My Name Is Memory by Ann Brashares

and I watched over her.
    The second day we rode I was more aware of the feeling of her arms on me, the particular impression of each of her fingers, her chest against my back. Her cheek pressed sometimes, her forehead. My nerves even felt out for the tip of her nose as we galloped through the dry, brown hills. But I didn’t want anything from her. I didn’t need anything. I wanted to make her well and keep her safe. I didn’t want anything else. To say it was to make it so.
    When we stopped for the evening she ate with more heartiness and less urgency. I saw how her bruises yellowed and faded into the lovely landscape of her face. I felt her basic knack for living, her resilience, and I knew how it would serve her on the long road. That was something you took with you from life to life. She wouldn’t know that about herself, but I would remember.
    That second night was much colder, and I could no longer find enough wood to keep a fire going. The blankets were thick but not thick enough. She couldn’t fall into a true slumber in that cold. I watched her shiver, going in and out of sleep. I tried putting my blanket over her. My eagerness, the intensity of my purpose, kept me warm, but she shivered.
    I went closer to her without quite deciding to. I didn’t want to overreach, but I had heat to share. I curled around her, a few inches away, trying to give her some of it. She must have felt my warmth in her sleep, because she gravitated toward it. I didn’t make the contact, much as I was yearning for it by that point. I got under the blankets with her, and, childlike, she wound her limbs in and around my warm surfaces. I felt the bare skin of her ankles and feet wrapped around my calves, her back burrowed into my chest; my arms went around her. She sighed, and I wondered who I was to her in her sleep.
    I didn’t want to move. I was too happy, and the moment was too fragile. My arm fell asleep, but I didn’t want to take it from under her. There are short periods of joy you have to stretch through a lot of empty years, me more than most. You have to make them last as well as you can.
    On the third day as we rode I felt the way her body relaxed into mine, and that was a gift. When we stopped to eat in the midday, she spilled rice on my knee, and she smiled. I wanted her to spill a thousand things on me, lava, acid, bricks, anything, and smile each time.
    That night she got under the blanket and curled against me without a word. “Thank you,” she said as she fell asleep, her hair against my neck, the top of her head under my chin. My arms pressed against her breasts, and I felt her heart beating and mixing with the pulse in my wrist. I tried to keep my lower regions at a safe distance, as certain organs weren’t complying with overall discipline.
    Sometime in the night I must have let down my guard and fallen into a deep sleep. I had been dreaming, I guess, of older versions of ourselves, and I was disoriented. I had gone all the way back to the first time I saw her, for only a glimpse, but it must have jarred me. When I woke she was right there, her face in front of mine. I didn’t understand exactly what she was doing there or where we were in time. The sight of her face filled me with regret.
    “I am so sorry,” I whispered.
    I wasn’t sure if she was awake or asleep, but I guess she was awake. “What could you be sorry for?” she whispered back.
    “For what I did to you.” I was certainly disoriented at that point, because I thought she would know what I meant. My connection to her felt so strong, I couldn’t hold on to the idea that she could know anything less than I did. It was a strange, illusory moment of believing our experiences were the same. I don’t understand where it came from. If there’s one sad thing I know, it’s that nobody’s experience is ever the same as mine.
    Confusion set her quiet face in motion. “What you did to me?” She sat up. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You