Midmorning

x. nine days

It's okay to steal. God does it all the time.

             If you want to be pretentious, you could say it began with Adam's rib, or the Garden of Eden. The one that plagues my mind the most is Job, though—He stole everything from him under Satan's persuasion. His children, his animals, his health. Of course it was just to prove He was right, and the tale says He was—Job believed in God, you see—but why He wasted his time persuading the Devil regardless was beyond me. Two opposite ends of the spectrum never tend to agree with one another.

             But I had no room to talk.

             I wasn't only dealing with the Devil, but stealing all the same. I was stealing time, wasting it like children's pocket money. I was robbing someone of a friend, of a daughter. But that's as far as the list went—the sun would still burn and the moon would still sin when I was gone. Besides, as far as they were concerned, I might as well have not existed at all.

             They deserved more.

             The parchment in my hand smashed against my knuckles, desperate to leave my confines as the wind blew north, east, south, west. Tom didn't prove himself very clear when he said I'll come and get you but also wrote the forest, leaving me to presume he changed his mind and followed the usual path out of the castle I took on my worst days, soaking in the scenery as if it would grab me and turn me to soil.

             Crunched footfalls gave him away, sanding my attention to a point, making the dull cold colder and my blurred vision sharper.

             'I told you I'd come for you.'

             Fuck's sake. 'Why waste time?'

             The moon played a hymn on his skin. The notes stretched over his arm as he held his hand out, and, stupidly, I nearly took it before he said, 'The list.'

             Reluctant, I handed it over. Wren had tried to snatch it from me the entire day—fighting the instinct to hide it now, especially from someone I distrusted, was unbearable.

             Tom tore it from me and the bright psalm snapped from his arm and only cupped his face. He smiled. '"A cohesive list of things I have never done."' Again, levity to save face. 'You've never made a spell'—he began to pace to the wind's tempo—'Never hung out of a speeding car?'

             I shrugged, chagrin shaving the cold away. 'Easily amused.'

             He ignored me. 'You've never visited a Muggles' witch museum—those sound horrific.'

             'They do,' And I hate that I agreed, 'Which is why I want to go.'

             Tom stared at me like I was a child expressing my fascination with the pretty pinks and blues and greens that rippled inside bubbles. 'If you insist.'

             To wound me more, he just kept reading: 'You've never cooked in the school kitchens, never had a book read to you—' He paused and I braced myself for the your mother never read to you? 'No, nor have I.'

             My organs twisted. Of course not.

             'You've never slow danced—'

             He paused again, a harsh, dampened pause. 'Well, the last one is a lie.'

             I grew defensive. 'What is it?'

             Tom sighed. '"Never felt anything."'

             I wrote that?