“I don’t have any knickers,” I said.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, and pulled my hands away and, taking one of them, wrapped it around him.
I felt his hardness and his heat and wondered if that was why his hands were so cold. After I had held him for a while, Reuben began to move his body, so that he slid backward and forward inside my hand, until I learned to copy the movement. He breathed into me and pressed his face down onto mine so that our teeth clashed and his tongue was in my mouth. The sharp edges of stones in the dirt floor under the moss pressed into my back, as he traced the shape of my waist and bony hip with his hand, the undulation of my thigh, and down to the graze on my knee, then up again between my legs. His fingers explored me and circled around the bit of me that I didn’t have a name for. He made me forget to kiss him, forget to keep my hand moving. He shifted his body over mine and opened my thighs with his. His thing nudged me, and for a second I felt his full weight. Leaning on one elbow, he used his other hand to push inside my body. A cry, almost of pain, escaped from me and there was a low answering echo from him. He propped himself up on his elbows and we looked at each other. Daylight was coming in through the opening of the nest, and I watched a smile grow on his face.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” he said.
He took my hand, guiding it between our bodies, and moved his hips up and forward. Slow at first, then faster, and all the time my fingers kept rhythm with him. He buried his face into my hair and moaned. His nose to mine, he pushed into me harder, his face changing, his eyes losing focus, and I went with him, breathing heavier and faster, until that moment when a kind of fire spread up from between my legs and I convulsed and I heard Reuben’s deep, animal noise. And from a long way off, perhaps down by the river, I heard my name being called.
“Punzel!”
Reuben’s body tensed again and he rolled off me, onto all fours, and stuck his head out into the day. I wriggled to the bottom of the space, found my nightshirt, and put it on.
“Punzel!” my father’s voice came again. Urgent, closer.
“I have to go,” I said, pulling on Reuben’s arm so I could get past him to the opening.
“What?” he said, turning his head to stare at me, incredulous. “No. This isn’t going to happen. Not now.”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“We’ll hide,” Reuben said. His thing hung between his legs, still wet, but soft now. He dragged his clothes up toward him with his feet and put them on.
“He’ll find me.”
“We’ll cross the river,” he said, feeding buttons into the wrong holes on his shirt.
I stared at my hands, calloused, already old.
“OK, not the river. We’ll climb the mountain.”
“I didn’t bring my shoes.”
“Christ! You want to die with him, don’t you?” He was almost shouting. “Fight back, damn it.” He held me by the shoulders and shook me, and I just wobbled with him, feeling the tears welling. He gave me a despairing push.
“Punzel,” came the call, once more from the forest. Drawn out; a howl.
Reuben and I sat in the nest, our knees touching, not talking, until at last he said, “I don’t want you to die,” and I let him take me by the hand to lead me out into the morning.
We went left toward the gill, but slowly; I couldn’t run, I had to pick my way along the paths, but still my legs and feet were stabbed and scratched by stones and brambles. The liquid that Reuben had put inside me trickled down my thigh, congealing on my skin while I walked.
“We’ll work our way round, back to die Hütte, and get your shoes.”
“Your hat,” I said, pulling back on his hand. “You left your hat.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
When we reached the gill, I glanced behind me and was sure something moved between the trees, following us through the forest. The gill was damp and mossy as always, but easier to navigate than the forest floor. All thoughts of the water which tumbled beneath us disappeared as I followed Reuben down, hopping barefoot from one slippery boulder to the next, catching my balance at the last minute with clawing fingers. I slid on my bottom, grazing my skin, jarring my elbows, the nightshirt becoming a darker shade of green. The scab on my knee reopened and blood trickled down my shin.
Reuben was always a few steps ahead, looking around to say, “Hurry, hurry up.”
When we had ducked under the log bridge, he scrambled up the bank and I turned to look back the way we had come. My father stood at the top of the green tunnel, his feet planted on adjacent boulders. He stared down at me; then Reuben was grabbing my hand and pulling me up into the trees.
We traversed a wide loop through the forest, almost down to the river, and without me saying that I had seen my father following us, we crouched low under the ferns, crawling on hands and knees over rotten logs and through bushes which pulled at our hair and tore at our cheeks as if the forest, too, wanted me to stay. When we reached the trees at the edge of the clearing, we paused to catch our breath. I couldn’t see anyone behind us, but I was sure my father was there. Die Hütte stood in a pool of sunshine. It was perfect: logs stacked in rows against an end wall, the purple stems of chard standing at attention in the vegetable garden—but the door was ajar and the interior dark.
“Perhaps I should go in alone,” I said.
“No, I’m coming with you.”
The grass was high around die Hütte, waiting for my father to come with the scythe and slice it to stubble. We strolled through it, although my heart was hammering. When Reuben reached the doorway, we looked behind us, as if checking that the owner of the little house was not somewhere close by. With one hand he pushed at the door. It resisted. He put his shoulder to it and something heavy on the other side scraped along the floor, and then he ducked his head under the lintel. Inside, it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the gloom—nothing was where it should have been. Everything had been turned over, smashed and scattered. The stove tilted on two legs, its door open, spilling cinders. The shelves were empty; my bedcover had been thrown off, as if my father had thought I might have been hiding underneath it. And the base of my beautiful bed was cracked in two. My father’s bed had been ripped off the wall, and the contents of the chest—the food, the clothes, the tools, nails, and seeds—had been flung around the room. I picked up my balaclava, sticky with honey. And when I turned to the window, I cried out at the sight of the piano. The keys were in disarray, like broken teeth, the pebble weights strewn across the floor, catching under my bare feet. The table was cleaved almost in half, and the axe was wedged in the gap.
Reuben took the handle and tried to lever it free, but it wouldn’t shift. I nudged a couple of the broken things with my toes and righted a stool. I had my hand on one of my shoes when the door was pushed wide. My father stood there, a black shape against the white morning.
“You promised,” he said coldly.
I glanced at Reuben behind the open door. My father stepped inside and I saw he held the spyglass in his left hand. The sunlight caught something in the other, and I realized, without surprise, that he also carried the knife.
“I’m sorry, Papa,” I said. “I can’t do it.”