by R. L. King
All I can do is nod. I slip out of it almost reverently and fold it back into its box, and only then do I remember what else she said before she gave it to me. “You said you wanted to talk about something. Was this it?”
She looks uncomfortable again, her happy smile departing. “No. It’s something else.”
“Okay, shoot.” I set the box aside and lean back in my chair, trying to figure out what it could be. Maybe I was right about her finally bringing up moving in, and despite her gift, I’m still not sure how I feel about it.
She takes her place across from me at the table, looks down at her plate, then back up at me. “You know I’m crazy about you, right?”
I chuckle. “Well, I hope so. Because I’m pretty crazy about you, too.”
“Yeah. We’ve had some really good times so far. You’re good for me, and not just because your magic helps us out with the stuff we do with the Harpies. Being around you makes me feel better than I’ve ever felt in my life.” Her voice trembles, just a little.
I reach across the table and take her hand. “I totally get it, Ky. I feel the same way.” I still don’t know where she’s going with this. Her aura is all over the place, flashing red with nervousness and uncertainty. Whatever she wants to say, she’s afraid to say it.
“Come on.” I gently squeeze her hand. “Just say what’s on your mind. I promise I won’t bite.”
She nods and sighs. After another pause, she meets my gaze but doesn’t pull her hand away. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, V. I haven’t said anything about it because I didn’t think it was my business to, and I figured I’d be better about it as time went on. But…that’s not the way it’s going.”
I tilt my head. “What are you talking about? Better about what?”
Again, she pauses. She picks up her wineglass and drains the last bit from the bottom, then nibbles on a garlic-bread crust. “Okay. So…it’s Stone.”
I go still. “What about him?”
She drops the crust back on her plate. “Look, V—I know I shouldn’t be saying this. You have the right to do whatever you want with your life, and it’s not like you’ve been anything but open with me this whole time. But…”
“But…?” Something deep in the pit of my stomach clenches.
She meets my gaze again, and this time her eyes glitter. “But I love you, Verity. I didn’t just give you that jacket because I know you’ll make a kick-ass Harpy. I want you by my side.”
“I love you too. I’m not going anywhere. But what’s that got to do with—” Maybe I’m being dense…or maybe I don’t want to admit that I see where this is going. Either way, I want to hear her say it.
“This thing we have going on…V, it’s not working for me. I know how much you care about Stone, but…” She lets out a loud sigh. “I thought I could be okay with it. With…sharing you with him. But every time you call him, every time I see you with him, every time I know you’re down there at his house, in his bed…it just makes me feel like shit. Like I’m not enough to make you happy on my own. Last night was kind of the last straw.”
I start to speak, but she raises her hand to stop me. “I know this is my problem. I get that. You’re not doing anything wrong. I know how much you care about him, too. I love you, and I want you to be happy. But…”
“But…?” My mouth has gone dry, and even another big sip of wine doesn’t help. I slowly pull my hand back from hers.
She looks like she’s struggling with her words. “I want you to be happy with me, V. I want us to be together, just you and me. Is that so terrible?”
All I can do is sit there and look at her. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t something in the back of my mind that thought this would happen eventually—and if it did, it would be Kyla, not Alastair, who’d bring it up. I know he’s not completely comfortable with our arrangement, but I also know he’d never ask me to choose. It’s just not the way he is.
I swallow again. “What are you saying, Kyla?”
She looks back down at her plate and doesn’t reply.
“Come on. I think you owe me that. Tell me what you want.”
Still no answer. She’s got her fist clenched around her napkin, and it’s shaking.
When I speak again, it’s softly, with no accusation, even though inside I feel like I want to scream. “You want me to stop seeing Alastair, don’t you?”
She nods without looking up. “Yeah. I want us to be together. I want to be there for you, and you to be there for me. Completely.” She throws her napkin on the table and brings her gaze up again, her face full of raw emotion. A tear trickles from the corner of her eye, and she swipes it angrily away. I’ve never seen her cry before—not even this little bit. “Is that terrible, V? To want that?”
My brain feels like it’s lit up with electric static. “No…” I whisper. “Of course it isn’t.” And it isn’t. That’s what most people want, after all: somebody they can settle down with, somebody they can love, somebody they can feel that they’re the most important person in the world to. Hell, up until recently I thought I was one of those people.
Maybe I am one of those people.
Am I being selfish, trying to hold on to both of them?
“Kyla…” My voice shakes.
She grasps both of my hands across the table. “V…please.”
I don’t pull back, but I don’t return her grip, either. My thoughts are in turmoil. “You’re…asking me to choose between you and Alastair.”
Her hold on my hands tightens. It’s still gentle, but firmer. “Yeah,” she says. Her voice is firmer too. “I guess I am. I’m sorry, V…I know I don’t have any right to do it. But I can’t help how I feel.”
I stare down into my half-eaten chocolate cake. I’m alight with sudden anger, but it doesn’t last long—guilt submerges it fast. She’s right: she does have a right to someone who isn’t only halfway there for her. It’s not unreasonable for her to want me to make a choice, to pick a side. I realize with sudden bitter amusement that the cake makes a great metaphor for the situation. You really can’t have it and eat it too, much as you might want to.
I’m not ready for this.
I close my eyes, picturing Alastair. His tall, slim form. His spiky, disheveled hair. His bright blue eyes, either sparkling with amusement or sharp with intensity. I picture him lecturing in his classroom, setting up a magical circle, jamming on guitar with The Cardinal Sin, lying next to me in bed. Above all, I think of everything he’s meant to me—everything he’s done for me. He’s saved me in so many ways, and made me happy in so many more.
But so has Kyla.
Why is she making me choose?
I open my eyes. She’s still watching me, studying my face like she’s trying to read my answer in it. She can’t read auras, but sometimes she doesn’t need to.
“Don’t make me do this, Kyla…” I whisper. “Please.”
Her grip on my hands tightens again, but there’s no anger there. Love, yes. Despair. Guilt. But no anger. “I love you, V. But I can’t be like this anymore. I need to know where I fit into your life.” Her eyes plead with me to give her the answer she wants.
I want to.
I wish I could.
God, I wish I could.
But I think both of us knew all along what my answer would be, if it came down to having to choose. Maybe that’s why she waited so long for this: she avoided it as long as she could, because she knew what would happen if she forced me to answer.
I don’t look away. I owe her that much. “I’m sorry, Kyla…” I whisper.
Her hands tense one last time, and then slowly, deliberately, she releases the grip and pulls back. She doesn’t look surprised, but there’s a bleakness to her expression that wasn’t there before. “Me too, V.” she whispers back.
Still moving with a kind of dreamlike slowness, like she’s afraid if she moves too fast she’ll fly apart, she stands. Then, without another word, she turns and trudges toward the door.
>
She doesn’t turn back when she reaches it. When she goes through, she closes it so softly behind her that I don’t even hear the click of the latch when it shuts.
I stay where I am, alternating my gaze between my half-eaten plate of decadent chocolate cake and the jacket folded in its box. The face on the patch looks somehow accusing, now.
I remain that way, silent and still, for five whole minutes before the tears finally come.
3
I don’t call anybody that night. There isn’t anybody I can call: Alastair’s already on a plane headed to Bucharest, and will probably be out of cell range for several days even after he lands. Jason and Amber are off camping somewhere in the Sierras. And somehow, talking this out with Hezzie or another one of the Harpies doesn’t seem like the right thing to do either.
I wonder if they even know what happened. If she’s told them.
I wonder what she’s told them, and if this means the end of my friendships with them as well. People pick sides after a breakup, and they’ve all known each other long before I entered the picture.
The truth is, I don’t want to talk to anybody.
This is my problem. I’m an adult now, and I should handle these things on my own. Just because I broke up with my girlfriend doesn’t give me the right to mess up Jason’s or Alastair’s trips with my emotional baggage. I can talk to them when they get back.
But that still leaves me with several days alone. I don’t even have any jobs with Scuro this week, and I don’t feel like I know Ian well enough to dump this on him, assuming I could even reach him.
Instead, I carefully hang the Harpy jacket in my closet and close the door, then crawl into bed with a book I’ve been meaning to finish. I really wish Raider was here now. I suppose I could drive down to Encantada and visit him—I do have a key to Alastair’s place, but he’s got one of his grad students looking after the cat so I don’t have to keep driving down there every day.
He’s considerate like that, even though I would have been happy to do it.
It’s funny: I still haven’t quite adjusted my mind to think of him as “Alastair.” For the first couple years he was my magical mentor, he was just “Dr. Stone.” Gradually that morphed into “the Doc,” and finally just “Doc.” I can count the times I’ve called him by his given name on the fingers of one hand, and that’s even after we started sleeping together.
I wonder what he thinks about that, or if he even thinks about it.
Come on, V, you’re spinning your wheels. Get some sleep.
Yeah, like that’s going to happen.
It does happen, to my surprise. I wake up the next morning with the sun shining in through my grimy bedroom window, my book spread open across me.
The first thing I do is glance across at the other side of the bed, and my stomach sinks as everything slams down on top of me.
It wasn’t a dream.
She’s not here, and she’s not coming back.
Never again will I wake up next to her. Never again will her smile be the first thing I see in the morning. Never again will I snuggle next to her, giving and receiving warmth and comfort.
This whole thing sucks.
I sigh, dragging myself out of bed and going through the motions of showering, getting dressed, and trying to figure out what the hell I want to do with myself. It hadn’t occurred to me before just how alone I am up here in San Francisco without the Harpies to hang out with. I suppose I could try calling Hezzie, but I can’t bring myself to do it. We don’t have an alchemy lesson scheduled for today, so it would be weird for me to contact her out of the blue. We don’t exactly pal around outside of alchemy stuff.
As I’m eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes over the sink, an idea hits me: I didn’t pick up my mail yesterday. There are only six apartments in the building, and the mailboxes are on the ground floor. Maybe if I go down there and hang around for a few minutes, I’ll run into Hezzie and then I’ll have an excuse to talk to her.
It’s a long shot and I’m kind of disgusted with myself for even considering it—I feel like a pathetic high school loser stalking the popular kids, and it probably won’t work anyway.
That doesn’t stop me from doing it, though.
My apartment building is pretty sketchy, full of the smells of old socks, various ethnic cooking (some yummy, some less so), pot smoke, and incense. The elevator doesn’t work, the stairs creak, and more than once during the rainy season I’ve had to work around buckets catching leaks or homeless people huddled in the stairwells to get out of the weather. None of that bothers me. It bothers Jason and his protective-brother instincts, but with my magical abilities, there’d have to be a lot worse threats than homeless guys or the occasional drug dealer before I’d have to worry. If the place were in a nicer part of town, the rent would be at least three times what it is here. Scuro pays me well, but not that well.
The mailboxes are on the ground floor, in a small lobby just inside a door that’s supposed to stay locked but never does. Today, it’s propped open with a milk crate. Across from the mailboxes are a couple of threadbare wing chairs on either side of an old credenza spread with underground newspapers and pot-dispensary ads. Bob, an old homeless guy in a shapeless coat and stained white Adidas sneakers, lounges in one of the chairs.
I wave. “Hey, Bob.”
He grunts a greeting and looks at me hopefully.
“Yeah, I’ve got some leftover spaghetti, if you want it.” I sometimes give him food when I’ve got extra, and right now I think it’s going to be a long time before I can face spaghetti again.
“Much obliged.”
“Just give me a couple minutes to check my mail and I’ll heat it up and bring it down for you.”
“Y’friend was down here few minutes ago.”
I turn with the key still in my box. “Yeah? Which one?”
He scratches his head under his knit cap. “You know—the short one wit’ the spooky eyes. She got ’er mail an’ left.” He points at the door out to the street.
Damn. That’s Hezzie. If she was already down here and left, that means she probably won’t be back for a while.
So much for that plan.
“Thanks, Bob. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
I carry my little stack of mail upstairs and dump it on the breakfast bar. I’m about to turn toward the fridge to grab the leftover spaghetti when I spot an unfamiliar envelope poking out from the pile. I pluck it from the pile and examine it.
This is weird: I never get mail. Not “real” mail, anyway. Every day it’s the same thing: bills, advertising circulars, and political spam. Somebody’s always running for something in San Francisco, and if they aren’t, they’re shilling for some cause. It’s a familiar process by now: chuck the spam and the ads, stuff the bills in the drawer for later paying, and that’s the mail done for the day. Thirty seconds, max. The only time it’s any different is around my birthday or Christmas.
It’s not anywhere near my birthday or Christmas right now, which means somebody’s sent me a carefully hand-addressed envelope for no reason I can figure out. Somebody I don’t know, too: the only person I know who even bothers with snail mail is Alastair, and this writing is far too neat to be his.
There’s no return address. No postmark, either, and no stamp. Even weirder. Somebody other than Bernardo, the mail carrier, must have slipped it into my box. Just for fun, I switch magical sight on and look it over before I open it. I’m a little embarrassed doing it, but better safe than sorry. I’m even more embarrassed when, as I expected, I don’t find anything. Everything isn’t magic, you doofus. I rip open the envelope.
Inside is a single sheet that looks like somebody tore it from a notebook. I unfold it and read the handwritten lines.
My hand tightens on it until it crumples in my grip, and a lurching jolt of shock ripples through me, hard enough to make me shudder.
Your mother didn’t die of cancer, says the neat, precise handwriting.
And your fat
her isn’t who you think he is.
Come to Fairbreeze and leave a message at Croney’s if you want to find out more.
It’s signed, A friend.
4
Two hours have passed, and I haven’t done a damn thing. I’m sitting at my dining table, staring out the window, the mysterious note in front of me and photos of my parents spread out over the rest of the surface. Aside from running downstairs to absent-mindedly drop off a container of hot spaghetti for Bob and ask him if he saw anybody leave something in my box (he didn’t), the only thing I’ve done so far is dig out that box, the one Jason gave me for my twenty-first birthday. I’ve been sitting here looking at the note and the photos since this morning.
All the standard thoughts have run through my head: The note was meant for somebody else. The neighborhood kids are messing with me. Hell, one of the Harpies is messing with me—maybe even Kyla.
But Kyla’s not like that. She’s not a practical joker, and she’s not cruel. None of them are cruel.
So what the hell does it mean?
I pick up one of the photos and look more closely at it, tears prickling my eyes. It’s one of my mom and dad getting ready to go to some fancy police function; he’s wearing his dress uniform and she’s wearing a slinky, sparkly gown. I’d never noticed before how different they looked—Dad was solid, muscular, with blond, brush-cut hair, crinkly cheerful eyes, and a no-nonsense expression, while Mom was smaller, dark-haired, with big, dark green eyes and a beautiful, pixie-like face. In every photo, even the ones where she was sick, she looked like everything about life amused her. I look a lot like her—everybody who sees the photos says so. Jason looks more like Dad. In the photo, Dad’s arm is protectively around Mom’s shoulder, and her expression says there isn’t anywhere else she’d rather be.
I glance around at the other photos, finally plucking up the one of Mom at some mage gathering in England. Aside from a couple of her and Dad together, this one is my favorite. In it, she’s standing next to Alastair when he was a teenager—seventeen, he told me when he saw it. I smile in spite of my stress: who’d believe this tall, gangly kid with messy hair and a big grin would grow up to be so hot? If I squint a little, I can almost picture me there next to him instead of Mom.
