Agnes exhaled, lifting her shoulder into her knife, and that moved me, that she was so trusting in my hand on her, and did not believe I would even accidentally hurt her. “I don’t really want to talk about this,” she said. “Not right now, this is just for us.”

She put her hand in my hair, and dragged my head back, turned my face up to hers. “I love you,” she said. Her eyes were the clear pale gray of nestling feathers. I could see the lake of each freckle on her nose. She lay her palm on my cheek. “This is just for us.”

* * *

We went back to the living room together, with my mouth tasting of mushrooms and Agnes’s tart body. We were of a piece in that moment, my hand at the crest of her waist, that small possessive tense. This is just for us, this was just for us.

Arthur had his feet on the coffee table, angled to greet us with the opening eye of his blood on his bandages. He was holding Agnes’s sketchbook again, at a contemplative distance from his face, and he lowered it at the sound of our footsteps.

The grin on his face was canyon-deep.

“I wondered,” he said, “where you got the mushrooms from.” He gestured at Agnes, his hand taking her in, taking in her body, the whole of her. “So that’s what they’re about.”

Like a straight razor, I slipped my body in front of Agnes’s body. “What?”

A word you might have used to describe Arthur is guileless, in the broad openness of his body, in the easy way his shoulders rested on his frame. Some people have a way about them. He gestured out the window. “I went out for some fresh air.”

“Oh.” The small black coin of Agnes’s open mouth.

“You said you couldn’t walk.”

Arthur stretched his back, bringing his arms to meet slow and languid above his head. He wove his fingers together, his back cracked. There was a smear of fresh dirt on the bandage Agnes had wrapped for him. “I can’t walk far.”

“It’s none of your business.” I wanted to put Agnes away. In another room, in a tower, in a castle, in a place where only I could reach her, and also in a place where she could not sweep my feet out from under me, trying to be kind.

“I didn’t say it was my business,” he said, making that awful gesture again, the hands raised, surrender.