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Dawn’s barely breaking when I leave the house. Prim and my mother are still asleep, but I know they won’t worry that I left early, they’re used to it by now. The street is quiet for a minute, and then I hear a door open. I know Haymitch won’t be awake, so I instinctively turn to look at Peeta’s house across from mine.
Peeta steps off his porch carefully and rubs his face. He looks like he’s had about as much sleep as I have, but he’s dressed for the day.
“Morning,” he says quietly.
“Morning,” I say back. It’s almost a normal interaction, considering we’ve barely spoken in the last month.
Maybe it strikes him as strange too, because he quirks his lips a little bit. “Nice weather this morning. If you’re going for a walk, I was wondering if you’d mind me tagging along?”
I know he doesn’t think I’m going for a walk inside the District, so I’m a little thrown. I go to the woods alone, except for Sundays when Gale has the day off, and I somehow don’t think Peeta is that interested in going hunting with me. But now that I'm looking at him properly I can see he’s wearing a thick jacket and a good pair of boots instead of the lighter summer shoes I’ve seen on him recently. He clearly planned for this, and I’m not sure why. But we can’t really ask each other real questions in the middle of Victors’ Village, so I just agree. “Sure.”
It’s a longer trek from the Village than it was from the Seam, and we walk in silence. Without acknowledging it, I take him to the fence opening that I know Gale favours. The smaller one I normally go through might just about fit him, but I don’t know how well he can crouch with the prosthetic leg. The fence is quiet, so I go through it and hold up the wire for him to follow me.
I know the air is no different three feet outside the fence, but as soon as we’re through I feel like I’m breathing better. I roll my shoulders and exhale. “C’mon,” I say, “this way.”
I lead the way, careful to walk slow enough that I think Peeta can match my pace comfortably. His tread is uneven, and louder even than it was in the arena when I got mad at him for it. But there’s no tributes hunting us down, and it doesn’t really matter if he scares away every bird in the forest right now.
We reach the hollow log where my bow and quiver are stashed and I pull them out, inspecting them for damage. I sit on a large flat rock and gesture at Peeta to do the same.
He doesn’t speak for a bit. He’s looking at the canopy of trees over us, the sun starting to rise over them.
“Isn’t it crazy,” he starts, “that these woods have been on my doorstep my whole life, and yet the first time I so much as touched a tree was in the Capitol?”
I don’t really know how to answer that, so I pull out my thermos of tea and pass it to him. He takes a swig, hums approvingly, and hands it back.
He takes a deep breath. “Look, Katniss, I've been wanting to talk to you about the way I acted on the train. I knew you had something with Gale. I was jealous of him before I even officially met you. And it wasn't fair to hold you to anything that happened in the Games. I'm sorry.”
His apology takes me by surprise. It's true that Peeta has been freezing me out since we got back, but I don’t hold it against him. I’m touched he made a point to seek me out for this.
“I’m sorry too.”
“There's nothing for you to be sorry about. You were just keeping us alive,” he says.
“I’m sorry I didn’t try to make sure you knew when I was lying,” I clarify. Because if he’s going to acknowledge he wanted it to be real, I can at least own up to this. I wish I’d pushed Haymitch to tell him what was happening during the interviews after the Games, or found a way to tell him myself. I don’t like that I hurt his feelings.
He nods. “My point is - I don’t want us to keep ignoring each other until we go back to playing lovers on the Tour in a few months. So I thought if I stopped being so, you know, wounded, we could take a shot at being friends,” he says.
“Okay.” I’ve missed him. I think of what that might look like, to actually be friends with Peeta. To trust him enough to actually talk to him. And then I think back to one of the first things he said.
“I don’t have ‘something with Gale’,” I say. I resent having to clarify that for people, but after the other day in the woods maybe that’s not all that fair. Turns out it's not a completely unfounded assumption.
“I thought you two…?”
If we’re actually going to be friends, I think I have to be able to say things like this to him. I can’t do it while looking at him though, so I focus very intently on the nest I can see peeking up on the branches of the tree in front of us. I could climb that tree pretty easily, see if there are eggs in there.
“The first and only time Gale kissed me was after the Games,” I say. Not a lot of people in the Seam have grain to spare on chickens, so eggs are always worth something at the Hob.
“I didn’t know he liked me before that, even if he says he did, and I’d never thought about liking him beyond knowing that people expected us to end up together. Maybe we would have, maybe not. But we weren’t together, and we’re not now.” Of course, these days I don’t need to risk my neck for a couple of eggs. The birds can keep them.
I dare to look at him now, and look away again before I can make eye contact with him. His eyes are pretty, but I don’t like looking at them when he’s looking back at me. I never know what he sees in there.
“Noted. I’m sorry,” he says again. It probably shouldn’t impress me, but I keep being thrown by the ease with which he apologises. I suppose I haven’t seen it a lot, and I have no skill at it myself. “I shouldn’t have assumed that you not liking me can only be about some other guy, that’s also shitty.”
“Peeta, I have never in my life gotten a chance to sit down and figure out if I like a guy. ” I don’t mean to sound mocking, but I don’t work that hard to avoid it, either. The words feel ridiculous, and I don’t want to be here, talking about this. But now that I started talking about this, I can’t imagine leaving it unsaid, either.
“Sit down and figure it out?” He asks, confused. I remember the story he told me in the cave - the one I manipulated him into telling the world for sponsorships. About how he’s had a crush on me since we were five years old, and I sang the Valley Song in school. I’d assumed he was playing it up at the time, ramping things up for the cameras with more skill than me. But I know better than that now, don’t I? Peeta is not an incredible actor with perfect recall for childhood memories. Maybe he’s never needed to question what he feels for me. That seems too large, and at the same time strikingly unfair.
It occurs to me for the first time that people might have an easier time understanding their feelings than I do mine.
“I don’t understand how I’m supposed to know!” I must sound like a child throwing a tantrum, but I can’t help myself. I stand up so I don’t have to be still.
“Supposed to know if you like Gale?”
“Or you! Or anyone!”
His eyes are wide again, and I understand that to mean he didn’t expect me to say that. Does he think my feelings for him are any more clear-cut?
“Katniss -” he takes a deep breath, “I’m trying really hard not to push you here, this was supposed to be about how I shouldn’t have read into things, but…”
“I don’t know how I feel about you! How could I? I already owed you my life, my sister’s life, and then you got reaped. I thought I’d have to kill you. I didn’t want to see you as a person, let alone a good person! I thought you were playing me in the Training Centre, that everything you did was a strategy to mess with my head, and you were great at it.” He looks truly shocked at that. I have no caution anymore. I’ve spent so long not saying this out loud, and now I’ve allowed myself honesty I don’t know how to stop.
“And then in the arena - when they announced the bullshit rule change, it’s true what I said in the recap interview. I thought I’d get to keep you. It was the first time talking to you when I thought we wouldn’t have to kill each other, but the whole time I knew we had to be in love and sappy and interesting so you’d stay alive.” He gets that already, doesn’t he? He said he did, that he understands why I had to lie. But clearly, he doesn’t understand the rest of it.
“Peeta, how many conversations have we had without cameras on?” I think about the roof of the Training Centre, so I add: “let alone since knowing staying alive wouldn’t mean killing each other.”
I see something sink in. “You’re saying we don’t know each other very well.”
“Yes. And I’m saying we have no idea how to act with one another when it’s not life or death. At least I don’t. I don’t know what it’s like to follow my instincts about you without thinking about what the Capitol thinks about it, too."
He cocks an eyebrow at me “What do your instincts tell you about me now then?”
“They tell me that I don’t want to lead you on, or hurt your feelings.” I’ve seen Peeta hurt enough for a lifetime. I don’t want to be the one causing it.
He nods. “And I appreciate that. But say,” he looks up at the sky for a beat before looking back at me. Maybe eye contact is too intimate for him right now, too. Maybe it’s not just me that feels naked out here. “Say that I told you not to worry about it. If we both pretend I haven’t already confessed my love to you half a dozen times. What then?”
Hearing him talk about loving me terrifies me in a way it hasn’t before. I suppose neither of us can pretend it’s all that much of a joke this time.
I’ve been brave this far, right?
“Then I’d say I’d like to kiss you without any cameras on, for once.”
Peeta is very pretty when he smiles, but I don’t tell him that.
We’ve shared so many kisses since the reaping. I liked some, others I found painfully awkward. This one is both, a little bit. I still don’t know what to do with my hands, or how long it should last, or if I should worry about what happens after. But I know I’d like to do it again, and I tell him so.
I feel that heat building in me that I felt in the cave, and this time it’s almost familiar. For a moment, this feels like the most natural thing my body could be doing. I’m kissing Peeta for the simple reason that we both like doing it. The thought makes me giddy for a second.
When he pulls away, I don’t want to stop looking at him. I’m staring at his eyelashes and get the ridiculous urge to touch them.
“Okay,” he says, “so that’s what it feels like to kiss you for real.”
I nod. Am I shy all of a sudden? I kiss his jaw, because it’s easier than saying anything, and then I detangle my arms from around him. I’m not sure when they ended up there.
He looks a little disappointed that I’m letting go of him, but he shakes the look off his face. “So if we’re doing this thing where we talk to each other - what are you thinking?”
“I still don’t think I’m in love with you," I say. I'm really an unfeeling cow sometimes, but I'm trying not to lie to him.
Surprisingly, he nods. “I think we’ve established we probably don’t know each other well enough for that, huh?”
“So could we? Get to know each other, outside the Capitol?” It’s the smallest of things, what I’m offering, but the way my heart is beating you’d think I was proposing marriage.
He puts his hand out to shake. “Deal.” I take it, weaker than I’ve ever shaken someone’s hand before.
“And if it turns out that I won’t ever want a relationship,” I ask, “even if I like kissing you?”
He looks incredibly smug that I acknowledged enjoying our kiss, but I let him have that one. “Then I get to say that the Katniss Everdeen, Victor of the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games, is friends with little ol’ me.”
I let go of his hand and shove my shoulder into him, and he just laughs and puts his arm around me.
There will be more to talk about, over time. What it means to get to know each other slowly when you’ve already been through unspeakable horrors together. If he’s really ok trying to be in a real relationship with me when I know I still won’t ever want children. How we’ll manage to stay honest with each other when we still have to lie to the world so often. None of this might work out.
But it doesn’t feel impossible to try.