The Humming of Numbers by Joni Sensel Page A

would be different. He could tell by the hot tingling between them. It felt like the breathless moment between lightning and thunder.
    Aidan closed his eyes, protecting himself from the pull of her lips. His face cramped in struggle. When he opened his eyes, he had remembered that he was a monk. Not a good monk; a good monk would have let go of her hand and moved away. Aidan let go of her hand to graze her jaw with his fingertips in wordless longing.
    That proved to be a mistake. Lana’s face tipped upward under his hand and as her eyes struck his, Aidan’s mind stopped working at all. Without his meaning it, his hand curled to better fit her jaw, drawing her face closer. His lips met hers. She gasped delicately, and he felt the tiny intake of breath tug at him, moving his body to lean into hers.
    Lana kissed him in return, and Aidan would have forgotten the abbey and the Vikings and everything else if she hadn’t drawn away after a long, fiery moment. Her palm, still flat on his chest, pushed back with increasing pressure until finally he felt it. He caught himself. When
he again opened his eyes, unaware of when they had closed, she was staring at him, her own eyes drawn wide. Now her hand leapt away from his heart as if burned.
    Aidan drew a ragged breath. His chest ached and pounded as though he’d been running.
    â€œI didn’t mean to do that,” he mumbled, more to himself than to her.
    â€œI don’t mind that you did.” Her cheeks blazing, Lana’s gaze fell away. Her fluttering fingers twisted in a lock of her hair. Somewhere she’d lost the length of yarn that had bound it.
    â€œI shouldn’t have.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    Aidan ran both hands through his hair and turned to go. Her question was too vast for him to even scratch at the answer.
    â€œI’ll be back,” he said, thickly.
    â€œAfter that, you had better,” she said, her lips crushing a smile. The smile blinked out. “I might not have anyone else left.”
    Her plaintive words snagged Aidan’s heart. Images of burnt-out cottages and dead bodies filled his head and he turned back to her once more, in part to banish those thoughts.
    â€œHere,” he said, dropping to one knee. He shoved
aside the fern fronds and drew four figures in the soft duff below:.
    â€œ Ah, bay, kay, dhay ,” he said as he drew. “The first four Latin letters.” He ran through their main sounds and added, “Learn them while I’m gone.” Without waiting for any reaction or letting himself be snared again by her eyes, he shoved through the hawthorn and escaped, oblivious to the scratches he took from the thorns.

XIII
    A idan revisited that kiss the entire way back through the woods. What stunned him most was not how hopelessly unchaste it had been or the way he could still feel her lips against his. The shocking thing was the number that had hummed behind that kiss. He could close his eyes and retrieve it, a deep bass emptiness—not nothing, but None. Different from the soundless nothing of sleep or the chill draft from an unoccupied grave, this Naught seared a white-hot blank against darkness, a thrumming so low he heard it in his bones. None vibrated of floods, of clearing away, of transformation and change. None was the sound of the full moon and the round sun breaking over the eastern horizon. It was the sound, Aidan imagined, that the heavens had made on the first day, before God had done anything more than move upon the face of the waters. If it wasn’t blasphemy to think such a thing, it was very nearly the humming of the Lord God Himself.

    His amazement was quenched by the sudden realization that he wasn’t sure where he was. Returning back through the woods in the twilight proved harder than Aidan had guessed. Though already aloft, the lopsided moon danced too often with clouds to offer much aid. Stumbling onto a clearing in the trees, Aidan made out enough of the