Page 55 of Gwen and Art Are Not in Love

‘Are you embarrassed?’

‘I’m notembarrassed, I’m just – I’d rather not be seen like this.’

‘Oh,’ said Gwen. ‘Well, I don’t mind. But I would like to know what’s wrong. Have you been poisoned? Cursed?’

Bridget squinted over at the trees beyond Gwen, and then looked down at her hands.

‘It’s my bleed,’ she said bluntly. ‘It hurts. A lot.’

‘Oh,’ said Gwen, somewhat relieved that Bridget wasn’t in danger of dying imminently of some obscure illness. ‘Oh. You should have said something! Is it always like this?’

‘Yes,’ said Bridget, through gritted teeth. ‘Or worse.’

‘I didn’t know it could be that bad,’ said Gwen. Inconvenient, messy, yes – but not bad enough to render somebody whey-faced and shaking. She’d seen Bridget walk away from being literally beaten with the blunt side of a sword with her head held high, so she couldn’t imagine how bad the pain must be for her to almost collapse during a stroll in the woods.

‘Well – apparently it isn’t,’ Bridget bit out.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve tried to speak to physicians about it,’ Bridget said, tentatively sitting upright, bracing her hands against the log. ‘I actually thought when I came here that the castle doctor – well, I thought he’d probably know more than my doctor at home. But he said what they all say. It can’t be as bad as all that, it’snormal, and something about ladies and a low threshold for pain – and then a lot of blustering noises until I … until I go away.’

‘But – that’s awful,’ Gwen said, outraged. ‘Do they give you something? For the pain?’

‘No,’ Bridget said, with great effort. ‘They say it would interfere with the natural order of things.’

‘Does anything help?’

‘No.’ Bridget blinked up at the sky as she tried to even out her breathing. ‘Well – yes. A … friend of mine used to knead my back. Her mother was a healer.’

‘Oh,’ Gwen said. There was a long silence while she worked herself up to saying something potentially very foolish. ‘Well – I can do that. If it would help.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Bridget said, pressing her hand to her forehead. ‘Sorry, I mean – you don’t have to do that. I’ll ask Adah when she returns, or … It comes and goes, so perhaps in a few hours …’ She broke off, wincing, and Gwen immediately got to her feet.

‘No, I’ll do it,’ she said, sounding braver than she felt, walking around the fallen tree so that she was standing behind Bridget, looking at the broad planes of her back with trepidation. She had spent quite a lot of time thinking about touching Bridget, and now she was being given an open invitation –but it’s purely for medical purposes, she told herself sternly.So don’t go getting any ideas. ‘What should I do?’

‘If you just – my lower back, both hands,’ Bridget said, ‘as hard as you can. And – dig your thumbs in around the spine. This is really – you shouldn’t have to—’

‘No, please, it’s okay,’ Gwen said, putting both hands lightly on Bridget’s back. ‘Here?’

‘Er – a bit lower,’ Bridget said reluctantly. ‘Yes. There.’

Gwen pressed into the hard muscle and felt Bridget immediately relax a little at her touch; encouraged, she dug her palms in deeper. Bridget sighed and seemed to melt into her hands, the back of her head resting ever so slightlyagainst Gwen’s chest. Her hair smelt like something rich and nutty and sweet, and she was warm under Gwen’s fingers; Gwen knew she must be blushing scarlet, and had absolutely no idea where to direct her eyes. She settled on staring at an innocuous and entirely platonic bit of tree.

‘Who – um, who was the girl who used to do this for you?’ Gwen asked, shifting a fraction lower and repeating the movement; she was rewarded with another sigh, and focusing on the specifics of the tree became even more pressing. ‘It wasn’t … Was it Adah?’

‘Adah?No. She was the daughter of a neighbouring lord,’ Bridget said, her words coming much easier now. ‘Until – she left. To marry.’

‘And – you were close?’

‘You could say that,’ Bridget said; Gwen couldn’t see her face, but somehow she sounded as if her eyes were closed. ‘I was courting her.’

Gwen stopped moving her hands. She felt like she had stopped functioning altogether. Her head was full of an odd rushing noise, like a river gone berserk, only one word audible over the uproar: ‘courting’.

‘Ah. Right,’ she said stupidly. ‘Lovely.’

Lovely?

‘You don’t have to carry on,’ Bridget said, a slight edge to her voice, ‘if you don’t want to.’