Re: carnival: sparrow/matt
She said she made up 'maybes,' and remembered nothing at all. Someone else with holes and nothing to fill them with. He'd thought the story about the carnival when she was young sounded too complete to be real. What chance was there of that? How rare was it for two people like them to meet? How did it happen for her? He didn't know how other people lost memories. He barely knew what had happened to his own. He wasn't sure about coincidences but it did feel rare, and it did feel strange.
He didn't answer her question right away. She was right - if she wanted to know, not many people aside from him could answer it for her.
She pulled up and stood close. She smelled warm and clean, empty-eyed but very real. He did sometimes remember women. The memories associated with them were sometimes as quiet as this room was now, but not for the same reasons.
"Something is better," he said. When you had nothing, you could be anything for anyone, absorb the first suggestion just to have something to fix the chaos on, wrap your whole self around any shred that you were given.
There was no question, standing so close, that he wanted to pull her robe loose and shut the door completely. He knew now had paid for that right. But he didn't. He didn't.
There was something left in him, then, that was old and tied up in an idea of chivalry. Who knew how faithful he had ever been to it when it was present in his life, an idea that many men even then only paid lip service to. He was still working out who he was, but this didn't feel alright in the pit of his stomach. It felt plain wrong, paying for the company of a woman who didn't even remember who she was supposed to be. Too close.
"To talk," he said. God, but she was nice to look at, with her head tipped up like that, so near his chest. Maybe there was a guy out there who knew that look and missed it. Or maybe there was no one worth remembering. He could feel the heat of her through the robe in the cool room, and the twist of heat in the pit of his stomach was guilty and tangible. He pressed his thumb inside its coarse glove into the base of her palm, holding her hand a little tighter.
There was no question that things would have been very different for him if the carnival barker didn't ask for cash, but he didn't flatter himself in thinking it would have been for her. "You sounded different." Different from the people who weren't afraid of bitter winters, blood on the sheets, or days with no sunlight.