Page 23 of Hellebore

I edge forward, nausea beginning to roll through my torso, my gaze darting to the pathway should Mother return unnoticed. I don’t want her to get in trouble, my sweet young sister, now in the honeymoon of adulthood. I don’t understand the game she’s playing. But there’s something calculating beneath her own composure, something dark as it weaves through her expression, turning her eyes malevolent as she allows him closer. Closer, and closer, and closer, until his lips linger a breath from her mouth, his hand trailing the small of her back possessively.

“Would you like to take a walk with me, Isabel?” He asks it gently, his hands settling against the back of her stained house dress. There is no beauty in it – no careful stitching nor colour to draw the eye. Only the quiet plainness of an ordinary girl, the way I was once. Unremarkable. Unassuming. Yet that’s precisely what he favours. The unbroken ones. The girls still soft with innocence, whom he might take slow pleasure in wearing down, thread by thread.

“Isabel–” I warn, stepping from the veranda, eyes focused on the way Cole pulls her against his body. But she closes the gap between them, running a hand across Cole’s chest with a sensuality I’d have not expected from her.

“Sure. But we can’t be long,” she coos, grasping his sun blemished hand and leading him through the gate with an unfamiliar smile.

My stomach knots as I watch, awestruck at her forwardness – aghast that she doesn’t seem to care if I overhear. As though my presence is of no consequence at all.

Yet I can’t move. Something has fastened itself around my ankles, rooting me to the veranda while slow, crawling dread sinks its claws into my mind.

It had begun with good intention, only the winter just passed.

A girl blooming with womanhood, alone and cold in the woods as she digested a new flush of feelings she was gripped with. A darkness beginning to weave through her marrow where glittering joy once overwhelmed her.

He had approached from the shadows, his foot fall near silent through the raindrops that echoed within the trees.

“Are those tears, Miss Rhodes, or is the rain simply bothering you?”

His voice was smooth as honey, laced with concern as he lowered himself to a crouch beside me.

Bark bit into the backs of my legs as I sat cross legged on a fallen trunk, my fingers twisting in my skirts. The rabbit mask lay discarded beside me – soaked through – a token of childhood thrown away in temper.

“I’m fine,” I assured him, wiping my cheeks and sniffling with embarrassment.

“Where is Francesca?” he asked, glancing around us should she sneak out from the thicket.

“We had an argument. She went home,” I admitted, tears welling again.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he soothed, brushing the tear from my lashes with a gentle hand. “What was the argument about?”

“She told me I needed to grow up.”

A sob shuddered through me as I recalled the dispute to him. Telling him how Francesca insisted it was time to let go of our masks, time to move on, become women. How she had wrenched the paper mache totem from my hand and thrown it to the earth with a ferocity I’d never witnessed. How anger gleamed in her eyes, the tension of her brow so deep I worried she’d remain that way forever.

I was merely seventeen when I first met him in the woods. He was many years aged beyond me. Yet in that moment, with his thumb across my skin and the gentleness in his eyes, I realised Francesca was right. It was time to grow up – to become a woman – and I was going to prove to her I could.

So, as I laid myself in the leaf litter, bugs scurrying noisily around my head while he pressed himself into me with unexpected force, that’s all I could focus on. Her. The light in her eyes as my toes began to curl and my fingertips pressed into the rough skin of this strange man’s back. Francesca and the way her friendship made me feel fearless.

I was going to prove to her, to myself, that I was brave and worthy of her love.

“May I have this?” he had asked, indicating to the mask in the leaves as he buttoned his jeans and straightened his back.

I nodded, a lump in my throat as I tried to swallow the swell of confusion in my chest.

“Thank you. I shall cherish it forever.”

And then he was gone, his shadow dissipating through the trees.

I unsteadily straightened, my legs quivering as an ache took hold in my stomach. Moisture wicked through my underwear, a sign of what had happened that made me feel both queasy and exhilarated.

Is this what womanhood was? Is this what my mother insisted I need to be ready for, when my bleed began and I faced a whole new perspective of the world.

I had run to Francesca immediately, not telling her of the union because the new secret I held felt too valuable, too gilded. Instead, blaming the tears on the loss of the mask. Weaving a story of how I had become so overwhelmed with emotion that I offered it to Cole as he passed me in the woods. That he had reluctantly accepted it, and moved on with confusion. That our interaction had ceased there, rather than with him leaving me frayed and yearning on the forest floor with a new attachment swelling in my chest.

Pity glistened in her eyes as she comforted me, her familiar scent settling my nerves as I pressed my face to the crook of her neck and she pat my back.

A knowing thrum began in my chest as I breathed in her scent, a lingering desire that wound through my fingertips as they itched to press to Francesca’s skin. She was my best friend, my anchor, and I loved her so fiercely that often it felt sinful.