Cathy insisted, "You see what I mean? The fact that we're even doing this –"
"Did I teach you nothing?" Heathcliff hissed, though he was smirking. His large, long hand came to Cathy's face and pressed over her mouth, silencing her. She opened her eyes wide in outrage. His smile grew wider. "Be quiet. We need the right amount of noise. Turn the hairdryer on."
He released Cathy and she blinked at him. She was dressed in her school uniform, as was he. Heathcliff hovered his hand over the door handle and nodded encouragingly toward the hairdryer. Cathy walked to it, switched it on, and it whirred nosily.
When she turned around he was gone, and seconds later she could hear the sounds of their Father greeting him at breakfast. After a few minutes, she turned off the hair dryer and waited a long, steady moment to look into her own eyes in the mirror. It was rare she was alone in this room, with the floor-length mirrors, the wide windows, where everything was reflective, where everything, she feared, was beginning to refract.
She took her time to drink in the soft movement of the blue colours there, deep and layered and strange, like the sea. And, like the sea, now that she looked into herself, she did not recognise much beyond a surface. Something was shifting, changing, moving through the waters of her, something inside, hidden by an attractive, translucent darkness.
She stood up quickly and made her way down the stairs. She did not want to think about it. She would pretend nothing had happened, and pretend that she didn't enjoy it, that she didn't sense that change, the something new, a forbidden thing, growing and growing like a swollen seed.
Heathcliff was sat with his elbows on the table and a hearty, lop-sided smile on his face when she came down to breakfast. Their Father was spreading marmalade on a slice of brown toast, round and bearded and oblivious. Cathy swallowed hard against the lump in her throat.
"Toast, Cath?" Heathcliff asked her. His eyes glittered at her, oily and heady.
"Yeah," She answered, and markedly sat beside their Father as he lazily flicked through the newspaper. Heathcliff noticed this, and rather spitefully lobbed the toast at her plate, spattering crumbs across the tabletop.
"Enjoy," he snapped. Cathy rolled her eyes at him.
In the absence of a Mother, their Father had hired a housekeeper, Nelly. She was paid a small wage, was kindly, pudgy and warm, with a softly lined face and fair hair tied in a small plaited bun at the root of her head. Cathy liked her very much - her Motherly smiles, her carefulness, her quietness, her shoulders hard enough to cry on. Cathy watched as Nelly used a cloth to quickly slide the crumbs off the table, and Heathcliff glowered at her.
She was only half way through breakfast when he shucked his rucksack up onto his shoulder and gestured towards the door. "Come on, then, if you want me to walk you to school."
She stood up with her toast hanging out of her mouth, though Nelly protested, "But she hasn't finished her breakfast, Heathcliff."
Father laughed at her, subdued and old. He said, "It's alright, Nelly, let her go."
Cathy squeezed his shoulder goodbye and scurried after Heathcliff as he began unlocking the door. As soon as it was closed behind them he changed.
He began, "I don't like –"
"I don't care about what you like," she interrupted him quickly, and he glanced down at her as though she were an irksome housefly. "We can't be doing this, Heathcliff."
"Doing what?"
"Sneaking around! I've been thinking about it. It felt weird, this morning. Dad's said you have to move. You have to move. It's not right to disobey him."
Heathcliff looked ahead at the moors, cluttered with rocks and heather and buttercups, squirming with life around them. The breeze was high today, the whole world around them hissed and purred. They were moving towards a steep incline. The walk to school was always laborious, but Cathy normally enjoyed spending lonely, quiet moments with Heathcliff before he apparently disappeared into a miasma of faces.
"Fine, I'll sleep in Howard's room. Whatever you say."
"Don't be like that," she countered. Heathcliff scoffed.
"I'm not the one acting like a me, me, me little princess!"
"I'm trying to do the right thing here!" Cathy grunted, and then socked her fist, with a moderate degree of force, into his shoulder blade. His rucksack slipped down his shoulder and he yanked it back up, staring ahead. "I don't want to make Dad angry."
"You're not scared of making Dad angry," Heathcliff muttered, and at that she paused, froze on the spot in disgust, glaring at the back of his head. He did not wait for her. He continued walking, the muscles of his back lazily tensing and releasing through his white shirt.
"What did you say?" she bellowed, and then for good measure picked up a pebble, a small grey mottled pebble, and lobbed it at him. She missed by far.
"The angry person here," he called back to her casually, snickering, "is you."
"What?" she demanded.
"You're the one that's angry, nobody else," he hollered, and then he turned around to face her and began walking backwards. "And doing this will only make it worse, pretending will only –"
Cathy stared at him. A few curls, two perfect black ringlets, patted against his cheek in the breeze. He hadn't tightened his tie to his throat properly, and he wore his blazer looped around his waist and knotted. She gritted her teeth.
"I'm just doing what Dad says!" she seethed. Had he somehow known about that moment in the mirror this morning? She hated him for this – for knowing her like this, for being able to read her in the thickest darkness, feeling for her thoughts rather than reading them, reading her like Braille. "Just stay away from me, Heathcliff," she said finally, and then began running past him, up to the top of the hill. He did not call or follow her. She did not see him again all day.
And then she was not scared, or angry – she was sad. Flatly, wholesomely sad.
Nelly was polishing the mantelpiece when she returned home from school. She had one hour of work left, and Cathy knew she often chose to clean the living room as it was the room with a grandfather clock. Something about the proud, brassy declaration of it chiming five o'clock and ricocheting across the dark wood flooring increased the sense of relief and pleasure and achievement, Cathy was sure.
"Hullo, Nelly," she greeted her, swinging her bag onto the floor. "Is Heathcliff at home?"
Nelly paused her buffing and held her yellow cloth between her folded fingers, smiling. "Afternoon," she said. "I haven't seen him, no."
Cathy gulped down a foul, metallic taste in her mouth, and then realised she had bitten her lip so hard through nerves, through apprehension of seeing him when she arrived home, that she had broken the supple, pink flesh of her lower lip. She licked around her mouth and swallowed, the blood smearing into the curve of her cupid's bow. She ran the back of her hand across herself and then cleared her throat.
"Did he mention he wouldn't be home?" she pressed. Nelly shook her head, and Cathy growled quietly to herself. In her hand, she carried a little bouquet of hand-picked heather that a boy in her Geography class, Edgar, a tall, blonde, lean boy, had given to her as she walked home alone today. He was a nice boy, a sweet boy, and Cathy should have been happy to be given flowers by a boy, but the sadness she felt at the absence of Heathcliff got bigger and wider and heavier and made her ears ring and so she couldn't really hear a word Edgar had said as he handed it to her, before he diverged from their path to walk to Thrushcross Grange.
It was just about to turn to night-time. This was Heathcliff's favourite time of day, in which the colours of the world became moody and strange, in which the animals began to shape-shift, became larger and darker, in which starlight punctured the daylight, in which both the sun and the moon sat in the sky, both lucent and mystifying - it was as if he was sat between two worlds here, on the big rocks on the top of the moors.
He pulled his tie from around his neck and wound it through his fingers, bored. But he would sit here all night, hungry and chilly, if it meant Cathy would finally come to him. They had played this game too much as children, the cold shoulder, hide-and-seek, and though he knew it was perhaps reductive, he simply could not give her the satisfaction. Not when, like everybody else, she was sending him away, isolating him, abandoning him. He could not, would not, be abandoned, not by her.
He heard her coming to him.
She moved like a dog through the grass, quick and feeling with all of her senses, small with a brown pelt. She was a bloodhound for him, when she wanted to be - she knew the smell of his pain.
"Heathcliff?"
He turned to her, taking in her large eyes and small, plush lips. Her hair reeled around her shoulders, the gold blinking in the purpling sun. The whole sky was bruising.
"You told me to stay away," he said nonchalantly.
There was a pause. She did not come any closer, only swung her hands around her hips absentmindedly.
"You know I don't like it when you leave."
"You don't seem to like much about me at all, any more, Cathy."
She shook her head. "Is this about the bed?"
"You don't want me anymore. You don't want to walk with me, or spend time with me. You don't want bedtime stories, you don't want to sleep next to me. Everything we used to do. I don't get it." He could not stop the words, flowing out of him and filling him with relief like piss he had been holding for hours. He seethed, "And you walked home today with Edgar Linton. You're so quick to replace me?"
Cathy screeched into the dusk.
"Replace? What are you talking about? I don't even know Edgar. I've only spoken to him - maybe once?"
"Why, then? Why all of this? What are you so afraid of?" Heathcliff kicked himself off the big rock and stood facing her, her open shirt fluttering as the wind slipped into the material. He knew the answer, he knew - oh, he knew and it hurt. She looked so pretty out here, with her wild hair and her vein-threaded eyes and her lip trembling. She had been biting it, he noticed. She had been upset, frustrated, nervous. He was oddly pleased, but felt equally guilty that he had induced it. Her skin was glowing a honey-pale colour in this light, and he realised that he would never quite become accustomed to the near physical pain he felt at this longing when he looked at her and they were alone - this longing.
"I'm not afraid," she said indignantly. "I'm certainly not afraid of you."
He stepped closer to her once.
"Then why are you running away from me?" he whispered, and the tenderness in his voice made her eyelashes flutter in surprise.
"I'm not, Heathcliff. But - things are - we - I -"
"Cathy," he said quietly, and then stepped closer to her again so that she was finally within arm's reach. The grass rustled against his clothing, and soon it became the only sound. She looked up at him, and her eyes were like a silent, opaque lake in moonlight.
She suddenly blabbered, "You're my brother!"
He could not swallow down the single syllable of laughter that was wrenched from his throat.
"You don't think that," he said.
"Well - we should. I should. I -"
Heathcliff could feel the frustration spiking on his skin like static electricity, growing and growing in heat. "It's alright."
"It's not alright - we shouldn't."
Why was she fighting? He snatched out for her hand and caught it, and then grabbed the other, pulling her closer to him, pressing her arms against his chest. She stared up and him, shocked and unmoving, trapped, his little bird.
"Do you love me," he began, exaggeratedly slowly, flicking his tongue over his teeth, "the way a sister loves a brother?"
Her eyes grew wider and he could see her pupils fluctuating in size, excited, afraid. He could smell her breath, the stale, bloody scent of her cut lip in it, the lavender soap on her skin, the clean smell of her hair.
"Heathcliff -"
"Do you?" he begged.
She shook her head. He let go of her hands, finally, and she shook herself free of the numbness he had left behind, before facing the floor and saying nothing.
"I'm not your brother, Cath," he said carefully. She ran her hands through her hair, clutching her fingers into her scalp, and then glanced up at him. "I'd do anything for you," he said.
"I know," she nodded solemnly.
"Oh, Cathy, please don't be upset."
"What would they think?" she stuttered.
Heathcliff took in a deep breath and then ran his knuckles soothingly over her shoulder. "They don't need to know, what does it matter? I just - please don't just - don't make it like this. I've wanted this for so - for so long. For years, I've felt like this. For years. There's nothing in the way. There's nothing in the way now, and - please."
"Please what, exactly?"
"Please don't fight this change. There's nothing to be scared of."
He unfolded his hand and curled his fingers around her shoulder. "I began when I met you. I swear, Cath, the whole world bought me to this, bought me to you! It's why the roads turn, it's why the hills have risen out of the ground, it's why the rivers run, why the Earth turns!" he said earnestly, and then blinked rapidly she looked into him and bought her little white hand to rest against his cheek. She smoothed her thumb over his skin. He could not fight – he had never, ever even considered such a thing. His eyes floated closed and he sighed into her dreamily, the luscious warmth of her skin filling him with a quiet surplus of pleasure and need.
He continued speaking with his eyes closed, "I know that you feel the same way."
"What does it mean?" she whispered after another stretch of silence, her fingers swiping over his cheek again and again. Heathcliff's spine racked and spasmed with excitement.
"What kind of love is it?" he managed between shuddering gasps of air. "If it's not a sister's love for a brother?"
Cathy's hand froze and he urgently pushed his face into her palm, encouraging, pleading, for her to continue those little soft ministrations on his surface – oh, she was moulding the clay of him with those hands, giving him form, giving him purpose, giving him life. He wanted her to touch him and touch him and touch him everywhere, anywhere, and never stop and never move.
"Please," he muttered. Her thumb twitched on his chin.
"I don't know any other kind of love," she said.
"Yes you do," he urged. He could not open his eyes.
"It's a big love," she responded.
"Yes," he agreed.
"I don't know what to do with it, Heathcliff," she whispered.
"A husband's love," he said quickly, and then bravely snapped his eyes open. She was gazing into him with a kind of delicate awe, and she suddenly looked very young, and very calm. "A husband's love for a wife. A wife's love for a husband."
She nodded, almost grimly. He ignored it.
"Please, don't go away from me," he implored. "Don't fight it, don't – don't go away. Don't take yourself from me. Be with me, be with me."
She gave him a small smile and caught a little teardrop that had seeped from the corner of his eye on the pad of her thumb. She licked it from herself, swallowed, and then said sweetly, "I'm always with you."
A/N: For my Heathcliff.
Thanks so much nacyvsblur for your lovely review! Hope everyone enjoyed. Please let me know what you think.