’s hair back with a red ribbon. “I’ll love you forever. That’s a promise.”
“Ib loves you,” Ib answers, a soft breath.
She isn’t certain that she means it. But she can’t remember why.
Fandom: Ib
Characters: Ib, Marry, Garry somewhat (Ib/Garry)
Rating: idk soft R, maybe
Disclaimer: Ib and its characters do not belong to me.
Summary: One summer, Ib tries to remember what she’s forgotten.
Word Count: 3651
A/N: Uses both “The Forgotten Portrait” and “Together, Forever” endings.
The art gallery closes forever in the summer. Ib, who has spent years walking those halls, the tap of her shoes on the smooth white floor so familiar it could serve as a lullaby, who has thrown out algebra and biology to make room for the names of paintings, comes every day. She stands for hours in front of the same piece, the one she always seeks out first and lingers with when she leaves.
“You shouldn’t waste your youthful summer here,” the movers tell her, but they don’t know, they haven’t seen the seasons pass while she stands here, haven’t seen her sprout from a quiet and wide-eyed child to this: still quiet and curious but taller, hair longer, features more defined but still dusted with wonder, slender limbs and movements like a solitary doe in the woods at dawn.
She’s memorized every inch of “The Forgotten Portrait” by now. She sees it when her eyes close. She doesn’t know what draws her to the man in ragged clothes but she loses track of time standing there, admiring his face and asking herself if he is sad or sleeping; and she doesn’t know why she’s never been able to shake the insistent feeling that she’s the one who is guilty of forgetting.
Oblivious to the boxes being built around twisted statues and the slow increase of empty spaces on the wall, she mourns for the loss of him. The others she will release when her mind is too full, but she will cling to him. She will remember.
When the last day comes and everything but him is packed away, the elderly gallery owner makes her an offer and she doesn’t notice she’s crying until she tastes the salt in the corner of her mouth.
[--]
She can’t decide where to hang the portrait. Her home is big, rich with colors and art and tidy perfection. He will fit in anywhere but where does he belong?
“With me,” she answers her own silent question with a whisper and a faint pink blush she can’t explain. And perhaps some of her decision is selfishness but the rest, she knows, is fear.
Mary steals. Their parents tell her she’s paranoid, that she’s most likely misplaced her belongings or maybe her sister has borrowed whatever has gone missing but certainly she will return it. Books of poetry, photographs she’d tacked to the wall, gifts from distant relatives-all have a habit of vanishing. When they were younger, Mary made dolls. Blue dolls with red bead eyes and crudely stitched smiles. Sometimes, Ib would find her things hidden inside of them, their doll stomachs fat with candy and lip balm or the jewelry their mother gave her.
She comforts herself with the fact that “The Forgotten Portrait” is far too big to fit inside a doll, but her heart still leaps to her throat when Mary comes into her room and sees it propped up against the wall.
“You actually bought that,” she says, her brows drawn in tight annoyance. “I can’t believe it.”
She sits on Ib’s bed with a huff and her canary-yellow curls bouncing. Mary has always been beautiful in a way Ib never hopes to achieve. A beauty both classic and cruel, warm sunshine and sharp thorns, depending on her mood. Her smile sets the earth moving and her glare stings fierce.
“You’re as pretty as a painting,” Ib told her once, and Mary pinched her skin until it purpled, then later kissed her cheek.
“At least you won’t have to drag us all out to that awful place when you want to see it.” Mary hates the gallery. She hates many things. Her love for most things is diminishing with age and there are times when her observations are made with the kind of disgust that says the world has severely disappointed her.
“But I love you, Ib,” she says every night without fail as they sit in their matching pajamas and she ties Ib’s hair back with a red ribbon. “I’ll love you forever. That’s a promise.”
[--]
For days, she doesn’t move the portrait. She opens her window to catch the rare breezes and lies with her belly pressed to the floor and her chin in her hands. She looks at him. She has high aesthetic standards when it comes to boys and she blames him. She can’t see his eyes but his lashes are long and she likes the way they fall on his skin, skin that is the same sort of flawless as her sister’s.
His mouth is set in an expression Ib’s never been able to identify. Sometimes she sees so much in the line of his lips, can pick out sorrow, longing, regret, hope, peace, pain-separate or all at once in a jumble of emotions that threaten to squeeze her heart until it bursts. Sometimes she sees nothing at all.
She hasn’t touched him, not directly; she’s afraid of damaging him. But her fingers itch, and he’s hers now, in a way, so she tells herself it’s all right, he won’t mind. One hand reaches out, index finger seeking while the others curl away in polite restraint. Her fingertip just brushes the stroke of his complicated mouth and she swears she can feel the touch all the way to her toes.
“What are you doing?”
Her hand drops. “Nothing.”
She listens to her sister’s socked feet come closer and feels the weight settle on the small of her back when Mary straddles her. Ib folds her arms and lets her head rest there, with Mary’s chin perched in her dark hair. Such closeness, while an occasional nuisance in this summer heat, is nothing new. Ib can remember when they were kids, waking up in the middle of the night wrapped in Mary’s arms and legs. She never protested, never pushed her off, because there would be such happy relief in Mary’s eyes in the morning, like she’d expected to be somewhere else, somewhere frightening.
“Spider hair,” Mary says, looking at the painting. Ib thinks his hair is lovely and imagines it feeling lavender soft, but she doesn’t say so. “What do you like so much about this, huh? It’s just a boring painting.”
“I don’t know,” and she doesn’t, really. She can’t explain this tug, this need.
“Ib,” Mary whines into the top of her head. “Let’s go out.”
When they fit together like this, Ib can feel the press of Mary’s breasts into the back of her shoulders. They’re bigger than Ib’s, rounder, and they used to be a source of great pride for her before she grew tired of them. Ib remembers the excitement; Mary’s first bra was blue and when she could fill it, her grin was moon-bright.
“Ib, look!” She laughed, blue lace hugging her new rosy flesh. “Look what’s happening to me! Isn’t it amazing?”
Mary’s thighs are squeezing her now, punishment for ignoring her plea. “Ib! Stop staring at this weirdo and come out with me!”
“Okay.”
Her agreement has Mary cheering, triumphant, as she jumps up and flounces out of the room. Ib stands to follow, faithful, but she has to look again and she’s stilled by what she sees. She knows this painting, knows it as well as her own reflection, and it’s different. The change is miniscule but it’s a change and that’s all that matters because paintings do not change and this one has.
His mouth has moved, just the tiniest bit, as if coaxed into more of a smile by the touch of her fingertip.
[--]
He doesn’t change again for weeks.
Ib keeps him sitting in that one spot on her floor, inexplicably afraid of disturbing his next disturbance. She never asks herself if she’s imagining things, if maybe his mouth was always threatening to smile and she was just remembering it wrong. Somehow, she finds it easier to believe it’s real, even if the reason is unexplainable.
She doesn’t point it out to Mary. She’s not keeping her door locked at night and some days Mary doesn’t even look at him, but when she does her gaze is hard and she asks “Aren’t you going to hang him somewhere?” in a voice that makes the air taste of resentment, and Ib still worries.
Mary’s prone to nasty bouts of jealousy, the kind that keeps Ib’s friends from coming over or inviting her out on weeknights. Mary went to dinner with a group of them once; once, and never again. If Ib listens to the deepest corners of her mind she can hear the way her friend screamed-high, pained, a wounded lamb-when Mary’s fork stabbed her in the cheek.
“You’ll forgive me, right, Ib?” She asked on their walk home, her hands wringing and knuckles white. “Because I’m your sister. And you have to choose me over anyone else. Right?”
Ib loves her sister. But she loves this painting, too. Sometimes, she thinks she’d hang herself rather than make a choice; but that’s silly, isn’t it? Still, she’s almost sure she means it.
Because he isn’t just a painting now. Perhaps he never was. She doesn’t know what he is, but she knows it’s something more.
She wakes early and stays up late, waiting for when she knows Mary is sleeping. She sits cross-legged in front of the portrait and touches him. Ginger touches that meet textured canvas for less than a second, just long enough for the lightning bolt to strike and leave her nerves tingling for an hour. She touches his long hands and tattered coat. The unruly hair, the slope of his cheeks and point of his chin. His nose she pictures wrinkling when he laughs too loud.
Her fingers visit his eyes last-the closed lids. She wishes she could see behind them. She wonders what color his eyes are, wonders if they’re the kind of eyes people talk about, the kind someone can get lost in.
They’re the next to move. Slow like molasses, it takes a day and a half before she notices the difference. The smallest sliver of white showing beneath the fan of his lashes. He’s trying to open them, she realizes with excitement nibbling at her spine. He’s trying to look at her.
[--]
This is the summer their mother asks them about boys.
“It’s about that time, you know,” she tells them. “Boys and girls taking notice of each other. And the two of you being so lovely, you’re bound to gain admirers. But make sure you don’t take kisses from just any boy! Your first should go to the most special person you can imagine.”
They’ve already had their first kiss, but they don’t tell her that.
Mary used to like playing house. “You be the dad,” she would say, handing Ib one of her dolls. “And I’ll be the mom.” The dolls would kiss each other when the dad left for work and again when he returned home, before the mom would inevitably kill him with a knife during dinner.
But Mary’s curiosity outgrew dolls and one day she asked Ib for a kiss.
“It’s okay,” she told her, “because we’re sisters! And we love each other, don’t we?”
Their lips fitted together gently, Mary’s hands holding Ib’s face with sweetness, until they fell apart laughing. Embarrassed, without really knowing why.
“Ib,” their mother asks, “are there any boys that have caught your interest?”
She says no, but it feels like a lie.
[--]
It isn’t long before the dreams start. They don’t come with the same gradual leisureliness as the portrait slowly changing in her bedroom; they flood her, assaulting, stuffing her head night after night. Most are nightmares. Shadows clawing at her ankle. Glass breaking. Books with words she knows but suddenly can’t read. She wanders in mazes, knowing something follows her, thinking she will die there. She’s trapped in rooms with doors that won’t open. Switches and keyholes and things that only seem threatening in her sleep.
Others are different. Others are nicer, softer, lit like scenes in romantic films. In those dreams, there’s no urgency, no rush to get free. She feels safe. Because he is there, in those dreams, the man from her painting. She doesn’t remember them as well, as often, which she finds terribly unfair.
But she does remember how steadily her heart beats when he’s there. He smiles at her like he knows her, like he’s missed her. Like he loves her. He reaches his hand out and her fingers dance over his palm before lacing with his.
One morning, she wakes with a slip of the dream caught in her hand, his voice in her head. It’s light, tender, when he says, “We’re going to have macarons together someday. Don’t forget, okay?”
She runs to Mary’s room, shakes her awake, demands to know what macarons are and if they’ve ever had any.
It rains outside her window but the night still drips heat and she lies restless beneath the sheets. There’s a cramp in her gut and she dreads the sunrise because she knows she will be bleeding. It takes hours for her to fall asleep. But when she does, he’s waiting for her and everything unpleasant dissipates with the gentle, lifting touch of his hand to her chin.
When he kisses her, it feels so infinitely different from what she and Mary did that she almost wants to give it another name, mark it as another gesture entirely. The heat and the pressure in her abdomen return, but even they have changed into an excitement that sets her writhing. His embrace surrounds her and she falls back, brings him with her, tastes him sweet like honey on her tongue. He trembles and his hair is soft when she strokes it. She can feel the both of them unraveling, coming so undone she can’t tell if she’s opening up to draw him in or if he’s growing to encompass all of her.
“Ib,” he whispers her name to her cheek as if it is the most important secret in the world, and he caresses the nape of her neck, her elbow, her thigh. “Ib.”
She calls out to him, his own name spilling out of her from somewhere she can’t reach by herself, and he answers her with a happy sigh. Then he moves and she feels tiny explosions that span the length of her being, from the blush in her cheeks to the curl of her toes.
Waking, she has to bite her tongue to keep from screaming. One of Mary’s dolls, hidden in the darkness save for the red eyes, is sitting on her chest. Its beaded stare seems hard, accusatory, and she can almost hear it threatening to tell someone. She doesn’t stop to wonder how it got there. She pushes it off, along with the bedsheets, and goes to the painting. The moon is hidden tonight so she can’t see him, not really, but she doesn’t need to. Her fingers ghost without making contact, space kept between her and his face, his hands, and she realizes she’s aching.
She’s forgotten his name.
[--]
The day she can finally see his eyes is one of the happiest days of her life.
They’re a deeper shade of purple than his hair and they hold the same knot of emotions that his mouth did, before it smiled. She wants to untangle that knot, or at least loosen it. She wants to solve all of his pain and tell him everything will be fine once she figures it out.
She locks her door and spends the afternoon looking at him look at her. Now she can believe herself, believe that it was just sleep all this time. He’s been asleep, waiting for her, but he’s awake now, at last. He’s awake and he’s ready for her and she’s ready for him.
“I love you,” she tells him.
And if she closes her eyes and leans in when all else is quiet, she swears she can hear a pulse.
[--]
“Ah, the flower shop! Ib, I love the flower shop!”
While other treats in the world have lost their flavor, flowers continue to enthrall Mary. Ib watches her turn into a giddy child once more, skipping from daisies to tulips, twirling around geraniums, giggling over orchids.
“After Ib, I love flowers most of all! Did you know that, Ib?”
Ib nods, but cannot be distracted.
Last night, she dreamt of empty corridors. She walked them while they twisted and turned, led to dead ends and holes in the ground. Beneath the nice shoes she hasn’t worn since childhood, the bare floors were then speckled with something small, thin and delicate and blue. The further she walked, the more she found, until the floor disappeared beneath a carpet of blue petals.
And now she stands before a grand display of roses, half-listening to the rhymes Mary composes for the peonies and sunflowers. There are so many and she looks over each great cluster. Red, white, pink, yellow, orange, tiny buds, wide blossoms. All beautiful, but none of them blue.
“Do you grow blue roses here?” she asks, and the shopkeeper shakes his head.
“Roses don’t grow blue,” he says. “Not naturally.”
“Ib, don’t look so sad!” Mary skips ahead of her on the way home, turns and walks backward, holding her large bouquet out between them. “Look at all these flowers I got! I think I’ll give this one to Mother… And this-wouldn’t this be nice in my hair? And see, blue is okay but see these yellow and red roses? I think they’re much prettier! Don’t you, Ib?”
Ib nods, but cannot shake the feeling that she’s failed somehow.
[--]
When his hand begins to move, she can’t hold it in any longer.
Sitting in front of the portrait, Ib watches him and not Mary, who is lying on her back in Ib’s bed. The flowers are dying by now, but she holds a wilted red rose in her hand and plays her favorite game.
“Ib loves me,” she chants. “Ib loves me not.” She lets each petal fall onto her face. “Ib loves me,” landing on the bridge of her nose. “Ib loves me not,” between her lips. “Ib, this isn’t looking good for you!”
Ib hears the warning and knows what Mary wants. It’s been like this for as long as she can remember. Despite knowing the stem trick, whenever Mary’s game ends with “Ib loves me not”, she fakes a heartbreak fit for Shakespeare. She throws herself to the ground. She pounds her small fists to the wall. She punches Ib’s arms, pinches her sides, pulls her hair, until Ib holds her and pats her head. Until she says, “Ib loves you.”
Mary whines her name now, but Ib doesn’t look away. With each passing day, she’s grown impatient, nervous, afraid she won’t know what she needs to do, she won’t remember what she’s forgotten, she’ll miss a new piece to this puzzle. She keeps a dream journal and she only blinks when her eyes sting; she can’t miss anything.
And then she sees it. Before, she always saw him after his change, the moment passed. This time, she sees it happen. The paint spread from his shoulder to his wrist seems to blur all at once, and all it takes is a second, and his arm moves. It’s a tiny move, inconsequential to someone who doesn’t know him, hasn’t watched him for an entire summer and not just a summer, really, years-but she can tell what he’s doing, what he’s trying to do.
He’s reaching for her.
She gasps, “Mary,” she can’t help it, she’s close to bursting and she doesn’t know why she’s not afraid but she isn’t, and she grabs at the folds of Mary’s skirt with one hand and points with the other. “Mary, look.”
“Ib loves me not.”
[--]
On the last day of summer, Ib gets a call from the flower shop.
“We ordered blue roses the day after you came in,” they tell her. “They’ve just come in.”
She runs there, but it doesn’t feel like running. It’s much closer to floating, she thinks.
That morning, she sat with her hand held out for the man in the portrait. She doesn’t know why, or how, but she sensed him straining, trying, but he wasn’t close enough, not yet. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll be here.”
She’ll wait. She’ll do anything, anything for him. Anything to make up for forgetting. Anything that will help her, finally, remember.
She buys every blue rose. She holds them to her nose and wonders if they smell like him. But when she gets home, all she smells is the smoke.
The thorns scrape her palms when she drops the roses and they’re bleeding when she reaches her room. Mary sits on her bed with a doll in her lap, its stomach ripped open; her fingers play with a lighter. Her face is dead, hollow, like she isn’t even real.
Ib cannot see him anymore. His open eyes, his smiling mouth, his reaching hand, they’re all lost in the flames. Pieces of him tear away and singe her floor, her wall, and someday she will see those dark spots and not know what caused them.
There’s a scream bottled in her throat and it’s useless but she lets it out anyway, and the scream is his name.
[--]
“I love you, Ib,” Mary says, several nights later, as they sit in their matching pajamas and she ties Ib’s hair back with a red ribbon. “I’ll love you forever. That’s a promise.”
“Ib loves you,” Ib answers, a soft breath.
She isn’t certain that she means it. But she can’t remember why.