19. Daphne Normal
nineteen
Daphne: Normal
They talk about purple prose like it’s the worst thing that ever happened to literature.
Unless, of course, you’re mentioning Bronte, or leaning hard into a setting where it was okay for the moon to drip on your skin and flowers to breathe in colors.
What they don’t consider are the complications of emotion that arise when your soulmate backs you into a goddamn corner and demands you confess something he already knows to be true.
No, this was for Finn.
Thay wanted to ensure he understood exactly what he was to me. A parallelogram instead of a poem. Maybe that was why all I could think of were adjectives. Metaphors. Bloody things.
“Tell him, Daph,” Thay coaxed, his black brows following the mood storming on his face.
Damn, he was beautiful in all the ways he should never be allowed.
“Thay is my… architect,” I ground out through a fake smile, giving Finn a wink.
“Fuck you,” Thay growled, and I loved that he hated it. “Now tell him the fucking truth!”
I narrowed my eyes, unwilling to be handcaged from three thousand miles away.
“The truth. Okay. Thay is my soulmate,” I shrugged up at Finn, “who never kisses me back and refuses to become anything more.”
Thay’s jaw ticked, his lip folding under as he inched closer.
“Goddammit, Daphne. Say the words!”
Finn swallowed, countless red flags twirling between us, and all I could do was swat them away.
“I’ll see you tonight, Finn,” I dropped my voice just enough to hear the car door shut.
Now would come the lecture from a golden boy on all the ways this man was wrong for me, and suddenly, I was exhausted.
“You’re a coward,” Thay said, leaning back on his bed.
“Yeah, well, you are an asshole,” I huffed, barreling into the cabin so hard I smashed my knee into the table. “What did you expect me to say?”
“I don’t know, Daph.” He stared at the wall.
“That you’re mine. That you want the letters of my last name.
That there’s no fucking way that dickless piece of shit has any chance with you.
But no,” he filled his lungs, “I’m your architect.
The bit of your soul that won’t fuck you. Super great answer. I’ve got to go.”
“No,” I winced, and he stopped short of hanging up. “Wait. Did you just offer me the letters of your last name?”
“Why? Do you want them?”
Did I what? If I could throw the goddamn sky at him right now, I would have.
“What is going on over there?” I asked because there was no way in hell I’d heard him correctly. Something was wrong. Twisted. Violently disrupted, and I had no fucking means to fix it.
“Answer the question, or I’m hanging up,” he promised.
“Yes, I want them, Thay. But since when was this allowed?”
“You realize sealing yourself to me doesn’t come with a hatch. You have all these doors right now, Daph, with Maine and your job! But with me, all that disappears.”
“I am not trying to escape you.”
“Goddammit,” he growled. “You are such a pain in the ass!”
“What? Why?” I clicked my teeth.
“Because pretending that the reality of me is not true helps fucking no one. And if you are harboring some romantic idea that I can leave everything I am behind and live some semblance of a normal life with you, you’re up your ass, Daphne.
Because I’m never getting out, this is the only existence I’ll ever have.
And you don’t escape it unless you are dead. ”
So what if I’d hoped our story might end with him sitting at a folding table, drawing, with a baby girl sleeping on his chest. We didn’t have to be perfect. We just had to be together.
“Thay, why are you saying this now?”
“Because with me, you close your eyes, and I want them open. I need you to look! To see that my last name is an anchor that drags all your stars straight to the bottom. Why do you desire that?”
“Because I want you!”
“For fuck’s sake, Daph. I am not a good enough reason.”
My mind melted, pounding its fists against all logic. “Then neither am I.”
Thay growled, “We are not the same. So, do me a favor and stop pretending we are. You got out, Daph, and the reality is you shouldn’t come back here. In fact, don’t.”
“Stop!”
“I am so fucking tired!” he shouted, his voice cracking down the center. “This life is hard all the time. It never lets up. It just stretches on for fucking ever. But you? You’re not.”
“I am not tired?” I ground out, two seconds from hucking the goddamn phone at the wall.
“Not like me. You still have light, and the only thing Seattle is going to do is beat it out of you. First from your eyes, then from your chest until nothing remains but me.”
“Thay.”
“Please.” Something wet slid down his cheek, and I nearly drowned.
“You just said you wanted me to tell Finn that I am yours!” I cried.
“That is because I can’t leave you. It is physically impossible. But you’ve already left. And that’s a good thing.”
“You’re being a martyr.”
“Come on.” He rubbed at his face, all of his rules puddling between us. “It’s why you couldn’t say the words to Finn. You needed a window, and deep down, you know the second you’re officially mine, that goes away.”
“I didn’t respond because I was afraid you would reject me!”
“To save you,” he snapped. “But things got so fucked up when you left, I don’t even think I can do that anymore.”
“What is this?” I fell to the floor, staring at him in a panic, every bit of food I hadn’t eaten today surging upward. “Holy shit, Thay. Are you… breaking up with me?”
“Daphne, no!” He took a breath, swallowing hard before finding the words to speak. “I did not cross that line with you before because, out of all the things I had to become so we could survive, I never wanted to be your monster. Or your reason why.”
“Thay, you were never my monster.”
“That’s because I chose not to keep you.
” His voice tumbled off the side of a cliff and into the icy water below.
“So what I am saying is, you shouldn’t choose Wolfe or me.
You should stay in the light, pay taxes, live a full life far, the hell away from Seattle and everything that keeps you here.
” My chest swelled. “But if you will not do that, and once again, you should, I’m removing the line. ”
There is a liminal space between breathing and death, where nothing floats or stays… just becomes warm and endless. My lids fell slowly, brushing my eyes with the softest touch before I realized what he’d said.
“But that doesn’t mean you have to cross it,” he added, trying to read my face. “See if Maine fits, Daphne. Make an actual choice. And if I’m one you can live with, I am yours.”
Mine.
What did that feel like? What did that even mean?
He had always been mine. Would always be mine.
The universe jumped down my throat, and nothing moved, everything swirling overhead in brief bursts of color. I still hadn’t uttered a single word when his voice cut through the mist one last time.
“I’ve got to get some rest. But Nathem will have his phone if I don’t answer mine, okay.”
“Thay?” I said before he hung up.
“Yeah, Daph.”
“Things are bad over there, aren’t they?”
“They’re not good,” he whispered. “But we’re handling it.”
“I wish you were here,” I breathed, keeping him with me just a little longer.
Thay pulled off his shirt and collapsed onto his pillow, setting the phone beside his face.
“Want to know what I wish?” He asked, his perfect lips folding under. “I wish I could touch you,” he muttered before closing his eyes, and I wondered what part of me he was picturing.
If I were with him, I’d press him to the center of my chest until our breathing matched. Until his breath became mine, and there was nowhere left to run, but to each other. It was a broken clockwork that didn’t need to make sense because it was ours.
“Will you sing to me?” I asked, lying on the kitchen floor.
“What song?”
“You choose,” I yawned.
Thay closed his eyes, his quiet, raspy voice easing into Just Pretend by Bad Omens. I smiled, remembering the steady boom of his heart, pumping blood in and moving it out, waiting for the tiny flutter that happened every fourth beat.
“Daphne.”
Hours passed, my body aching as I rolled onto my side.
“Daph,” Thay said again, prodding me awake.
When I opened my eyes, the kitchen was dark. I focused on the night sky pinging off the metal sink, tracking the shadows until I realized where I was.
“Holy shit. How long have we been asleep?” I asked, noticing the screen had gone black when the rustle of Nathem and Jessie’s voices echoed in the distance.
He was in the car. Damn.
“You? Almost all day.”
I loved that he hadn’t hung up, knowing how empty it would have felt to wake to a cold phone and him just… gone.
“I’ve got to go, okay? Call me if you need me. Oh, and uh, Wolfe says he’ll talk to you tomorrow and not to be pissed at him.”
“Be safe,” I pleaded, shivering when the phone went blank.
My mind stalled in strange pauses, shifting between the broken pleas of a man who wanted me to have a better life and the promise of all of him.
To anyone else, it would not be a choice.
Not with Maine sitting in the palm of your hand.
You do not tether yourself to a criminal, and you sure as fuck do not fall in love with one.
But Threx came after Thay, a monster he created to keep us safe.
And if I left our darkness to play in the light, he wouldn’t become the monster. I would. Or already was.
Finn: Be there in thirty!
Oh, shit. Finn.
I breathed, scrambling to my knees and lunging for the shower. I wasn’t sure if I’d thoroughly rinsed the conditioner from my hair or shaved more than three uneven lines into my legs, but I somehow squeezed into a black dress and my usual pair of Chucks just in time to hear a knock on the door.
“Hey!” I smiled, throwing it open while hunting for my keys.
“Wow. You,” Finn turned his head ever so slightly, “look different.”
I made a face, fully aware that the standard yoga pants and placenta-covered shirts usually kept me in a perpetual state of disarray.
“Thank you, I guess,” I laughed, bending low to scoop the key off the floor. “Where are we going?”
“Kalico’s,” he answered like it meant something. “It’s a bar. I thought we’d have a drink, and I’d introduce you to a few of my friends.”
I halted, my face scrunching into a pale ball of disgust before I shoved my phone into my bag.
I wasn’t great at socializing on my best day, but add cheerleader types and jock muscles into the mix, and my brain got twitchy.
Mainly because when acquaintances don’t know what to say, they default to safe, run-of-the-mill questions about family and childhood, things other people found harmless but turned me into a bigger freak than I already felt.
“Or not,” he ran his tongue over his teeth. “Is there something wrong with basic human interaction, or do you just do the big bad stuff?”
Rude.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing,” he shifted, raking his fingers through his golden tresses. “But if that phone call this morning was any indication of your personal life, I thought maybe you could use some normalcy.”
I eyed him warily, knowing full well his idea of a standard evening looked nothing like mine. In fact, my normal right now was masking up in an unmarked car under the shitty light of a broken streetlamp, while I was pretty sure Finn’s ended with body shots and a hot pink bra stuck to his ass.
“And by normal, you mean darts, beer, and girls in crop tops making eyes to get free drinks?”
“Yes,” he snorted. “Well, that and cheeseburgers as big as your face.”
“Yum!” My stomach rolled, realizing the only thing I’d eaten today was the lemon bar from this morning. “That actually sounds amazing.”
“You have a weird relationship with food,” he tried to joke, but it fell flat. “Sorry, I… I’m a privileged asshole who is obviously not very good at this.”
Finn reclined against the counter, burning holes into the floor.
“You’re fine,” I mumbled, letting it go, gulping air through my nose when I pointed at the door.
“It’s not fine, Daphne. Don’t let it be.”
I knew what he was trying to do, but he had very little footing to do it. If Wolfe had said this, my body would have gone cold in thought, but from Finn, it sounded evangelistic. That, and he did not matter enough to hurt me. At least not yet.
“If I call you a dick, can we go?” I laughed, second-guessing whether this was a good idea. I had to work alongside this man, and if it got any more awkward than it already was, the next couple of weeks would be hell.
“Yeah,” Finn pulled on his fitted shirt, shoving his hands into his pockets. “I guess that would work.”
“Fine. Finn, you are a dick,” I said clearly, so the kitchen knew I meant business. “And not a big one.” I smiled, watching his expression ease into its regular shade of playful. “A weensy, little, super fucking tiny… dick.”
“Got it,” he bit through a smirk, glancing down between his legs in a flash of hesitation.
“In fact,” I smiled, “you are so small we now have to call you a penis.”
“Alright, you’re done,” he laughed, shadowing me as I pushed through the door. “Did your architect teach you that, too? How to land a solid blow.”
I snorted, arching a brow.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Of course,” I grinned into the night air. “He taught me everything I know.”
Finn might not have meant it that way, but I did.