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1
2
3
4 colored houses on a quiet street.
I count them 10 times.
Ten.
One two three four.
I let out a deep breath that I had been holding and now the colors don’t seem quite so wrong and I no longer look at the curtains with distrust or fear or anguish.
1 One of these houses is mine.
And his.
I feel his fingers curl into my palm one two three four. He squeezes. I release a second breath.
“You’re counting again, love,” he murmurs into my ear, his lips brushing my earlobe. And the warmth of his breath brings me back. I feel the earth beneath my feet and feel the wind brush my face like a caress and I look into the sky and I see a bird.
Flying.
They just started to come back, the birds.
One two three four years to took to get our world back. And it’s not over, not just yet. But the colored houses and the birds and the grass have started to come back, creeping in along the edges of our poisoned canvas of a world, daring to bleed paint back into the scenery we tarnished.
“Juliette.” My name is a song on his lips and I turn at last to look at him, and when my eyes meet his clear green eyes I don’t have to count anymore.
I asked him to tell me when I was doing it. Counting. I hardly do it anymore but sometimes it comes back. It comes back when I feel the world slipping away around me because something in my brain is telling me not to trust it, it’s not real, you’re only dreaming that the world is finally starting to look right.
But we fought for it. Bled for it. Now I am 21 twenty-one years old and I’ve been leading the war against The Reestablishment with Warner and Adam and Kenji and the others. We no longer refer to ourselves as rebels. We are The New Tomorrow, and at first I was afraid that naming ourselves would make us like The Reestablishment and maybe we would end up just like them. Making things worse while trying to make it better.
But the birds are back.
I’ve been across the world by now and seen and done things that the little girl sitting against the wire fence at school would never have dreamed of, even in the most private corners of her mind. And I’ve done it all with this boy man beside me, the only person I’ve ever met who has ever been able to handle me. All of me.
I reach up on my tiptoes to brush my lips against his mouth. I sometimes wonder if we’re okay, if we haven’t been too scarred or damaged by this thing. Sometimes I have nightmares that someone has sliced me open only to find nothing inside me but bits of broken glass and bone and dust and I’m all dry on the inside and shattered into pieces.
Warner always knows when I have this dream. I’m still not quite sure if he senses it with his beautiful power or if he just feels me go stiff in bed beside him, but his hand always spreads across my stomach, stitching me back together, and then he fills me with his kisses while he reminds me that I’m not broken, but even if I was he would still love me.
Just now his other hand presses into my waist. “As much as I would love to stand in the street and kiss you all day, love, we are very important people and we have places to be.” He kisses the top of my head and gently tugs my hand to lead me up into the house. I work very hard not to count the steps it takes to get there. Instead I grip Warner’s hand and let his touch soothe me as it always does.
Our house is yellow. It was my idea. I chose yellow because yellow was the color of the crown on the bird that gave me hope where I struggled so hard to find any. And yellow is the color of Warner’s hair, and James’s, and the color of the sunlight, which I saw once when we supported the uprising in what had once been Africa. I was so dazzled by it I didn’t move for a solid ten minutes, and then Kenji realized I had stopped moving with the group and had stomped back to drag me along, grumbling all the way.
The house itself was Warner’s idea. He said that if we wanted the world to start going back to normal, we had to set the example.
He told me this after he’d had it built, painted, and furnished.
And surprised me with it on my twenty-first birthday.
The other three houses on the street are for our friends, but none of them have come back from their missions long enough to settle in yet. I’ll see most of them tonight. Tonight, at the dinner party we’re having to mark the anniversary of New Tomorrow. The night we conquered Sector 45. It has a new name now.
Newcastle.
Not all of us have made it out of this war. We knew that this would happen, and we prepared for it. But there still remains a Castle-shaped hole in my chest that I keep locked up except in those private moments when I need to grieve and remember the friend I had who gave me a chance at a home when I did not yet believe I deserved one. It only seemed fitting that the place I did call home now would be named for him.
The light around me changes as we step inside. Warner flicks on a lamp to illuminate the small foyer, which is tiny enough to mean that three steps forward will send you stumbling into the staircase.
A carpeted staircase with a white railing.
To the left is a high arched doorway and past that is perhaps the best gift in the entire house. I cried harder than I already was when Warner showed it to me.
A library.
Filled with every book he’d been able to save. Old and dusty ones, huge ones, even silly things like pamphlets and old tabloids. I halted the whole tour and promptly sat in the middle of the floor and began tearing through whatever was in reach, and it was only Warner’s impatient but affectionate cough that prompted me to let him show me the rest of the house.
A sitting room with a bow window and two armchairs perfectly angled to catch the best of the little rays of sunlight that sometimes broke through the bandages of clouds in our healing sky.
A kitchen with a chessboard floor and mint green cupboards and a real life working stove.
Upstairs, only two rooms. One is ours, mine and his, with a large bed like the one he used at the base. Only this one he cares about, because it has a large downy comforter like whipped cream and bands of brown and green across it. Simple, streamlined, but . . . it has him in it.
A few moments later it had both of us in it, getting tangled in the down and the sheets until we were drowning in them and in each other.
We stand in our bedroom now, and I can see the street through the windows behind the bed. The sidewalks are still cracked and browning, but occasionally springs of green pop up in the fissures, as though they’d been waiting to break free the whole time.
Warner sees where I’m looking and he lifts the corner of his mouth in a smile. “Small steps,” he breathes as he runs his hand through his hair.
I want to run my hands through his hair.
So I do.
I step in front of him and weave my fingers through the silken locks again and again, and he leans into my touch, his eyes closed and his mouth lifted. His arms wrap around my waist and I want every last particle between us gone. I step forward and fuse myself to him, and while his eyes are still closed I kiss him. They are short kisses at first, sweet ones, but then his clear green eyes snap open and I see the look in his eyes that lights a live wire under my skin. Sparks are shooting through my veins and out my fingertips and I grip the back of his head, kissing him harder.
There isn’t a millimeter of his skin I don’t know yet, not a hair of him that I haven’t touched, but every time we do this it feels like the first time. I push against him until he’s on his back on the bed in the down comforter and I’m sprawled over him, kissing and kissing and kissing and he groans and I want every inch of him again and again.
His hands are hot plates on my hips and he helps me slide out of my pants. My fingers fly across his buttoned shirt and free him of it and his skin his skin the only skin that could always take me exactly as I am and make me feel free, free like the bird, like the birds that are in our skies again.
A cuckoo breaks through the sizzling silence of our bodies and I shoot upright, my heart going cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo along with the odd little clock mounted on our wall.
A gift from Kenji, of course.
“Shit,” Warner groans, rubbing his palm over his face from forehead to chin. I bend down to kiss him again but he places two fingers to my lips. “Now, now, love. We have to get ready if we’re going to be on time.”
“And you’re never late,” I say.
“Juliette,” he says, and his lips form around my name in a shape that says he would rather stay exactly where he is but he can’t we’re important and we have to go.
“There’s always after dinner,” I say lightly as I rise off of him.
He laughs. “There’s always after dinner.” He looks me up and down and I can see the effort it’s taking him not to get my shirt and underwear off, too. He says, “At least I did you the courtesy of helping you get undressed.”
“Likewise.” I hate tearing my eyes away from him but I have to, and I pad through the bedroom and across the hall to the only other room upstairs besides the bathroom.
Our closet.
It could be another bedroom, but Warner said there was no sense in having one, and he was not going anywhere without his closet. The one thing he’d been able to maintain in this chaotic world--his one touch of normal.
There are plenty of clothes here for me, too, clothing of all kinds, picked out by Warner with me in mind. I’ve worn almost everything by now, but there is one corner of the closet I have not yet touched. I run my hands over the colorful materials, noting how he has arranged them like his own clothes, by color and by shade, making a cascading rainbow in my closet.
I hope I’ll see a real rainbow one day.
I know which one he likes best because he’s told me, but he also said he never expects me to wear it. I never thought I would, either, but the promises and futures we’re forging together make me think anything is possible, and he deserves this from me. I shimmy out of my top and put on the appropriate underthings, and then slide on the dress.
The first dress I’ve worn in four years.
When I think about it, I am amazed that in all that time I never wore a dress again, preferring pressed slacks like Warner’s at all critical meetings and negotiations. No one is allowed to underestimate me and these leaders are from an old and different time where somehow skirts and dresses are seen as weak. I have to speak their language to achieve my goals.
But in this dress I do not feel weak.
I take a few more minutes to brush out my hair and use simple pins to keep it away from my face. I know what I look like now. When Warner realized how unfamiliar I was with my own face he told me that he didn’t think he should be the only one to enjoy it. So he started to put mirrors everywhere. And I stopped being afraid to look.
When I am satisfied, I step across the hallway to our bedroom and knock.
“Don’t come in. I’m indecent,” Warner says, but I can hear the joke in his voice.
“You’re always indecent,” I say back, letting the lie fly off my tongue and twist itself into a joke-shaped knot as I push the door open.
He’s fully-dressed, of course, clean and pressed and all perfect angles and impossible beauty. He is looking down and adjusting his cufflink when I walk in, and when he raises his head his eyes go wide and he stumbles back a step, cufflink forgotten.
“You’re wearing a dress,” he says, his voice tight. “My . . . my favorite dress.”
“I hope it lives up to your expectations,” I say, and I curse the tiny whisper of a younger me in the corner of my mind that tells me that it doesn’t, that I’ve probably let him down, that it’s not at all what he hoped for . . .
Warner adjusts his posture and stares at me, the unfathomable look still in his eyes. “And then some,” he rasps. His eyes graze every line and curve of my body, each one visible in the green silk dress that clings to every crevice of me. Little gold straps hold it up at my shoulders, and matching gold cuffs connected open, gauzy sleeves to my wrists. Like wings.
I’m not able to react fast enough as Warner prowls across the room to me and presses me up against the doorframe, capturing my mouth with his as the hunger overwhelms him. And I release the careful hold I’ve developed on my power and let the exhilarating adrenaline flow through him. He grips my face, drags my lower lip between his teeth, and my pulse begins to thud thud thud
Cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo
Warner lets out a long string of expletives and I can’t help but laugh, the giggle bubbling up my throat like the hot geysers we saw on a mission last month. I press my forehead against his chest, giggling and giggling, until his own body shakes with laughter and his palm is running down my spine.
“The next time that thing interrupts us I am going to shoot it off the wall,” Warner says between gritted teeth.
“Kenji would be very offended.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass.”
I swat his shoulder, trying to remind my face that it is not a fireplace and does not need to be so red. “Be nice. You have to see him tonight.”
“I’m so excited,” Warner deadpans, but when he meets my eyes I see the glint of mischief and affection there. Little bits of light better than the sun that only I am allowed to see.
I kiss the corner of his mouth. “Come along, President Warner. It’s time to be charming.”
Warner’s hand wraps around mine. Four strong, capable fingers. One of them plays with the jade ring on my left hand.
“Whatever you say . . . President Warner.”