The Sum of Love by Olivia Lark

Author:Olivia Lark [Lark, Olivia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Three Bunny Farm Press
Published: 2020-02-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

IT WAS STILL STRANGE to Hollis that no one thought anything of two women sharing a bed. She certainly didn’t think of it as trivial. In the future, they’d be pegged as gay for sure, just for always sleeping together. It would be a no-brainer.

Or walking together hand in hand.

Or kissing every moment they were alone.

She shifted slightly to look at Faith, still sleeping against her shoulder, and felt that now familiar rush of desire. She wanted this woman. Fiercely, all the time.

Hollis tried to take that moment, in the faint gray light of dawn, to really grasp the sense of Faith as a solid real person in a solid reality. The quilts ever so slightly rising with her sleeping breaths, the strand of hair across her cheek. The weight of her, her smell, sun and earth and cascades of brilliance. It had to be enough. It had to overbalance the dread of losing her, even though it was stacked against the time travel, the sense that this couldn’t last, that it was a dream or a trick.

“Mama says it’s time to prepare the picnics!” One of the boys, maybe Ben. Hollis should be able to distinguish one from another by now, but it was probably hopeless. They were just so alike and so numerous, except for Byron, but he was nearly grown.

Faith moaned against her skin. “Picnics,” she mumbled.

Just Faith’s breath against her skin was enough to raise Hollis’s temperature.

“Your young man will be there,” the boy shouted.

Faith sat up, blinking blearily.

Faith’s young man would be there. Of course Peter would be there. Hollis suddenly felt cold again. All they were doing was torturing themselves.

Everything was terrible.

Faith glanced at her. “He is... “ she trailed off uncertainly and put her hand on Hollis’s arm.

“He is courting you,” Hollis said shortly.

“I know.”

“I don’t like it.”

Faith didn’t pull away. “You aren’t staying here,” she said. Her fingers, maybe unconsciously, were rubbing Hollis’s arm. God help her, Hollis couldn’t pull away either. She gazed into Faith’s face like it would hold all the answers she knew didn’t exist.

“If I were?”

It was an unfair question. She knew it when she said the words. Faith could no more marry her in this age than she could turn into a peacock.

Faith pulled away then, though. She started to pull the bedclothes off.

“No, I’m sorry,” Hollis said. “Don’t leave, not yet.” She pulled the blankets so that they tugged Faith back towards her. “Please, I’m sorry.”

“We don’t have much time,” Faith said. She obviously meant before they left for the picnic, or to do the chores, but it was the truth in every way. They didn’t have much time at all. Had they ever had anything more than borrowed time?

Hollis let her arm fall and Faith got out of bed.

“Hurry and get dressed,” Faith said. She sounded impatient. She turned so that Hollis could fasten her stays and brushed her dark hair out in the dingy mirror. Hollis watched her.

“I will begin making the baskets,” Faith said, her hand on the top of the ladder.

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