Chapter 6 Ris #2
She had picked up the pottery drop-in on Thursdays while he was at band practice, and then sometimes, his own drop-in to a grief support group afterward.
Ris already knew that band rehearsals occasionally turned into post-rehearsal beers, beers turning into someone explaining why their last break-up made them the de facto creative genius of the group.
The lateness of his arrival home those nights was not a credible indicator that he'd been at the support group. He didn’t go every week, and he never talked about it when he did, but Ris could still tell on those nights.
On Fridays, he worked from home again, their official pizza and a movie night.
“I can’t help but notice you have no issue with my penny-pinching magic when it benefits you,” he’d pointed out, not long after the trip to buy the bookshelves, sniffing that his free wi-fi was no different than his milk crates.
“The free wi-fi comes with working from home,” she pointed out, laughing. “You didn’t have to fight a family of raccoons for it next to the dumpster. Not the same.”
Weekends were spent at museums and the symphony, open-air markets in the warm months, street festivals and carnivals, and the film festival back in Cambric Creek, while these long winter months were spent working their way through cookbooks, making soup and baking bread.
They had book club and learned languages on an app with a bullying little bat as a mascot.
She cherished the moments when they were still, but Ris wouldn’t change a thing.
She had gotten used to holding him through the quiet evenings after his therapy sessions.
Her physical presence kept him anchored, letting his mind work through whatever it was still chewing over, and she was glad to do it.
Therapy had been one of her non-negotiables before she’d been willing to move a stick of furniture out of her condo, a condition upon which he had readily agreed.
Ris knew he was still grieving. Grief had become something he carried on his person wherever he went. Carefully, thoughtfully, as if it were fragile, like one of his instruments.
She tried her best to understand.
“You have to give him the time he needs,” her own therapist had said gently.
“I understand that,” she’d countered, her face hot, a small pile of crumpled tissues already beside her. “And I want to give him all the time he needs. I just . . . don’t know how long that is. I don’t have a frame of reference for any of this. I’m not going to lose my parents for a long time.”
“But surely there have been other people in your life,” the troll pushed back, voice still gentle. “Co-workers, neighbors. Family friends. Someone close to you who wasn’t a relative.”
It had been a mistake choosing the goblin. She liked the woman, but this wasn’t going to work. Ris had been thinking that for weeks already, but this was irrefutable proof. Finding the right therapist can be tricky. Back to the drawing board.
She didn’t have long-time family friends, neighbors, teachers who had died. Elves stayed in close-knit communities for this very reason.
“I don’t. That’s why elves live in enclaves,” she said bluntly.
No sense in tiptoeing around it, and you already paid for the hour.
“We’re taught from a young age not to get too close to outsiders.
Yes, I made the decision to be in a relationship with someone who has a very different lifespan.
No, I don’t understand everything he’s feeling.
That’s why I’m here, so you can tell me. ”
At that, the goblin nearly choked on her swallowed laughter. The small, green-skinned woman pulled off her glasses, rubbing her forehead with the back of her hand, shoulders still shaking.
“You know, when I saw that I had an elf in the patient profile, I wondered how it would go,” she chuckled. “We don’t see too many of you in multi-species practices like this. And I guess that’s why.”
It was her turn to laugh. Okay, maybe you’re being too hasty. Give her a chance. “I just moved to Bridgeton from Cambric Creek,” she admitted. “Multi-species is what I’m used to. Honestly, I was just happy to find someone in the practice who wasn’t human.”
There were two goblins in this office, and every other therapist in the group was human. You’ll have to stay in Cambric Creek another day of the week if this doesn’t work out. One more night without him, and he was the reason she’d gone back to therapy at all.
The Ainsley she had fallen in love with was gone.
He was still there, of course. Ainsley would always be Ainsley, and he sparkled even when he actively tried to avoid it, but there was a sadness that existed in him now. His sparkle was dimmer, his smiles more guarded.
When they met, he radiated joy with the exuberance of a puppy, but now .
. . joy and trust were tentative things.
Metered out, as if he might run out if he spent either foolishly.
He had been forever fractured by the events of the previous year, a wall going up around his heart that hadn’t existed before, with a ghost taking up residence in a permanent seat at her kitchen table.
That was the only way she could think of it. Tate was a ghost in the room, a third roommate she’d not agreed to. One Ainsley talked around, and the entire prior decade and a half of his life had a pall over it as a result. It would be easier if he were dead.
Ris tried her best to understand.
He felt betrayed. Used and lied to. He felt as if a full decade of his life had cast him at the center of a web of intricately constructed lies, and he trusted less now because of it.
He wasn’t just grieving the loss of the friend he thought he’d known, she understood. He was grieving for the orc he’d been then, the orc with a close circle he’d trusted implicitly, a version of himself that had disappeared as completely as Tate, one he’d never get back.
You couldn’t ever go home again, and that was a concept she understood. And when she was alone, when the room was too quiet and her mind too unoccupied, Ris mourned both the orc she had lost and the version of herself that had existed a year ago as well.
“Look,” the goblin said finally, slipping her glasses back on.
“I get it. I understand you don’t have a reference point.
I wish I could tell you there was a playbook you could follow along with.
A checklist. You know, five stages of grief, nice and neat.
But there’s not. I can’t tell you what to expect or how long it will take because grief looks different for everyone.
So does healing. It’s complicated and messy, and it takes as long as it takes.
We’re shaped by our experiences, right? Your partner is being reshaped right now.
You helping him through his complicated grief is going to be part of that reshaping. ”
She nodded, her eyes filling with tears again.
She wanted to help him as much as she could, but for the first time in her life, Ris was at a loss on how to manage the situation.
There was no SOP she could email out, no existing policy to adhere to, no paperwork she could file to expedite the change in Ainsley.
“We’re almost at time, but this is something worth considering . . . if you’re in this relationship for the long haul, Ris, you’re going to have a point of reference eventually. You might want to dip your toes in the waters of experience before that day comes.”
She was being hasty. She liked the goblin, and it was good to have someone force her into seeing a different perspective.
That had been nearly a week ago; another week to go before her next appointment. Maybe next appointment you should talk about other things. Like why you can’t be alone anymore.
The silence in the apartment was heavier once he was gone.
There was an almost imperceptible buzz prickling at the back of her neck, and she followed the hum of it across the living room and down the hall, finding the source in the second bedroom.
She smiled, envisioning him in here before he’d left, flicking the switch on his amp. The sound vanished immediately.
She had loved quiet moments, once upon a time ago.
She’d loved taking her mat to the roof on warm, sunny mornings, breathing into her poses, relishing being alone inside her body.
Now the silence was too quiet, and in the quiet, she couldn’t escape from her own thoughts. It was why she liked keeping busy.
Too busy to overthink the future. Too busy to compare the orc she lived with to the orc she’d first fallen in love with.
Too busy to examine why she needed to keep so busy, what scared her so much about silence and empty rooms, in a way they never had before.
Maybe you should add another therapy appointment to the month.
Keep busy with something genuinely useful.
She missed her friends. It was hard to conceptualize, for she had never been busier. Her life had never been so occupied, her calendar so full . . . yet she had scarcely felt this alone. Restlessness in her bones, those chafing grains of sand, still there. Still chafing.
They’d talked about how hard it was to make friends as an adult on that very first night they’d met, more than two years earlier, and it never seemed more prescient than it had in the past few months.
A first night together you can never talk about again, because Tate was there, you met at Tate’s bar, you went to Tate’s restaurant.
Ris glared at the empty chair across the kitchen, pulling her lasagna and garlic bread from the oven.
Fuck you, asshole. If the barkeep ever showed his sharp-toothed face again in her vicinity, she had already vowed to dislocate his jaw with a baseball bat.
Ainsley had told her once that the one thing musicians and artists all had in common was that they were, by and large, terrible friends. Flakes, there for a good time but not to be counted on in anything that constituted not merely a good time.