Hammer & Air Read Free Page A

damned grateful. He didn’t place his palm across my stomach and bring me back against him in quiet moments, as I’d seen men do with their women; but then, he hadn’t done that with any of the women I knew he’d fucked, so that didn’t seem to matter. There were no hidden kisses, no whispers in my ear, no surreptitious touch of hands as we reached for sundries in the morning.
    But none of that hurt, and none of that mattered, because at night, the fathom-deep chasm between our sleeping bodies had filled, closed, become nonexistent. What were left were the blissful heaviness of his arm, anchored around my hips or my shoulders or my chest.
    I woke up every morning feeling as though I had been branded by him, the heat of his body having seeped through my skin like the smell of leather and now I wore Hammer as my own personal tattoo.
    It were that invisible mark, the mark of Hammer on my skin if not yet in my flesh, that gave me the courage to put on a blank face the morning we were to meet by the tree.
    Summer were fading now, but that didn’t mean it weren’t hot in the room with the printing press, and the smell of ink were stifling. I didn’t mind so much; today’s job were a newspaper, and the newspaper were running a short piece I had written on why earthworms made for more fertile farmland. I’d run an experiment out where the maple tree stood, and there were two flats of carrots, turnips, and tubers there, one bigger and grander than the other, and all, I were sure, for the extra bucket of earthworms I’d added to the soft soil.
    It were a small thing, but large enough to tell Hammer, in broken sentences, over dinner at the orphanage the day we’d met at the tree.
    He’d given me a gift in return. A smile. He didn’t often smile—his face tended to set itself in surly lines, hiding his eyes behind his high brow and the squint of his cheeks. But he smiled, and his face were transformed into a thing of beauty, and my heart seemed to beat twice as rapidly as before. It were probably a scientific impossibility, but the feeling were enough to stop up my tongue, and I’d had no voice to tell him about the article itself. He’d smiled at me. I’d write volumes for such a smile.
    They were so rare, that I might as well have.
    So I were happy this day, as I set the letters with gentle taps of the hammer, and me and Linus, the other boy in the shop, placed the big sheet of paper and set the rollers over it. Linus glared at me, and I looked innocently back.
    “Yer in a good mood today.” He were a sour boy, for the most part. He’d been sold into apprenticeship by his parents so that his younger siblings would not starve. They visited him on his half-days and brought him baked goods and fresh blankets, and in all, he had the most comfortable pallet at the printers. Of course, I had a bed in an orphanage, until Hammer turned nineteen in two months. Hammer had promised me he’d gain his majority and his mastership at the smithies, and rent a flat above the inn. Before that day at the tree, even, he’d said I could stay with him, and we’d both be quit of the orphanage forever.
    “It’s my half-day,” I told Linus now, wishing I could say something, anything, about Hammer, meeting me at the tree. Such a small thing, but it felt like the sky.
    “Yeah, well, let’s still hope we get them after Master Will takes over. That bugger’ll likely ream us in the closet and call it a lunch break.”
    My fingers fumbled for a bit with the paper, and I had to pick them up right quick or they’d be crushed.
    “Master Will?” The words felt cold as they fell from my numb lips.
    Linus smiled evilly. “Not such a blessing being pretty, now is it?”
    He could talk. He were a thin, sallow looking boy with a scraggly blond beard and stringy hair to match. Master Will, with his preference for boys, had never looked at him twice. But me, well, I looked like Hammer. I weren’t vain, but being told we looked like brothers