Chapter Twelve. Daye
Daye
“Hey,” Rory said from behind Daye. He placed a steaming mug on the ground, before carefully folding himself down beside her on the garden steps, not seeming to know how to wield his newly long limbs without a confusion of jutting knees and elbows.
‘Hey,’ Daye signed back, an open palm skimming through the air like a stone on the surface of the water.
“Did you find any good shells at the lake?” he asked, picking up the cup and carefully taking a sip. It was almost surprising, seeing Rory with his hands unoccupied with weaving, no diagrams or notes spread around him.
Daye shrugged, digging out from her pocket two pink shells that had a soft pearly gleam and one rounded green rock.
Rory examined them, smiling faintly. “Good finds,” he said, looking up at her. The smile flickered and dimmed, pulling downward. “I really am sorry that I’m always buried in books lately. I know … I know it must be hard, being alone all the time.”
Daye shrugged again.
Rory bumped her shoulder with his. “Yeah, it sucks for me, too. But it’s only for a little bit longer, I promise. I just need to be ready for the transition. Once I manage to do it on my own, everything will go back to the way it used to be.”
Daye bumped Rory’s shoulder back, affectionately, and leaned closer to his cup, inhaling the steam from the hot chocolate inside.
She couldn’t actually drink it—she had tried, once, but the liquid simply pooled on her tongue, unpleasantly warm, her body not seeming to know what to do with it next other than spit it back out—but she liked the way it smelled, heavy and warm.
Rory passed the cup to her so she wouldn’t have to lean.
“So, that was actually what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said, stretching his legs before him. “I, uh, just got off the phone with Wynne. She said she’ll be here in five days to help me with the winter transition.”
Daye started. It was never like that before—a date circled in the calendar, an appointment to meet.
It was usually a slow dance, duck and weave and circle back again, with Rory’s anxiety mounting and her feet faltering, a hopscotch play of unseasonable days and temperate ones, woven through with Wynne’s erratic comings and goings.
It never felt like a decision to be made so much as an inevitable, looming collision.
She poked at the snowless ground with her toe. It was still autumn-soft. Her skin, too, was still mid-season supple.
‘But autumn isn’t over yet,’ she signed haltingly, cup balanced on her thighs. And with so much of it lost between sheets and blankets, the season seemed newer still, the twinge of rot a still distant thing, not yet unfurled in her bones.
“There’s only twelve days left,” Rory said apologetically. “And Wynne wouldn’t be able to come for the last two weeks of December, so—” He shrugged. “But that would be the last time. Next season, I’ll be able to do it without her. I’m sure.”
At the edge of the garden, a bunny, autumn lean, nosed between the shrubs. Daye tried to imagine being in winter amid all the bare ground and still-clinging leaves. She couldn’t quite grasp it. It felt like reaching for something only to discover, mid-grab, that it wasn’t there.
“So, I was thinking,” Rory said, his words tearing through her thoughts. “Um.”
She looked at him expectantly, his nervousness making her nervous in turn.
He shifted slightly, his knees rubbing against hers. “So, we have five more days. And I was thinking, since I’m the one doing it this time, that you should have a say. If you want to.”
And for the first time since Daye woke up, disoriented and disjointed, with Wynne hovering over her and Rory hollow-cheeked and fever-bright, Daye felt like everything might be all right after all.