Fourteen Stitches

He's across the camp and I can feel him in my teeth.

That's the only honest way to say it. Stellan Keir is forty feet away, replacing a cracked axle beam on the supply wagon, and my body has mapped his location the way a rabbit maps the fox before seeing it. Without looking. Without permission. A low hum in my jaw, my collarbone, the skin along my inner wrists, that started six months ago when he walked into our camp alone and hasn't stopped since.

My partner is sitting behind me. Rune's legs bracket mine, his chin on my shoulder, his breath against my neck warm and steady and familiar. His arms circle my waist and I lean back into him because this is what I do. What we are. The Paired. Two years of his body choosing mine in the Circle, deliberately, devotionally, his discipline an act of love so complete it makes my ribs ache.

I'm sewing a costume for the solstice, counting stitches on my needle. Fourteen. One for each night between now and the ritual that built this troupe and remakes it every year. The night twelve of us walk behind the silk curtains and touch and are touched until, one by one, our bodies speak their truths and we step out. The last two standing are bound as the new Pair.

Rune lasted for me. Twice.

I don't know who I'll last for this time.

"Need a hand with the joinery," Stellan calls to Tomas, who's passing with firewood. His voice is low, unhurried. The kind that doesn't raise itself to be heard but gets heard anyway.

"Give me two minutes," Tomas says.

"Take four. The glue's still setting."

Four unnecessary words. A small generosity to a man carrying too much wood. I file it alongside every other scrap I've collected about him in six months: that he organizes his tools by size, not frequency. That he checks the horses' hooves before his own feet. That he arrived after years of walking alone and still flinches, sometimes, when the troupe touches him like family.

The needle bites my thumb. I hiss, pulling it free. A bead of blood wells up, bright in the firelight. I press it to the fabric before it spreads.

"Careful," Maren says from her stool beside me, not looking up from the sock she's darning. She's the troupe's elder, our compass, the woman who held us together through the first winters after the collapse when half the world starved and the other half ate itself alive. "That thread is expensive. The blood, we've got plenty of."

I smile because Maren expects a smile. "Just a prick."

"Mm." Her needle moves, steady. "Your stitching's been uneven this week."

She's right. I look down at the scarlet fabric. The seam wanders like something drunk, lurching left where it should hold straight. My hands, which have been sure since I was sixteen and she taught me to sew in the back of a wagon, are betraying me.

"Long road," I say.

Rune presses a kiss behind my ear and stands. He's been rehearsing the opening monologue of our solstice play all afternoon, and now he moves back toward the fire to run it again. His voice lifts and drops through the words, each one polished smooth by repetition. He's brilliant at this. When he performs, the settlements forget for an hour that the virus took everything and what came after took the rest.

I love watching him perform.

I don't love him enough.

The fire pops. Sparks drift up. One lands near my knee and I brush it away, and in the brushing, my gaze lifts.

Stellan is looking at me.

Not looking. The difference is in the weight. When Rune looks at me, it's a blanket. Warm, safe, something you pull over yourself at night. When Stellan looks at me, my skin prickles from jaw to collarbone, a frequency just below hearing that settles in my teeth.

He doesn't smile. He doesn't look away. He holds the axle beam in one hand, tools forgotten, and for two heartbeats the camp and the fire and the twenty years of ruin between the old world and this one all go quiet.

Then a log shifts in the fire. Rune's voice catches on a high note, and the moment folds shut.

I look down. My thumb is bleeding again.

"Fourteen days," Maren says quietly, threading her needle through the sock heel. She might be talking about the solstice. She might be talking about something else entirely.

The troupe settles into evening. Around the fire, the Bonded couples lean together. Tomas has his head in Kira's lap while she braids Joss's hair. A linked chain of easy touch. Nobody is lonely here unless they choose to be. That's what we built when the old rules burned down with everything else.

I should be grateful. I am grateful.

I am also counting the days until everything could change, and I have been counting since a man with rough hands and quiet eyes walked into our camp and looked at me like he already knew the shape of my wanting before I did.

Across the fire, Stellan puts down the axle beam. Wipes his hands on his trousers. Walks to the cook tent without looking at me again.

He doesn't need to. His attention stays behind, pressing against my skin like a handprint in clay.

Fourteen stitches. Fourteen nights.

I pull the thread tight and my hands are steady and my hands are lying.