Chapter Eleven #2
Did this mean he should kiss her again?
“I don’t know how to dance, either,” Pax blurted.
Wait.
Did he say that? Why did he say that? Who cares if he couldn’t dance?
What he meant to say was he did care about how Josie felt.
Instead, a completely different set of words left his mouth.
Something about the lack of magic in this world turned Pax into an idiot.
Josie chuckled. “I’m sure your dancing skills are as good as your joke-telling skills, you just need to practice them.”
Yessss. She’d laughed.
It hadn’t been a full-throated laugh, but he’d take it. She thought he was funny. This was going well. He was turning into quite the charmer.
A strange buoyancy pressed against his breastbone, and he smiled back at her.
“Oh, I’ve never seen you smile like that,” Josie said. She swallowed and shook her head sharply. “Sorry. I’m…I’m not saying you’re humorless, it’s…you have a nice smile.”
The buoyancy spread through Pax’s limbs, leaving him weightless.
A blush crept over her cheeks like a sunrise. Pax rubbed his chest where a pleasant ache made itself known.
“The other night,” he said, forcing the words out over a bubble of fear right next to the pleasant ache, “I kissed you without asking for consent.”
This had been in the back of his mind all week. In the front of his mind had been the nicer parts, how soft her lips had felt beneath his, how the burdens he felt so keenly had melted beneath the tentative brush of her fingers across the nape of his neck.
How hard he’d been when the pressure of the kiss increased, and he knew she wanted him as much as he’d wanted her.
He hadn’t asked her, though.
“Can I kiss you?” Pax felt his own face heat and he shook his head as though that might clear whatever confusion Josie ignited in him alongside the lust. “I mean, not now, but before.”
“Not now?” she asked, her elusive smile reappearing, flickering up and down until she pinned it with her top teeth to her bottom lip.
“Yes? No. I mean, it’s not that I expect to kiss you again, I wanted to retroactively, uh…”
Shit. Who was this nitwit inhabiting Pax’s body? What was he even saying?
Josie blushed harder and looked down at her feet, one toe sketching a half circle in the space between their bodies. When she looked up, he took the opportunity to move closer and inhaled the scent of cherries, saying a silent greeting to her heart-shaped freckle.
He cleared his throat. “I didn’t want to presume.”
That sounded reasonable, right?
Josie’s smile reached to the corners of her eyelids and Pax lost his mind a little.
“You were welcome to kiss me,” she whispered. “Are welcome.”
Pax caught her coat sleeve between his fingers and began to pull her closer. Josie’s serious gray eyes stared up at him as she lifted her head the tiniest bit. Desire pooled at the base of his spine, and he dipped his head to meet hers.
“Moooom.”
Shit.
“Mooooo-ooooo-om!”
Amos ran over and grabbed Josie’s hand. “I hafta go potty.”
For a moment, Josie remained motionless, her gaze locked on his.
Snippets of poetry, talk overheard at the alehouse, certain paintings Pax had never understood were suddenly translated in the language of prickling beneath the skin and warmed cheeks and breathlessness despite the fact they both stood perfectly still.
“Right,” Josie said to Amos, still staring at Pax. The boy pulled on her arm, and she turned her head, breaking the connection with a snap. She turned back and shrugged, then followed the boy inside the store.
Pax had no idea how long he might have stood there while the world rearranged itself, but Maddy came stomping across the garden center toward him muttering about nonlinearity and fractal patterns.
In other words…
“Chaos.” Maddy spit the word out like a foul taste, folded her arms, and tapped the toe of her shiny red shoe. “This world is a mess.”
The heel of the shoe looked impossibly high. He almost asked her if the unnatural bend in her foot might impact her moods, but a tiny pink tongue flickered out from beneath her headscarf, so he kept his damn mouth shut.
“It isn’t all bad,” he said instead, still warm from what happened with Josie. “They have donuts and bouncy houses. Legos. Debussy.”
“Pfft.” Maddy dismissed donuts and classical music with a flip of her hand.
“For every bear claw there is a place like this, a pretension of order—a facsimile of choice narrowing the horizon until something as wild and uncultivated as a sunset is reduced to a two-dimensional image used to sell goods instead of recognized for the genius of the universe.”
True, but Legos?
“Has anything else happened with the woman and her boy?” Maddy asked.
The abrupt change in subject made his head itch.
“What exactly do you mean by that?” he asked.
Maddy cocked her head like a predator watching its prey. “I mean has Number Five shown any more signs of recovery around them? Has the needle moved? What else could I mean?”
Pax looked over Maddy’s head where Joey Z. and Denis were arguing at the entrance to the garden center. Joey wore rolls of different-colored duct tape on his arms like bracelets and Denis appeared to be objecting to them.
“Pax?” Maddy prodded. “What else could I mean?”
“Nothing,” he answered. Aware he was as bad a liar as he was a humorist, Pax averted his face from Maddy’s narrowed-eye gaze and grabbed a bucket filled with a purple stalked long grass.
“What do you think of this?” he asked, holding the plant in front of his face to hide his expression.
Maddy’s black-leather-gloved hand reached through the grass and bent it to the side so she could examine him.
“Why do you look guilty?” she countered.
Pax shoved the bucket into Maddy’s arms and grabbed another plant. This one was also a decorative grass, and the tasseled ends looked like a dirkit’s ass.
“I don’t look guilty,” he lied. “This one is nice, and it is on sale. Forty-seven cents less than the usual price.”
Joey and Denis came up behind Pax, still quarreling.
“…buy things because they look cool. This world is one where hard work is devalued and the elite want the masses to spend their currency on meaningless junk serving to keep them distracted from the atrocities happening around them.” Denis punctuated each of his points by slapping one hand into the open palm of the other, applauding himself since Joey appeared disinclined to do so.
Each slap dislodged the tinfoil cap more from its precarious perch until you saw only the gnome’s bulbous nose and frothy beard.
“You can’t generalize about this whole world based on this one store,” Joey argued, the acrid smell of decay accompanying him. “You’re spending too much time on the YouTube. Miss Nekesa says—”
“Shut up. Both of you,” Maddy snapped.
Denis huffed, pretending to be offended rather than terrified, and Joey’s eyelids flew back, one of them getting stuck while his eyeball rolled wildly in its socket.
Maddy dropped the grass she was holding, grabbed the bucket Pax was hiding behind, and tossed it onto a nearby rack of potted ferns.
“The more I think about this plan, the less I like it,” she said, arms crossed, toe still tapping. “Planting a garden suggests permanence. We don’t want to put down roots, physically or metaphorically. We want to get out of this world and back to where we belong.”
Denis pushed his hat up, revealing his beady eyes. “Agreed. The vampire is right. Use the young human as a blood sacrifice and get Number Five back into action.”
Gasping, Joey held up his hands as though to deflect their words, the rolls of duct tape keeping him from bending his elbows. “What are you, monsters?”
“Um, yes,” Maddy said, leaving no doubt how ridiculous she found his question. “Hello?” She pointed to the mass of “hair” hidden beneath her headscarf.
Spinning to face Pax, Joey waved his arms in distress. “What about you? You’re supposed to be a champion of the Light. Isn’t killing a little kid the work of the Dark?”
“Bah,” Denis scoffed. “You’re talking to The Butcher. Killing is as reflexive as breathing for Pax.”
Not anymore.
“You’re missing the point,” Pax said. “Finding a sacrifice is the easy way out. What if we did use blood to feed Number Five and she started up again? Doesn’t tell us what caused her to run out of fuel in the first place and certainly doesn’t guarantee we won’t get stuck again.”
Rolling his eyes, Denis sighed and spoke slowly, as if to a child. “If we can get Number Five healthy and moving, we can go someplace that’s full of magic.”
Maddy nodded. “We can’t even send pigeons from this world. We’re cut off from anyone that could help us. What is the life of one magicless child compared to the life of Number Five?”
Joey rocked back and forth, trying to hug himself and dropping duct tape rolls in the process. “But Pax is a paladin, he’s sworn to uphold the Light. The kid and his mom are guests now. If you hurt them, you’d be breaking the Wayside’s oath.”
“Exactly,” Pax said as he helped Joey pick up tape that rolled beneath a table full of spidery-looking plants with pink heart-shaped flowers.
“You’re forgetting we paid a price to check into Number Five and were promised safe delivery in return,” Denis snarled.
The price for a stay in a Wayside was supposed to be a secret, and Pax and Maddy weren’t told what each guest sacrificed. Sometimes a wounded guest would volunteer the information (“I paid an arm and a leg for this trip”) but usually the price wasn’t something people liked to advertise.
Josie obviously paid in money.
One night when blood drunk, Raphe had insinuated he’d paid by losing some of his magic.
Denis would only say what he’d paid should guarantee him first-class service.
He might be the size of a human child but nothing about Denis was cute or sweet. Like most gnomes, he saved and polished his grievances like gemstones and saw his simmering anger as proof of his righteousness.