Chapter Text
She takes a summer job at the supermarket. It isn’t glamorous or well-paid. Often her fingertips are so frozen from stocking ice-cream that her phone doesn’t recognise her thumbprint at the end of the day; but she doesn’t mind. The coolness suits her.
They put her in frozen goods because in her first week she dropped a crate of spices packed into little glass tubs. Her throat burned as she knelt to slide a semblance of order to the scattered spray of shards and powder. Cinnamon stuck to her skin, her teeth. It took her a moment to realise that beneath the aromatic dust her cheeks were wet with tears.
Her manager made her pay for it out of her wages. He is a small, neat man with a silver streak in his dark hair. Always smiling. He smells of mint and looks at her dangerously. She avoids being alone with him.
Once, in that same week she dropped the crate of spices, he spent ten minutes berating her for mixing up two different shapes of pasta. She stood with her weight predominantly on one foot, her left arm crossed over her ribcage as she listened intently. She wanted to scream. Wanted to tell him that she was better than him, than this—that she knew the real reason he was boxing her in against the shelves, that she saw the lick of hunger beneath the anger in his eyes, and it disgusted her.
But she said nothing.
She doesn’t want to draw attention to herself. This summer, she wants only to stay as she is now: limned in the lonely light of the frozen goods aisle, made small by it—safe.
\ \
Theon is the first of her brother’s friends to find her. She looks at him as he leans a hip against the lip of the freezer cabinet she is pouring bags of peas into. He has dark circles beneath his eyes and tobacco-stained fingernails. A lean tiredness clings to the edges of his face as he tries a smile.
‘You’re working here?’
She makes a gesture to her uniform. ‘It would seem so, yeah.’
‘Why?’
‘Why does anyone work?’ she says. ‘I need the money. For uni.’
He flexes his fingers around the handle of the metal basket he is carrying. ‘Thought you’d have got a scholarship or something,’ he says. ‘You’re dead smart.’
‘The world’s full of people who are cleverer than me.’ She lifts her shoulder to rub a strand of hair back from her cheek. ‘There’s no money for them either.’
‘How come?’
‘Capitalism,’ she says. ‘Probably.’
She turns back to the freezer cabinet. He lingers for another minute or two. She is acutely aware of how intensely he is looking at her. The weight of it finds its way to her throat and—briefly, madly—she thinks she might start crying again. Then he straightens up and walks away with a word, a wish to see her around.
Relief floods like warm water beneath her skin. Her shoulders sag toward the bright white edges of the cabinet. She takes a breath. The air in her lungs is cold enough to cut. Soon her face is numb; but she doesn’t mind. The coolness suits her.
/ /
In the afternoons when she isn’t working at the supermarket, she walks across the green opposite the house.
By now it’s high summer. The sky hangs like a watercolour, and the air is hazy. Little wisps of grass glide at the knot of her anklebone. Beneath the thin cotton of her tee-shirt, the small of her back is warm and damp. She puts her hand to it, leans into the bracket of her palm as she pauses to take in the view.
It hasn’t changed much—the treeline, the distant glimmer of a lake—but from here it feels like she is looking at another world. Perhaps it is because she has only ever seen the wood and water lit by headlights, a wax-coloured moon. She closes her eyes now, pinches to black those thoughts of long ago.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket. She hooks it out, casts an idle look at the screen. A text from Jeyne, a plea for her to join the others at the pub tonight, a promise that it’ll be fuuuuun. She puts the phone back into the pocket of her denim shorts. Digs the toe of her right shoe into the tufts of grass till she loosens a bit of soil beneath the green.
On her way back to the house, she thinks about the text. Neat black letters offer up a dozen different excuses behind her eyes. Even as she considers them, she knows that she won’t use a single one. She gets her phone out from her pocket. By the time she reaches the black-iron gate leading up to the house, Jeyne has replied.
She looks at the screen, at the flash of colours. Three distinct emojis: a firework, a wine glass, a little red love-heart.
\ \
The lipstick she chooses is a darker shade of red. Her mother tells her how pretty she looks; but she isn’t so sure. What feels correct in the city sits wrongly here. The tight black jeans and silky blouse, the moonstone pendant and silver earrings. Her friends will be in flower-patterned prints, flowy dresses that twist like autumn leaves.
She is halfway across the green now; it is too late to turn back.
The low heels of her boots click against the pavement as she steps from the grass down onto it. Buildings bob the space either side of her. Most of the shops are shut, the awnings pulled up and signs brought in from the street. The sky is pale blue; but the air is a little too warm to be comforting.
She floats through her hometown like a ghost. She feels distinct from it, as if everyone else is woven into the bones of the place and she sits more like skin or the downy little hairs on its outer surface. Like she is not bound to it, like she is free to leave again. She enjoys this feeling.
Then she hears a voice, her name a bit of ribbon caught on the barb of it—
‘Sansa?’
—and all at once, she is pulled back into the bones of this place: all its knots and aches.
/ /
They used to drive down to the water at the outskirts of town, share a bottle of whatever he had managed to nab on his way out from the club. He was Robb’s friend, so their meetings were always secret.
But Robb is gone now, and neither of them have many friends to keep secrets from.
Jeyne and the others sit at a table on the opposite side of the pub. Sansa feels the phone buzz once in her pocket. She doesn’t look at the text on the screen as she sets it to silent and puts it back. Her eyes flick to the faded beermat on the dark tabletop, then lift slowly to track the strong shape of him at the bar.
From here, his shoulders look broader than they did before. Her palms cannot pretend not to know the exact shape of them, even so.
She presses her lips together tightly as she reaches for the beermat, rolls it up between her fingers. It is soft against her skin. She watches as he leans toward the bartender and the dim spotlight above catches the glimmer of silver around his neck. Her throat tightens; she feels like there is cinnamon still stuck to her teeth.
In her pocket, her phone sits silently. She didn’t look at the text on its screen, but she knows what it said—what it says, screams in that shrill voice Jeyne sometimes gets when she is worried—a red exclamation mark after two little words: Jon Snow.
His name bears with it a chequered reputation. There are knots of violence hidden away in the branches of his family tree, a pyromaniac or two. He has never committed arson; but half the town over know that he can well use his fists, his feet. She has seen the scars, the bruises made by one boot or the other. Those same boots treading the sticky flagstones toward her now in that quick, wolf-like way all his own.
The wine glass glitters wetly when he sets it down in front of her. She waits until his hand is well away from it before she reaches out to trace a fingertip around its rim. Her eyes fix onto the pink bloom contained within its edges. Distantly, she registers the sound of his tongue clicking against his teeth. Her breath hitches in her throat; but she will not tell of the reasoning behind its halt.
It is a secret ache, the want she bears like a bruise: for him to say her name again—slowly.
\ \
‘Theon told me you were back in town.’
Her second glass of rosé; the first words he has spoken. She tries to suppress the quickening of her pulse, the ragged drumming of her heart. Her body responds to the gravel in his tone as if years ago was yesterday. Unbidden, networks of touch left by the memory of his fingertips flash like fire beneath her skin.
She does not look at him as she takes a sip of wine. ‘Only for the summer.’
‘Hmm.’
There is an inflection to this sound that makes it lift from his throat like a laugh. She wants to look up as she sets the glass back onto the tabletop; but she knows that she can’t risk it. Because there will not be laughter in his eyes. There will be a calm like the distant eddies of a placid lake, the barest hint of something lurking beneath its glassy surface. Her gaze fixes instead on his right hand, the tattooed knuckles flexed around the beer-bottle.
‘I thought you might have left by now,’ she says.
‘You don’t leave the Watch.’
Her eyes dip along the letters on his skin. ‘It’s only a bar.’
‘Old Bear would roll in his grave to hear someone say that.’
She looks up. ‘Jeor’s dead?’
‘Aye,’ he says. ‘He left it to me—his faithful doorman.’
His fingers tighten around the beer-bottle. She thinks for a moment that this is what people see—lover and lout alike—before he wrecks them, utterly. His ink-stained hands, the cords of muscle flexing beneath the skin of his forearms. That little sound he makes with his tongue against his teeth.
A prickle of heat blooms at the nape of her neck now. ‘I should go.’
‘Finish your drink first.’
She pushes back from the table. ‘I need to go.’
‘Finish it,’ he says. ‘Please, Sansa.’
Her name in his mouth, the pulse of it carrying on his voice like a heartbeat. It wrecks her, utterly. The air is too warm and still, the sigh she makes must echo like a shout inside the stone walls of the pub, and she needs to get out. She reaches to grasp the glass, lift it to her lips and sink the last of the rosé; but her movement is frantic, clumsy. It slips from her fingers, shatters across the dark tabletop.
She looks down at the spreading stain of wine and thinks of cinnamon, of tears and burning throats.
She leaves the pub; she does not look back.
/ /
The tiles in the staff toilet are pale green. She has learnt the shape of each of them by the time she has risen from her knees.
Gingerly, she finds her way to the sink and washes the taste of bile from her mouth. The water is tepid and metallic. She knows, without looking, that the reflection offered back by the warped mirror on the wall would show her skin to be the same shade as the tiles.
Out on the shop floor, her kinder colleagues cluck and fuss. One asks if she had a little too much to drink last night.
‘Yes,’ she says with a faint smile. ‘Probably.’
Sansa considers joining in with their gentle laughter to accentuate her lie. Perhaps if she smiles a little wider, laughs a little louder she will believe that it was the one and a half glasses of rosé that made her sick—and not everything else. She tries not to think of all the abstract possibilities vying for a place on a list she doesn’t want to make.
\ \
By the end of the day, the abstract possibilities have been compiled neatly into that list she didn’t want to make. They fall into place, into slim rows and columns as she straightens boxes and digs her hands deep into a pile of frozen chips to try and shock her body, her brain into silence. It doesn’t work. She wills a wine-haze to descend; she aches for quiet.
The tannoy system crackles, blares an instruction for customers to make their way to the check-out counters. Sansa pushes herself away from the freezer cabinet she is leaning against, lets the staff room swallow her whole. Someone wishes her a good rest of the weekend; she remembers that it is Saturday.
‘You too,’ she says.
She is thinking of all the days that have passed since she left the city—the days, the weeks. It felt like the admission of something when she stepped off the platform onto the 13:34 bound for home. As the train creaked closer, that something loomed a little more clearly: guilt, shame—the failure inherent to feeling such things and not acting on them. Being so passive as to feel them in the first place.
‘Go careful.’
Her manager’s voice slips out at the same moment as his hand touches lightly to her elbow. The fleece she is wearing is still chilled, her skin beneath it icy. She feels the dry warmth of his fingertips like a brand. He smiles at her even as she steps back from his touch, gathers her arm across her chest as if he has broken it.
‘You too,’ she says.
‘Oh, I always do.’ His eyes gleam a different shade to the glitter of his smile. ‘But then I am very careful about the company I keep.’
He opens the backdoor, stands aside politely to let her sweep past him with her arm still pinned close to her chest. She smiles faintly at him, ready to pretend that she didn’t notice the bite of his words, that she didn’t catch the latent meaning glowing in his gaze—then she looks up over his shoulder, and she knows she can’t pretend.
She can see the hatchback in the carpark, the paintwork a shade lighter than the tarmac the tires rest on and, through the glint of the windscreen, the ink-stained knuckles flexing idly on the steering-wheel. For a moment she stares at the car numbly, then she makes her way toward it.
Finish it, she thinks. Please, Sansa.