Chapter 39 #2
Elliot and Peter head back to Elkfore, while Sophia and I linger at the threshold of the cottage, still protected within Driscoll’s spell.
The sun has slipped behind the shadowed red brick of Mortimer Tower, and the night is growing cold.
Sophia wraps her jean jacket tighter around herself. “What’s u—”
“I’m freaking out,” I blurt.
“Duh,” she says easily, blowing her copper bangs from her face and leaning against the doorjamb. “When you left for Fever Dream the other day, you looked like you spent your life savings on a Porsche only to realize you get carsick.”
I frown. “That’s so oddly specific.”
“I’m right, though, aren’t I? Reid’s back and now you have buyer’s remorse.”
My stomach turns at her phrasing. I almost want to tell her I meant that I was freaking out about the worsening syrabraxa episodes or being found by Citadel hunters on Harker’s campus, but compartmentalization is a funny thing.
While on a macro level, I am racking my brain for how to best protect myself and stop Caspar, the micro-panic of worrying that I don’t feel what I used to for my quasi-boyfriend is hitting harder and more insistent.
Perhaps because that’s the issue I think I can actually do something about while holed up in this cottage.
When I can’t find anything to say she asks, “What percentage of the freak-out is because you fell in love with his jackass brother?”
My heart leaps up between my teeth. It’s like I’m a teenager who’s been caught sneaking out of the house.
My eyes cut to Sophia with sheer bewilderment. She’s snickering until she sees my face, and then I would give up every single thing I own, daggers and black loafers included, to go back in time and have snorted along with her in good humor.
But she knows me too well. She’s seen the fear rip right through me.
“Holy shit,” she breathes. “Really?”
“No. I’m not in love with Deacon.”
“Of course,” she says, eyeing me. She is such a good fucking friend. A perfect liar when I need her to be. “I was only kidding.”
“When I fell for Reid, I felt like we were…” I search for the right analogy.
I’d once thought he and I were both puzzle pieces that never seemed to fit.
And yet Deacon somehow feels like the piece that completes my own.
Where Reid and I are similar—disappointments to our families, always trying to be good when our nature is telling us otherwise, wishing we could be different from what we are—Deacon and I are nearly opposite.
Where he’s immoral, I’m decent. When I hate myself, he’s got enough ego to share with the class.
“I felt like Reid loved me despite what I was,” is what I settle on.
“And that felt so good. To be loved even though I’d never really felt worthy of it.
But Deacon…” I shake my head. I can’t even imagine what he’d think if he heard me saying this.
A tiny corner of my heart wonders if it would make him proud.
“He showed me I should be loved because of it.”
Sophia remains quiet as she studies me. It’s the longest silence in our friendship. “I never thought I’d want to crossbow Deacon as little as I do right now.”
My laugh sounds exhausted, even to my own ears. “I know the feeling. I just”—I rub my temples—“I’m scared I’m not the same person I was when Reid left.”
“Well, a lot has happened. And you’d barely started dating when he disappeared. You don’t have to rush into anything now. Even though you’re staying here, you can just feel it out. And if it’s not right, that’s okay too.”
It’s good advice. I’d spent so much of my life beholden to people and their expectations of me, I’d almost forgotten that being with Reid was a choice. That if I didn’t want to be with him, I didn’t have to be, and nobody would call me a shitty daughter or a bad friend or a disappointment.
After Sophia leaves I call Penny. She tells me Fever Dream is fine, and she’s been painting up a storm, portraits of all the wayward deviants who live there.
I ask her about Ward and get a non-reply.
“He’s good.” I wonder why she won’t tell me about whatever is going on between them.
I can’t bring myself to ask about Deacon, and she doesn’t volunteer anything.
When the sun sets and Reid is still gone, I decide that I’d rather not sit around and wait for the syrabraxa in my back to eat my brain.
I watch two classic films and wonder what Deacon would think of them.
On movie three I can avoid it no longer.
Deacon had said I had three months, maybe four, until I was driven mad by the spell, and four months have come and gone.
I’m out of time, and I don’t want to lose myself before I watch La Douleur Exquise.
Turns out it’s a staggeringly beautiful story about a man who moves to a small town after the death of his father and falls in love with a woman whose husband abuses her. In the end he kills the husband to set her free and is hanged by the townspeople for murder.
I cry buckets. More than I’ve ever cried from anything besides my own father’s passing. I wonder very seriously if I will need an inhaler and then remember that even if I really was drowning in my own tears I couldn’t leave the cottage to get help from the pixies in the infirmary.