The Miner's Wife

Chapter 5: The baker's son

When was the last time I lived in the same house as another human being? It must've been before I was reaped. That was 14 long years ago.

It may as well have been another life.

It's hard to get used to all the sounds. Not that Katniss's children are all that noisy. When I think about the way I used to fight with my brothers when we were little, Arrow is rather quiet by comparison. Although Ivy is only a baby, she really doesn't cry a lot. I was under the impression that babies cry all the time. Maybe because that's what my mother told me I did when I was a baby, I don't know. Either way, having people in the house means that there are a lot more sounds than I'm used to.

I don't speak with Katniss much. I'm not sure what to say to her, or what the safe topics are. The past is tricky, although we have brought it up a couple of times. She's recently lost her husband, so that is obviously a touchy subject, and the two of us never really had a past. Katniss and I never shared anything but a memory of bread, rain, hunger, and a beating from my mother.

The rest of the memories are mine, not hers, because she never noticed me. Like the memory of a five-year-old girl with two braids instead of one, who sang the Valley Song. When she did, I can swear that the birds stopped singing to listen to her. From that moment on, I was a goner.

I remember a tiny Seam girl, the very kind of girl my mother used to view with great suspicion whenever they stepped into the bakery. The girls she would speak disparagingly about as soon as they were out the door. The dark, olive-skinned girls with bony legs and gray or dark brown eyes, freckles on their noses, and delicate cheekbones.

Never in my five years of life had I seen a girl who was as beautiful as Katniss Everdeen. She didn't have a lot of friends, but she would hang out with Madge Undersee at lunch. I thought it was odd that the Mayor's pretty daughter, who could've been friends with anyone, would prefer the company of the poor, quiet Seam girl. I always thought that Madge, too, must have seen that there was something about Katniss. Something special.

I never dared to talk to her. Talking to Seam girls wasn't socially acceptable for good merchant boys like me, who were closely controlled by their mothers. Only later, when we got older, would it be acceptable (although still not to their mothers) to take the Seam girls to the slag heap to fuck them. I'd never do that to Katniss, of course. Not before the reaping, because the last thing I wanted was for our first time together to be on the slag heap. She deserved so much more.

Not that she would want me, anyway.

And when I returned from the Hunger Games, there was Gale Hawthorne. I knew, of course, that he and Katniss had been hunting partners and friends for years. I'd seen them after school, when he would follow her home or watch as they would slip off to the woods together.

She seemed oblivious to it, but I noticed. I noticed how, sometime during the winter of the year she turned 16, Gale looked at her differently. I recognized it because it takes one to know one: A boy, or a man, who is hopelessly in love with Katniss Everdeen.

The realization made me so jealous it scared me. I had no idea I could harbor feelings that dark. I would imagine Gale touching her, kissing her, or even just talking to her, and I would be consumed with red-hot rage. I imagined myself getting into a fist-fight with him. Obviously I'd win, and after, Katniss would look adoringly at me and tell me that she had never wanted to kiss Gale, and she'd thank me for saving her. And then she'd kiss me instead. When I snapped out of my daydreams, I always felt deeply ashamed of myself. Katniss Everdeen wasn't mine, and if I'd actually done that - gotten into a fight with Gale - she certainly wouldn't have thanked me after. She would've hated me. My only consolation was that Katniss didn't seem to be in love with Gale. She didn't seem to notice the way any of the boys at school looked at her.