9 / sugarers
During the day, sweet liquid runs from trees into buckets she walks around collecting, wearing a borrowed coat from the proprietor's gracious wife. These are borrowing times, but she doesn't mind living small, taking only what she needs. They are living in a kind of limbo, she knows. This can't last forever. Spring will warm and summer will rinse the sweetness. They will have to move on, or she will have her revenge and go back home.
Despite her dreaming, he doesn't have a clue. She is tapping trust from his heart like sap from these trees, and watching it dribble black and poisonous in the dish of her cunning palm. She drinks it in her coffee each morning, the way he looks at her.
They fold their arms and pretend they have nothing to talk about in clouds of steam pouring from the apparatus that boils their collection down to an amber thickness. It's easier when Buck is around not to lean into the calm and feel almost as if it's just the two of them in the world again. She fears that feeling, dreads its implications, but takes so much comfort in the absence of other people. Buck gives Kai a bottling lesson and she watches, mesmerized by the golden liquid filling each glass bottle as she reminds herself that the presence of one other person, even if that person is Kai, is the difference between the calm she feels now and the panic she felt when she was truly alone. It's possible, to some degree, that she needs him.
Buck seems proud of them as apprentices. Some of their precious yield is lost to the table, but Kai learns bottling quickly, and then it's her turn. Before the first week is done, he proclaims them good-enough sugarers. Now that they're acclimated to the job, he'll only be visiting once or twice a week to pick up full bottles and drop off empty ones. It's all too perfect, Bonnie thinks. She still can't trust things will stay good like this, but then again maybe that's just her, caught up in the trauma cycle that was living in Mystic Falls. It's hard to convince herself that life will feel stable ever again.
Nights, the sap inside the trees freezes and halts, and Kai can tend to the furnace as they ready themselves to bed. He lays on the couch under masses of blankets like geological layers of earth, the devil in all the heat he can generate. He watches the old couple's collection of movies on an obsolete cube TV, DVD menus and their music the soundtrack to their dreams once he falls asleep. She doesn't even have to tell him to stay on the couch; he simply cedes the bunk beds and the loft in its entirety to her and the space he knows she still needs.