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There’s something strange and wonderful about it: another silhouette in the darkness. Another weight, filling in the space.
Minerva reaches out one hand, close enough that she can feel Madeline’s breath. A gentle pressure on her palm, just in and out, in and out, and this could move mountains, Minerva thinks. This is the way the tide rises, the way the tectonic plates beneath the earth sink and shift. In and out. Cycles of the ocean or the moon.
Minerva reaches out, but stops just before her palm meets Madeline’s lips. She does not fall asleep easily, Madeline Cobb. It takes her hours: sometimes a cup of herbal tea, sometimes a beer. Sometimes lying on her back, sometimes curled up on her side. Sometimes a track of forest sounds, playing in headphones nestled carefully in the cartilage between the pinna and the ear canal. Minerva pointed out, the first time she witnessed this particular method, that they live in a forest already, to which Madeline shrugged and said, I need more organized forest sounds. The barn owl always hoots at precisely three minutes and five seconds in, and that’s comforting. And it echoed in Minerva’s eardrums for hours after. That’s comforting. Comforting. Short o, long em, bitten-off ting, as though Madeline isn’t used to the word, to admitting the inherent need stored up in the roots of those consonants. The way it rings.
Minerva reaches out. On Mira Five, she counted the nights by building columns. Every sunset, that too-close star sinking beneath the desert and tinting the clouds green, sickly, as though they’d been dipped in a vat of hydrochloric acid—every sunset, she would go to the ruins just beyond the circle of her compound. She would take one stone, usually limestone, dirty-white and slick with dust, from the desert floor, and stack it on top of another. That was comforting: the burn of her arms, the strain as she lifted. Low at first, below her knees, then up to her waist, her chin, and finally over her head.
When the tower reached twenty-five stones, that was one month and she started over. By the time the asteroid came, the towers had grown into their own lonesome city—no inhabitants, no sewage systems, no libraries, only an army of shadows marching across the burnished sand.
Shadows are lonesome, until someone fills them. Minerva holds her hand steady, steady, then takes a shaky breath in—she doesn’t need it, not really, but it feels like the human thing to do—and then pulls her hand back into herself, leans into her pillow. Madeline keeps breathing. In and out, in and out.
And then she shifts: tuns, from her back to her side, and one of her earbuds falls to the mattress, and her eyes blink open, eyelashes long in the faint moonlight in from the window, and Minerva is turned to stone just at the sight of her, reduced to a silhouette or a reflection, wishes to be that moonlight just to lie in the curve of her nose, to taste the freckles there.
“Did I wake you?” Minerva asks. Her voice is loud—too loud, in the moonlight. Too heavy.
Madeline breathes for a moment, and then she blinks, twice, and reaches one hand to rest her palm, flat, on Minerva’s shoulder. Her hand is cool. But then, Minerva runs hot compared to humans, or so she’s been told.
“I don’t think so,” Madeline says. “I think.” And she pauses, shifts against the mattress. “I think I have to pee.”
And so she gets up and pees: sits up, first, and swings her legs over the side of the bed, and stands, and pads barefoot out of the bedroom and down the hall and stays there for five minutes and twenty seconds all of which Minerva spends listing reasons that Madeline is a real solid human with flesh and veins and everything and will not disappear if Minerva closes her eyes for too long. And returns.
“Were you doing something?” Madeline asks, sitting back down on the mattress with a faint bounce. She is wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt, dark green, with the sleeves cut off. Minerva watches the silhouettes of her arms, the way her shoulder blades roll as she swings her legs back up.
“Minerva,” Madeline says.
“Yes?”
“Were you doing something?”
“What?”
“You asked if you woke me up.” Madeline’s tone is stern, deep, like black coffee on a cloudy morning, but she’s smiling. There’s enough moonlight to see the shape of it, just stretching the corners of her face.
“No,” Minerva says. “Yes. I don’t know.”
Minerva has commanded armies, ordered the destruction of a world, crossed the universe, and yet this woman makes her uncertain. It’s something about Madeline’s shoulders, she thinks. There is a tiny scar, a pockmark, on the curve of her left shoulder, just over the peak. Madeline’s second summer fighting monsters, she took a claw to the skin there, just a graze, just enough to bleed. If she asked, Minerva would tear herself in the same spot.
But for now, Madeline only says, “Alright then,” and settles back against the pillows on her side of the bed. She stays there for a moment, breathing. And then she tilts her head down, leans on Minerva’s shoulder. Her hair is a mass of tight curls, out of her usual braids. Ticklish against Minerva’s chin.
“Do you know how long it’s been since I slept with another person?” Madeline asks. “I mean, like, actually sleeping, not fucking.”
“I am not sure how I could know that, Madeline Cobb, as I have only been in Kepler for—”
Madeline laughs—a quiet thing, just a huff of breath against Minerva’s throat really, but it stops her all the same. Cool and tasting faintly of peppermint toothpaste.
“I know,” Madeline says, “I know, that was rhetorical. I don’t even know how long it’s been. It’s weird, right? Like, are people meant for this?”
“If you are asking me to leave, Madeline, I will gladly—” Well. Peppermint, cool breath, in and out. Minerva corrects herself: “Not gladly. But I will.”
Madeline turns her head and presses a kiss to Minerva’s shoulder. Her lips are chapped, the rough edges pressing into Minerva’s skin. Like building a monument, Minerva thinks. Like pressing your toes into bare, wet earth on the morning after a long rain.
“Okay,” Minerva says. Her voice feels unfamiliar—low and rumbling, from a part of her chest that opened not too long ago, sometime between jumping through Duck Newton’s skull and this, here, quiet moonlight and frogs calling somewhere beyond the window, alive and searching for mates.
Madeline smiles—Minerva can feel it, this time. The stretch of lips expanding.
“I think,” Minerva says slowly, “that if people were not meant for this, they should be. Beds are too good not to be shared.”
Madeline laughs again, that tiny perfect exhale, and then she picks her head up and slides back down to a horizontal position, hair splayed out against her pillow like the birth of the universe. She reaches and tugs at Minerva’s tunic until Minerva goes too: horizontal, utterly unprotected, facing Madeline.
And here they are again: two silhouettes in the moonlight. Minerva reaches one palm out to Madeline’s shoulder, just to be certain she’s real.
“I do want you here,” Madeline says. “Just in case that’s not obvious.”
“It is,” Minerva replies. “But thank you.”
Minerva keeps her palm, flat, there on Madeline’s shoulder. The moonlight dances a slow waltz, shifting with the trees in the wind. This time, Madeline does not need a cup of tea, or a beer, or carefully calibrated forest sounds, to fall asleep. Or at least, Minerva has to assume she doesn’t, because Minerva drifts off first.