Finch's nose, though long, was thin and delicate, and the tip of it turned upwards. Just a smidge. Cato could really only tell when he looked at her in profile. It was especially lovely when she was regarding him with skepticism, because then she would wrinkle it and it made him want to laugh. Kiss me it said to him. Kiss me.
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For the most part Finch's travels through the Training Center's ventilation systems didn't yield too much new information. She'd been hoping to be lucky enough to overhear the gamemakers discussing the twist, but it never happened.
One day, however, as she peeked down through the grate covering the vent in the ceiling of the board room, she saw them, gathered around a table and looking over a holographic map of the finalized arena.
She could hardly believe her good fortune, and she immediately set to work memorizing as much of it as she could. It was a forest, with a lake right next to the Cornucopia. But the lake was too exposed, too obvious. The lake was the territory of the Careers. So she focused on locating the streams and creeks, the smaller sources of water.
And she took comfort in the fact that, even though she would die soon, it would not be from dehydration.
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Cato's chest was like a brick wall warmed by the sun. Solid and broad and begging Finch to splay her hands across its expanse. Begging her to rest her cheek on the left side of it where she could hear his heartbeat, steady and strong and comforting.
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She couldn't believe she'd not thought to tell him about ancient Greece until now. She spent two whole nights on the gods and the goddesses and the myths and the city states.
"I'm a Spartan," he said when she was done. "A warrior. And you're Athenian. A scholar. They should have named you Athena."
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Finch's skin reminded Cato of milk. Flawless and rich and creamy. Except for the light dusting of freckles on her nose and her cheeks.
Sometimes he tried to count them, the way he used to try to count the stars as he gazed up at the night sky in 2, but she never kept still long enough for him to get past 20.
He'd strangle a sound of frustration, and one time she noticed it as he caught it in the back of his throat, and looked at him questioningly.
But he just shook his head. "Nothing," he said. He could hardly tell her to lie down on the mat so he could settle overtop of her and take her face between his two hands, turning it this way and that as he memorized the coordinates of each and every faint nutmeg-colored dot.
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They got on the topic of the Civil War, which led, of course, to slavery and the KKK and the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.
Cato was not able to grasp the concept of racism very well.
"It makes no sense," he said to Finch. "It's like deciding that just because someone has blue eyes or brown hair or is short that they should be treated differently. There's no logic behind it."
Finch shrugged. "I don't really get it either. But nevertheless, that's what happened." And then she told him about what the Nazis did to the Jews, and about World War II.
And on another night she told him about gay rights in America and how hard people who weren't heterosexual had had to fight just to be allowed to get married to someone of the same sex.
He let out a snort when she said that some people had thought that sexuality was a choice and that those who weren't straight could be "rehabilitated." "That's stupid. Everyone knows it's genetic."
"Apparently, they hadn't made those advances in science yet."
"Well anyway, I hate broccoli, right? That's like telling me I'm choosing to not like broccoli and making me eat it. Sure, I can chew and swallow, but it's not going to feel good. I still won't like broccoli at the end of the day. And why did they care anyway? Those people? About who someone else wanted to marry?"
And that started days' worth of talk about world religions, which they'd already discussed in brief during many of their other history lessons.
The gnawing feeling ate at Cato's insides every night now. And a voice whispered in the back of his mind that something wasn't right about the relationship between the Capitolites and the citizens of the districts. About the way the districts were pitted against one another. About the way they were treated differently and the way they were controlled.
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Never in a million years had Finch thought she would like the smell of metal on a man. But she did. There was something faintly metallic in the scent of Cato's skin and his clothing and his hair and his sweat-even his breath for chrissakes.
It was the smell of his sword and his spear and the blood that he would soon spill, and so she should have associated it with death.
But it was also the smell of his blood. Sometimes her forehead brushed against the base of his throat as they wrestled and she could feel it there, pulsing warmly just beneath the surface. She would breathe in the smell of iron and the smell of his strength, and so she associated it with life.
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Sometimes she was amazed at how quickly he could put things together. Like when he figured out that Rosseau's philosophies must have played a role in the French Revolution. And that France's decision to help America out during the Revolutionary War also probably helped contribute. "Seems hypocritical on Louis XVI's part," he said. "I mean, he wanted to retain control over his own people, but he was helping the colonies rebel against George III? Didn't it occur to him what kind of message that would send to his own people?"
She'd made none of these connections for him. He'd reached into the closet of his mind and pulled out details that she'd thought of as so insignificant she'd been sure she'd been boring him to death, but apparently he'd been absorbing them like a sponge. He was beginning to remind her of a walking encyclopedia, but a pleasantly humble one, who didn't even realize how much he knew.
When she talked about World War I, he wondered how two people who were related to one another so closely could go to war against each other. "What are you talking about?" she asked him. She'd merely told him that Germany and Austria had gone to war against England and France and the United States.
"Queen Victoria. Wilhelm was her grandson. And George V. They were cousins."
"Huh?" Her head was starting to spin. So he pulled out a pencil and turned over his map and he drew her a sort of abbreviated family tree, with Victoria at the top, although the only names he knew to put at the branches were those of her two eldest children and their eldests in turn. "You said she was the grandmother of Europe and all her kids married into the royalty of all these other countries, like Germany. Obviously this is not right at all, cuz I don't know the names of her other kids," he said as he drew a bunch of other lines off of the bottom of Victoria's name. "But these two. They were first cousins," and he tapped the pencil on Wilhelm's and George's names.
She hated to admit it, but she was actually jealous. She may be the more educated of the two, but he might be smarter. She had known, of course, that Wilhelm had gone to war against George, but it hadn't actually hit her that they'd been related until Cato pointed it out.
But his brain had already moved on. "Well, I guess it's not so surprising that relatives went to war against each other. Look at Henry II and his sons," he said, and then his tongue was racing off again, leaving Finch's mind feeling as if it had been left in the dust.
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When Finch laughed, her eyes narrowed so much that you could barely see her amber irises. But oh how they glowed. They looked almost translucent, and Cato swore he could see little flecks of gold drifting sluggishly through them, as if caught in honey, and pushing off slowly against the thin chocolate brown ring that kept all of that delicious nectar contained.
Sometimes he fell into her eyes and got lost in them, opened his lungs and felt amber-colored syrup ooze down their insides and he couldn't breathe.
What a lovely way to drown he thought.
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"The arena is a forest this year," she said out of nowhere.
He snapped his eyes to hers in shock. "How do you know?"
"The vents. I can fit in them. I can crawl through the whole training center. I heard the gamemakers talking about it."
"Finch, you should be careful!" he hissed. "They'll kill you if they catch you."
"I'm d-"
"I know, I know, you're dead anyway. But maybe the wouldn't kill you. Maybe they'd...maybe they'd cut your tongue out like Titus's daughter and make you an Avox." He was starting to panic. He was from 2. He knew what Peacekeepers sometimes did to prisoners and Avoxes. "They could beat you or starve you or rape you."
He grasped her shoulders and shook her, hard. "DO NOT go in those vents again. Do you understand me?" His voice was harsh and angry, and her eyes grew wide and filled with tears at his tone and his sudden aggression.
He sighed and forced himself to soften his voice and his grip on her body. "What else did you hear?" he asked.
Finch swallowed and blinked the tears from her eyes. "Girl on Fire is an archer. She hunts. You can't let her get her hands on a bow. And her district partner is stronger than he looks. Wrestled in school. The boy from 3 can build explosives from random things. But otherwise, I didn't see anything that made me think anyone else is a threat. Except the boy from 11. He's a serious contender. But you already knew that."
Cato nodded at her. "You hear anything about the twist?"
"No, nothing. I was gonna go in again tomorrow...see if I could learn anything about it."
He dropped his head and squeezed her shoulders, but there was no anger in it this time. "No!" It sounded like a plea, his voice. "Please. Promise me. Promise me you won't go back in there."
Coming from Cato, this was worse than the yelling and the demands. It was so pitiful that Finch felt she had no other choice but to agree. "Ok," she said. "I won't."
He sighed with relief and looked up at her, held her eyes captive with his. "Promise."
"I promise."
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Cato's lips were mostly to be found forming a tight, thin, stern-looking line. They practically disappeared when he laughed or smiled, and then he was all teeth.
And while Finch didn't mind looking at his lips or his teeth, if she was honest with herself, she would prefer to not be able to see them. Because she would prefer his lips to melt into hers and then open to invite her tongue into his mouth. She would prefer that his teeth sink lightly into the place where her neck met up with her shoulder.
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"Is that your token?" Cato asked, pointing to Finch's right hand.
She looked down at the thin copper band. "Yeah. It was my mother's wedding ring. What's yours?"
"I don't have one," he said.
He sounded stoic, but Finch's heart ached for him.
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Finch's cheekbones were high and sharp, positioned at the very widest part of her face. From there, everything tapered down gradually but steadily, until the right and left sides met up at what some might see as a chin that was just a little too pointed.
But Cato wanted to take his two index fingers, one to either side of her face, and trace her bone structure. He'd start just under her eyes, he decided, and run his fingers back along each cheekbone until he reached her temples, and then he'd make his way down the sides of her face and he'd map her jawline, and finally, once his fingers met one another at the tip of her chin, he would draw back regretfully.
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"I'm tired of talking. I need a break. Tell me something. Tell me about 2. What's the prairie like?"
So he talked to her about the smell of the grass and the way the thunderstorms rolled in and about the prairie dogs popping up out of the ground. About the color of the sky at sunrise and sunset. How the sunlight bounced off of the snow in the winter and how the wind howled and drove it into drifts. About the bullfrogs singing at night in the summer while the fireflies danced above their heads.
And when he looked over at her, her eyes were shining. "I wish I could see it someday," she whispered.
He wished she could too. So badly that it made his throat close up and his chest hurt.
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Cato's arms were the loveliest restraints Finch could ever imagine. She was quick and she was slippery and she was nimble but sometimes, just sometimes, she let herself be caught, let herself be tamed, let herself be held a little longer than necessary so she could revel in the feel of those warm arms, hard as rock, hard as steel.
And she should have been terrified of them, she knew. She should have labeled them as dangerous. Every ounce of intellect chided her that it should be so. But every cell of her muscle and her blood and her bone whispered to her safe, here you are safe.
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Cato was heading out the door of his apartment so he could go see Finch for their usual meeting when he ran into Plutarch Heavensbee as he stepped off of the elevator.
"Hello Cato. I just came to see Brutus," the gamemaker said, holding out his hand. "Where are you off to?"
Cato was about to lie and say he was going to see Marvel, but as he took his right hand out of his hoodie pocket, his folded map with Victoria's family tree on the back of it caught in his cuff and wafted down to the ground.
He stood, frozen, as Heavensbee bent down to retrieve it.
Please don't notice what's on it, Cato prayed silently.
But his prayer went unanswered, and he watched in horror as the gamemaker unfolded it and studied it for a few seconds. "Who gave you this?" he asked after what seemed like an eternity.
"It's mine," Cato said icily. He'd be damned if he'd betray Finch.
"I didn't realize they taught all of this at the Academy. In fact I'm fairly certain they don't."
"Just have me arrested already. Get it over with," Cato said through clenched teeth.
But Plutarch Heavensbee merely refolded the paper and handed it back to him. The look in his eyes was a curious one, completely devoid of malevolence. "Don't fret my boy. Your secret's safe with me. I suspect you and I may have more in common than I ever realized. But don't worry about that right now. Just survive these games-although I'm assuming you're not really a fan of them, just as I myself am not-and we'll have lots to talk about afterward. And you be more careful with that." He pointed to the map, and then he stepped past Cato and into the apartment.
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Finch's voice was low, and surprisingly so, for someone as small as she. But Cato wouldn't have described it as smooth. No, it was pleasantly...fuzzy. Sometimes it scraped a bit against her throat before it rose up and out between her teeth, especially on prolonged vowels. As though she'd lost her voice days ago and hadn't quite gotten it all back yet.
When she spoke, he had the strange sensation of being deliciously bound on all sides by the content and cadence and texture of her words, and yet somehow he found her voice to be elusive. As though it wrapped around him teasingly and then, just when he reached out to try to catch it, it slipped from his fingers and evaporated into thin air.
If he could, he would trap it inside of a velvet-lined box and he would store it in the top drawer of his nightstand in his bedroom at the Training Center. And then, every night, as he lay alone in his bed, he would take it out and set the box on his chest, and then he would lift the lid, and there would be her voice. A glowing amber lozenge, with tiny nuggets of gold swimming lazily through its depths.
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"Look what I snuck for you," Finch said mischievously as she entered the sparring room. Her eyes were dancing.
In her hands she held a small plate with a piece of chocolate cake so dark it looked black. It was topped with a generous coating of fluffy white frosting. His mouth started to water.
"I'm not supposed to have that," he whispered, but his resolve was already halfway crumbled.
"One piece of cake isn't going to be the difference between life and death in that arena," she coaxed.
He leaned down and inhaled the heavy dark aroma of chocolate and the rich creamy scent of vanilla frosting, and he moaned.
"What's that shiny stuff?" he asked. There was a fine dusting of something shimmery on top of the icing, and it reminded him of sunlight glittering on fresh snow.
"It's called finishing sugar," she said.
"Oh my god, give me a bite."
Finch giggled and cut off a piece with the fork and then she held it up to his mouth. He closed his lips around it and he thought he had died and gone to heaven.
"Mmmmmmmohhh my god," he said with his mouth full.
"Good?" she asked, raising her eyebrows.
"It's better than sex."
"Well that's...more than I wanted to know," she said. "I picked the piece with the most frosting on purpose."
"You have some now."
"I already had a piece at dinner. This is for you."
"All of it?"
"Every last bite."
"Oh my god I love you," he groaned as she stuffed another forkful into his mouth.
Finch's heart seized up, but only for a second, because she knew he wasn't serious. It was simply a hyperbole, an exaggeration of his gratitude.
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Cato's hands had taken quite a beating for someone so young. His palms were calloused, his knuckles scarred, his cuticles dry and ragged against the white half moons at the base of his nails.
Finch knew well the feel of the callouses as they caught on the skin of her arms and her wrists and even her neck. But she did not know what those scars felt like beneath her thumbs, and god did she want to know.
If she could choose her manner of death in the arena, she thought it would be best to have her throat squeezed between those warm calloused hands until they cut off her air supply. And as her lungs struggled for oxygen, she would attempt to inhale through her nose, and so the last thing she would smell would be the metal on his palms.
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They were holding a heated debate over whether Cato should wear a navy blue suit or a dark grey one for his interview over dinner and it was starting to drive him insane. Paris was in favor of the blue, while Acadia, his stylist, was pimping the gray.
"What do you think Cato?" Paris asked, turning to him.
"I don't care either way," he said, slightly annoyed. He had been in the middle of contemplating 1984 and the idea that Big Brother is always watching and what it had to do with his life as he knew it, and at first he'd been able to ignore their inane conversation, but now they were trying to draw him into it.
"Well, listen," said Acadia, "the gray will look better with your eyes and-"
"But the blue will look better with your hair I think," Paris said.
"But your eyes are your best feature," Acadia argued, leaning in towards him.
"Oh my god I don't care!" Cato yelled and they both sat back. "It doesn't matter. It doesn't fucking matter. Just pick one."
Didn't they understand what was important in life? Chocolate cake was important and Shakespeare was important and George Orwell was important, goddammit. And girls with red hair laughing as they caught fireflies while bullfrogs sang in the background because they didn't have to worry about how their fathers and brothers would eat.
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Finch's lips, a few shades darker than her skin and tinged with pink, were small and thin and straight, but Cato was fascinated with them. They were highly defined where they met up with her skin, creating an almost imperceptible ridge all the way around them that he would have very much liked to trace with his tongue as he took each of her lips, the top and the bottom in turn, between both of his.
Her teeth were small and pearly and just slightly pointed (like a fox's he chuckled to himself) and sometimes he imagined them taking hold of the skin just beneath his jaw, tugging and nipping and leaving little marks that she would soothe with her tiny pink tongue.
His musings on the rest of her face made him feel tender towards her, but the thought of her mouth ignited the part of him that was most carnal. The thought of her mouth never failed to turn him hard.
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"The bloodbath," Cato said. "We need to talk about it."
"Ok. What about it?"
"Don't even bother with it. Turn and run into the trees. Immediately."
"I know. That was my plan all along. What are you gonna do?"
He looked at her soberly. "I'm a Career," he said, and his voice was flat. "I'm gonna do exactly what everyone expects me to do."
Finch studied him sadly, and then she nodded in understanding.
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Cato's eyes were usually the color of his sword, cold and glinting and hard.
But sometimes, when she was in the middle of a story, she'd turn to look at him and find them focused on her face, the look in them soft and smoky and warm. She would almost lose her train of thought, almost lose the ability to speak.
Maybe he wouldn't even need to wrap his hands around her throat to kill her in the arena. Maybe he could just fix his eyes on hers and she would suffocate on the smoke in them.
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"Tell me a fairy tale," he said to her.
"I thought you didn't like those."
"I need something with a happy ending," He closed his eyes. "Tell me Beauty and the Beast again."
So she did, and as she talked he thought about how the only reason she'd started seeing him every night was because he'd threatened to make her pay if she didn't. But he hoped with all of his heart that now she saw him because she wanted to.
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Cato couldn't see much of the skin that covered Finch's body, and his hands had not had the privilege of discovering its texture, but through the fabric of her clothing he could feel its warmth, could feel how it stretched itself thin over her collarbone. He could feel how perfectly his palms molded over the curvature of her shoulders, as though they had been shaped specifically to suit him.
There were other things he could feel. A few places where her flesh, rather than being pulled taut over ribs and elbows and shoulder blades and hipbones, was softer and more pliable. Two small swells high on her chest. Two larger ones beneath the small of her back. The insides of her thighs.
But he kept his thoughts from lingering on those places for long, for the same reason he avoided gazing at her mouth for any length of time.
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"What do you hate most of all?" he asked her one day.
"The games," she said.
"Well, ok, but if we lived lives without games and Peacekeepers and parents dying too young or being paralyzed or leaving us on doorsteps. Then what?"
"Being made fun of and mocked and picked on. Being humiliated in front of everyone," Finch said. "What about you?" She already knew the answer, feeling stupid, but she thought it was polite to ask the question anyway.
She was surprised at the words that came out of his mouth. "Being confused," he said quietly "Not understanding my place in the world."
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Cato's hair was perhaps the most boyish thing about him. It was a dirty golden color and it mussed easily, sticking up in unruly tufts. It wasn't as soft as hers, that she knew, but still. She would have liked to run her fingers through it, to tug and twist it this way and that.
She had heard the girls at school giggling about how sometimes a guy would go down on a girl and put his mouth at the juncture of her legs, and how it would feel excruciatingly wonderful.
She pictured Cato's head down there, his hair the only part of him visible between her thighs, and she smiled at how she would reach down to grab fistfuls of it and hang on for dear life as she threw her own head back.
The thought of it made her rub her thighs together a little-just a little-and feel the dampness that had accumulated there.
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Brutus smiled to himself as he watched his tribute's gaze follow the little thing from 5's every move longingly.
He chuckled to himself as he watched the little thing from 5 caress the planes of his tribute's face with her eyes.
But he frowned to himself when he remembered that in less than a month's time they would be pitted against one another and that the little thing from 5 would be dead.
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As much as she hated Lacey Smalls, Finch had to admit she was right about one thing. She was probably gonna die a virgin. And that really wouldn't have bothered her. She hadn't been particularly curious about sex. Until Cato came along.
And sometimes she thought about swallowing her pride and asking him if he would grant her this one favor. But she didn't. Because she knew he would never want someone as ugly and awkward as her.
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Cato had wanted to fuck Glimmer so so bad. He'd gotten inside a lot of hot girls in 2, but Glimmer...she oozed sex. She was by far the hottest thing he'd ever seen.
He'd held back because he didn't want her to get clingy. It could make for some awkward training sessions and some uncomfortable games if they had anything other than a one-night stand. He'd promised himself that he'd fuck her the night before their interviews. Two nights before they entered the arena.
And Serena was gorgeous too. But he knew better than to stir up that kind of drama by sleeping with more than one Career. And she wasn't a sure bet. She'd take some work he figured, and he just didn't care enough to put in the effort.
Clove...she was like a sister. It would have just felt wrong.
So it was Glimmer he had chosen.
But now he was starting to rethink that decision.
Now he was starting to think that Finch was by far the most desirable girl he'd ever met. And he thought about telling her. But he didn't. Because, in spite of her kind words and her insistence that he was smart, he knew she would never want someone as stupid as him.