by S. Gates
"I 'think it's over?'" Amanda's knuckles have gone white. "What the hell? I don't 'think it's over,' I know it is because I said it's over and a relationship takes both parties saying it's still going to keep it going. I made a mistake, trying to keep going so long."
"What, so I'm a mistake now?" you demand. The tight feeling in your gut only grows.
"No! But trying to keep up a relationship with you when I'm a lesbian and you're not a woman was a pretty stupid thing to do." She gestures at the table with the hand not clutching her water glass. "Come on, Doug, look at us! This is what we did! This is all we did before I left! And I can't believe that you're still holding on to the childish idea that if you wish really hard, I'll ignore who I am for you!
"And you know what? This was a mistake, too!" She swings her legs out of the booth and stands. "I'm sorry I ever thought you were mature enough to handle being friends. No wonder you and Simon get along so well: you can both be immature and emotionally constipated together. I'm done." She slams the glass of water back down on the table, causing ice and water to slosh out everywhere. In another jerky motion, she grabs her things from the booth.
"Amanda, wait!" you cry.
She stops, back to you and shoulders shaking. For a moment, you think she might sit back down and have a pleasant lunch together. But the moment slips away, and, with it, so does Amanda.
You aren't that hungry anymore, but leaving the pub without making an attempt on your lunch seems somehow like giving up. Two meals and an appetizer are more than you could stand on a good day, though, so you ask the waiter to box most of it up and set it in the footwell of the passenger seat.
By the time you make it back to the house, Simon is already gone.
You dash off a quick text, reminding him of his promise to you, but you don't have high hopes. It's tempting to simply refuse to hold up your end of that bargain and leave the house an unapologetic mess. It would certainly serve Simon right, you think petulantly. However, you reluctantly squash the impulse; you've got to do something with the your time, and staring disconsolately at your laptop is not going to cut it.
Cleaning the bathroom does not take as long as you'd hoped, which leaves you unfortunately at loose ends for the rest of the evening. Despite not having slept in more than a day, your body still refuses to let you, even when you throw yourself down on your mattress and bury your face in your pillows. The thought drifts almost lazily across your mind that you could simply try to force yourself to pass out to perhaps get some relief, but you physically roll over and wave the thought away. A quick glance at your phone tells you what you already know: Simon hasn't responded to you. You can only assume by your continued existence that nothing untoward has happened, at least not yet. And so, you choose to study the flaking plaster on the ceiling.
The sun sets, and your mind wanders. You prod at the holes in your post-head-trauma memory in the same way one would tongue a canker sore, though it all seems so much less pressing now. What does it matter if you can't remember your first date with Amanda, now that she's surely had done with you? Why would you care about your parents' anniversary when they've proven, once again, how thoroughly disowned you are by not even checking on you after the wreck? (Did they even know about it? Had Simon even tried to let them know? Or had he remembered what you'd told him about your relationship and decided to not even bother?)
On the end-table next to your bed, your phone buzzes. Finally, a text is from Simon: "Getting some drinks. Don't wait up." As if you have any choice in the matter. You use your thumb to dismiss the message and roll yourself off the bed. No sense to pretend you're going to sleep at this rate.
The clock widget on your phone declares the time to be 8:37. There's no telling when Simon will come home. If he will come home.
You head downstairs. At least you have the TV to yourself for now, and don't need to worry about waking anyone this time. The next several hours are dedicated to one of the anime boxed sets Simon picked up ages ago that you'd feigned disinterest in, but by the time you reach the fourth disc, your stomach begins to growl.
After shuffling to the kitchen, sniffing leftovers, and deciding none of them appeal to you, you are left with one option: a post-midnight stroll to the grocery store.
* * *
Something flickers at the edge of your vision, like a clutch of cockroaches scattering when the light's turned on. It isn't exactly dark, so much as everything seems gloomy somehow. The only source of illumination is the kitchen light. You'd left it on so you wouldn't return to an empty house, that much you remember. But it's a thin sort of illumination, as though the photons are coming from some distant star rather than just the kitchen a few yards away.
You reach for your phone; it's in your right pocket, where it lives while on your person. It's undamaged and functional, with the clock widget on your home screen reading 01:37. There are no missed call indicators, but you have a few more texts from Gavin, all dated between 1:23 and 1:34. All of them are varying degrees of "What the hell?" or "What's going on?"
Between the phone's backlight and the wan glow from the kitchen's direction, you can see something strange on your hands. Your fingers are discolored somehow, and when you rub your thumb and forefinger together, it reminds you of the time you tried to mix chalk dust and oil pastels in your high school art class. It goes halfway up both your forearms, wicked by the fabric of your sweater almost up to your elbows.
At your feet, something glitters. You pocket your phone again and stoop to investigate. Coiled like a snake's shed skin is the chain that Simon had taken to wearing lately. A little further afield, several apples rest on the carpet, apparently having come from a plastic bag the bottom of which had split open. A handful of other items lay strewn on the floor: a package of brown sugar, premade pie crust, a four-pack of butter. You remember deciding to bake yourself a pie, but can't recall the actual trip to fetch ingredients.
Out of the corner of your eye, you glimpse motion. The shadows collected near the ceiling and in the high corners of the living room have begun to flake away. The alien quality to the dimness dissipates while the shadows somehow fall like ash. You take a few steps forward, not failing to notice the way the carpet seems to squelch under your feet, and snag the pull-chain for the lamp next to the couch.
The coating on your hands fizzles and smokes when the light touches it, as does whatever has soaked the area around your feet. A pragmatic part of you breathes a sigh of relief because you're not sure you didn't buy milk, nor would you want to try to clean it up if you had.
That pragmatism dies once your eyes fully adjust.
Half-naked and curled in a fetal position on his side, Simon lies crammed as far into the corner of the couch as he can manage. He's buried himself partially under some of the throw pillows, but the noise the oily dust on your skin made when it evaporated caused him to twitch violently enough that some of the pillows have fallen to the floor. He whimpers. Has probably been whimpering this whole time, but the throw pillows muffled the sound.
"Fuck, Simon," you hiss, dropping to your knees to be on eye level with him. You can't see any major injuries, though he has a few jagged lacerations on his hip and back that you're fairly certain weren't there when he left. When you make soothing noises and pry open an eyelid, his pupil contracts exactly as you'd expect it to. Running your hands through his hair reveals no sign of head trauma. "Shh, Simon, it's okay." You try to pull him close to your chest, but he's as unyielding as steel. You settle for trying to get him sitting upright. "Come on, Simon, talk to me; tell me what happened. Come on, Simon, come on, talk to me."
A few stuttering, incoherent sounds make it past his lips. His hands unclench, find your fingers, wrap around them. He tilts his face up as if to look at you, but his eyes remain squeezed shut. He tries again to speak, but it's still nothing but jumbled syllables with no discernable language to them. With his hands gripping yours, it's impossible to do much but sort of head-butt his knees with your forehead and contin
ue mumbling his name in the most soothing tone you can muster.
Your phone begins buzzing in your pocket again, the pattern of buzzing consistent with an incoming call rather than a text message. It takes a few seconds to disengage Simon's hand from yours, but you manage to do so and answer before the call falls over to your voicemail.
The voice on the other end is masculine and unfamiliar. It belongs to someone who is older than you are, or who made a habit of gargling with gasoline around puberty. "Douglas, what happened?" You pull the phone away from your face for long enough to glance at the caller ID: Gavin. Despite the California area code, the words you hear are thick and Midwestern.
"I don't know," you say, pinning the phone against your shoulder so you can return your hand to Simon's grasp. "I was thinking about some late night apple pie, and then next thing I know, it's almost an hour later and my roommate's practically catatonic on our couch."
On the other end of the line, you can hear Gavin suck in a breath through his teeth. "Shit. Alena won't shut up. She's just cackling, keeps saying she didn't think Ori had the stones."
At the mention of Ori's name, your heart tries to skip and then trips over a few beats. "Ori did this? Whatever it is?" Simon gurgles in response to your agitation, but calms when you give his fingers a reassuring squeeze.
You hear a woman's voice murmuring something you can't quite make out before Gavin responds. "Yeah. Look, whatever happened, Simon's off the board now. I don't know what Ori did and Alena isn't telling, but I do know Simon's not a game piece anymore."
His words enter your brain, but you can't really make sense of them. Too many other thoughts are clamoring for your attention for any of them to be entertained for more than a single synapse's firing. Ori did this. You don't know how, but now you know they did it.
"Douglas? Doug? Earth to Douglas?" Gavin's voice sounds tinny and distant to your ears.
"I'm here," you say. "Just thinking."
"That... doesn't sound encouraging," says Gavin after a moment.
"You're always talking about 'Alena' this and 'Alena' that, like she's always right next to you." It's not a question, so you don't wait for Gavin's response. "Ori's not like that, thank god, but what if I need to talk to them and they're not around?"
"It's always around, and don't let its seeming lack of a presence fool you. Players are never far from their game pieces." Gavin clears his throat. "You aren't planning on doing anything stupid, are you?"
"Listen, since Ori came into my life, it's been nothing but shit. I'm fucking tired of it. When it was just me, I could deal because I guess I'm kind of a fuck-up. But now they're interfering with my friends." You give Simon's fingers a reassuring squeeze, which he seems to return. You take that as a good sign.
"Don't get cocky, son," says Gavin, pitching his voice low as if to keep Alena from overhearing. "You think you can just talk to it and make it go away, but you're wrong. They'll do anything, and I mean anything to get you to agree to their terms, and Ori is no different. Don't do anything stupid. Don't agree to shit. Whatever you do, do not let it talk you into a deal."
"I won't do anything stupid," you huff. "I gotta go. I need to take care of my roommate."
"Don't be stupid," Gavin reiterates, then the line goes dead. You drop your phone so you can straighten out your neck.
You pull yourself closer to the couch and rest your forehead against your roommate's. "Come on, dude, let's get you upstairs."
* * *
Once Simon is in bed, you return to the living room. Other than your discarded phone and the scattered groceries, it's almost as if nothing untoward had happened at all. It doesn't take you long to clean up the remains of the mess now that the whatever-it-was covering yourself and the floor has all evaporated. It seems almost pointless to go about making your apple pie, but what else are you going to do? How would sitting in Simon's room be more productive? Or lying around on your own bed?
You bring your laptop down to the kitchen and leave it on the table to continue playing the DVDs you were watching earlier. It makes you feel better to have the white noise in lieu of companionship while you bake.
The oven beeps when it's done preheating, so you turn to put the pie in. When you turn back, Ori perches on the chair in front of your laptop. You're too drained to manage any sort of response beyond a vague grunt.
Ori is feminine again, with her skinny legs pulled almost up to her chest to accommodate the manner in which she sits on the edge of the chair. She stares at the computer screen as if enthralled, shifting only to push stray locks of hair behind one ear with delicate fingers. The memory of what happened the last time you saw her as such drifts through your mind, but you wave it away. You won't be intimidated by her. Not now.
"What did you do to Simon," you say. The words sound as dull and tired as you feel.
She doesn't look away from your laptop. "Nothing. Well, almost nothing." Her shoulders rise and fall in a quick shrug. "I suppose, if you were feeling generous, you could say that I freed him. But I didn't harm him." She pauses, tilts her head to one side. "Lucien was, sadly, not so lucky."
"What's upstairs doesn't look like not harming him," you say.
Finally, Ori uncurls, hooks her feet on the cross-bar of the chair, and taps the spacebar on your laptop to pause the show. Her head swivels so she might look at you over her shoulder, but the effect is less like that of a girl and more like that of an owl or someone whose neck has been snapped. "I assure you, dearest Douglas, that I had no hand in that. Much of that damage was done before we arrived."
You take a deep breath, two, let the air out slowly through your nose. "I don't care. I want you gone. My life has gotten so fucked up since you came along, and I'm done. Cash me out."
She blinks at you. "Oh, Douglas. You surely don't mean that."
"I fucking well do." You spit the words out like they were a bite of rotten food. "I'm done. I'm not buying what you're selling, and I'm sick of you fucking up my life." You pull the ring off your right index finger and shove it in her face. "Take it back. Take it!"
Her eyes are, as always, so dark that you can't even tell if she's focusing on you. The hand holding out the silver band trembles, making it catch the light in ways that it probably shouldn't. Before your eyes, her face crumbles: the corners of her mouth tug down, her eyebrows knit together, and her eyes narrow. "You don't know what you're saying," she says after a moment.
"I fucking well do!" It takes every ounce of self-control not to stomp your foot like a petulant child and just throw the damn thing in her face. Something in your hindbrain holds you back, tells you that such an action would irrevocably cross the line you're currently toeing.
Almost hesitantly, Ori lifts her hands to clasp yours. The ring is hidden in the tangle of your fingers. "I do not believe you mean this. I know that I made myself perfectly clear when I first spoke to you what is at stake here." The cadence of her words is so soft and soothing that it comes perilously close to making her sound concerned. Even though her eyes lack pupils, you can tell that she is searching your face for a sign of something, though like Amanda before her, you have no idea what.
Her hands slip away, taking the ring with it. "All right," she says, sounding defeated. "I will keep hold of this for now. It's obvious that I cannot dissuade you on my own. Should you change your mind, I will return it."
Something about the way her shoulders slump and her face tilts downward twists up your insides. You're still so very angry, but Ori projects such vulnerability that you're almost half-way through a shuffling step forward before you realize it and stop yourself. "No," you say. "No, I'm not falling for it. I'm not falling for you. You keep that damn ring. I'm done."
Ori's voice quavers. "I... I understand. Just know that, should you need me, you need only call for me and I will return what is rightfully yours." There's nothing flashy about her exit. One moment, she is in front of you and then, when you blink, she is gone.
Your heart feels somehow heavier,
but at least you don't have the press of cool metal around your finger any longer.
You tap the spacebar on your laptop to resume the show while you wait for your pie to bake.
* * *
The first day is quiet. Simon rests, and you work your way through his DVD collection (despite telling Ori to remove herself from your life, you still can't sleep). Sometimes, you hear him stir upstairs, but he never ventures down to the living area. Your laptop follows you wherever you go, sometimes playing videos, sometimes games, sometimes browsing the internet. When you're certain you won't be waking him, you call JD and let him know you'll be out a few more days; he doesn't ask why and you do not volunteer a reason.
(In between moments, when you shuffle between the upstairs and downstairs to attend to Simon's needs, it strikes you how small and insulated you are. Within the space of a night, you've lost the only people you truly consider friends. Who do you tell about these developments now? Who will offer you advice?)
The first night is not quiet at all.
* * *
You don't want to count the number of hours you've been awake by the time you finally get sick of anime, so you don't. Instead, you check on Simon once more: he's propped against his headboard, staring at something you guess is three hundred miles away. His vocalizations have almost ceased.
His desk chair sits in the middle of his room, kicked away from the cheap IKEA desk. Unlike its companion, the chair is expensive and comfortable, so you plant yourself in it and drag it next to his bed. You aren't sure what you hope to accomplish with your vigil, but you're sure that it's bound to be better than trying to slog through another episode of whatever show you'd happened to grab. You wrap your fingers around his, which have gone chill and clammy since last night. He does not react.
"I'm sorry," you whisper. "Sorry for being a shitty friend, sorry for getting you dragged onto this somehow, sorry for everything." You take a deep breath through your nose. His room smells much like he generally does: masculine with a hint of musk. "Was Amanda right? Did you think that we could have a thing if I was a dude? Is this how you opt out of the convo you didn't even know we were about to have?"
