Chapter Twenty-Seven
The sun seemed colder from where I crouched on the couch like a caterpillar in a cocoon with a blanket wrapped around my body. When I looked out the window wall, its rays didn’t touch the grass and neither did its warmth. I pulled the edges tighter over my ribs and shoulders.
Waiting for Maggie to arrive in preparation for the fundraiser, I’d fused with the cushions.
The creatures continued to sleep, and I hadn’t found the motivation within me to wake them.
I wanted to be an empty shell of a human for as long as possible.
I sat bundled up with a box of Ruth’s cinnamon rolls in front of me.
I hadn’t touched them. I hadn’t changed out of my silk pajamas.
Or brushed my hair. The world was me and the wall I stared at.
Had I spent all day sulking? No.
I’d spent all day and night.
I’d stayed awake half the night going back and forth about what I wanted.
Laken’s leaving didn’t change how I felt about him, but it affected how I felt about us.
And unfortunately, he’d been respectful.
If he’d reacted with a tone or said something he didn’t mean, my decision would’ve been easier.
But Laken wasn’t the one to do that, I was.
So I made a list.
Pros of waiting for Laken to return: Get time alone. Get to love him when he returns and forever after that.
Cons of waiting for Laken to return: Get time alone.
Time to sulk. Time to cry. Time to wallow in self-pity.
Worrying about his well-being. Worrying if he’d return at all.
Worrying if he’d fall in love with someone else.
Worrying if he’d become the type of person to drink light coffee.
Adapting to changes (mine and his) when he returned because, let’s face it, people change.
What if I did wait and he did return and he’d changed his mind?
What if Laken finally realized I wasn’t worth his love in the first place? I blinked away the thought as a knock came at the door.
I rose, engulfed in soft fabrics, and skated across the floor. I opened the door, revealing a very well-put-together version of Maggie—dressed, smelled like florals, and probably recently bathed. Unlike me. Her glinting eyes took one look at me and dimmed.
“You look like hell,” my friend so kindly noted.
Frowning, I shrugged. I’d been waiting for her. “You have a lot to catch up on.” I leaned past her, eyeing the extremely full carriage behind her. Four suitcases, three bags, two vases, and one man unloading it all.
“You bring the entire shop with you?”
Maggie grinned unapologetically. “You know I did,” she replied.
Three trips. It took three trips for us to get everything inside. Filling my living room to the brim with flowers and jars and glue and… everything else Maggie brought, it became a game to walk through without tripping over bundles of eucalyptus.
Because I felt like doing absolutely nothing, I nearly convinced my mind of the same.
Which was why I made a to-do list, so things got done instead of becoming lost in the maze of my brain.
One: make flower jars with Maggie. No, scratch that.
One: feed animals. Two: flower jars with Maggie. Three: spill about Laken.
Moaning all the way, I set Blaze on my shoulder and grabbed my boots. Best to get to it, right?
“Reece?” Maggie called from where she sat on the couch.
I turned with a “Hmm?”
Round brown eyes poured into me, seeing straight through me. “You’re upset, what’s wrong? What happened?”
My brows knitted. “Is it the pajamas? Or do I have bags under my eyes? I couldn’t sleep last night—”
“Socks.” She nodded to my frilly socks peeking up from my boots. “Dead-flower socks. You wear dead-flower socks when you’re upset.”
I tilted my chin down and angled my foot; little black flowers sat above the trims of my boots. “They aren’t dead flowers, they’re just black. And that’s not entirely true—” I defended.
“They’re your comfort socks,” she argued.
My jaw clenched. I shifted uncomfortably on my feet, hiding one foot behind the other.
Flustered and busted, I grew angry at the thought of being seen and understood.
How dare Maggie actually pay attention to me and my wallowing habits these past years?
How many times had I worn them? “Yeah? Well… well, I have chickens to feed.” I turned and closed the door behind me.
It wasn’t as though I didn’t plan on telling Maggie everything anyway, but… I don’t have comfort socks.
Of course, the hellblazers were already blazing.
Kicking up the trash can lid, I shielded myself quick and easy, sneaking in and out before flames could touch me—or my pajamas.
Once they realized I’d come to feed them, they chilled out.
Like with Laken, they’d grown used to me.
Even Chicken Noodle. After a head count and filling their water, Blaze and I slipped out, though they were plenty distracted with eating. “Bye, you bastards.”
Finneas and Finnigan were more than excited to see me back, one running behind the other for some good head scratchies.
Their little horn nudges and soft grins made me smile.
Phoebe, as the princess she was, lay curled up in her pink cushioned bed.
From where I squatted inside her enclosure with food, the raw patches on her back seemed to have healed up nicely (thanks to Finneas’s and Finnigan’s milk).
Watching her sleep, safe and healthy, I’d be lying if I said my eyes didn’t water.
Phoebe’d made a full recovery and because of our work here, she’d have a happy, peaceful life. I could promise her that.
Blaze and I scrambled on over to the man, the myth, the legend himself—Benedict.
An old nemesis who I’d learned to consider as something more.
With Blaze on my shoulder, I trucked the wheelbarrow to the food storage and gathered his breakfast. We marched to his enclosure through the grass wet with leftover dew and rain, not yet dried by the sun.
Thankful for my boots because I hated the feeling of dew on my feet, especially if I wore socks, we made it to the gate.
If a bystander watched how we fed Benedict, they might’ve thought I’d lost my mind as I skipped and danced across the yard, fake throwing him snacks left and right.
I called it the Benedict Boogie. Archie didn’t even disappear on me when I fed him but instead landed on my arm to say hello.
Butters understood my signals and I understood his.
Last of the outside creatures, beloved old Indomitus.
As his aged soul called him to do so, he waited on the edge of the riverbank, his massive body shielded in ash-white scales of armor.
Indo wasn’t a being of social gestures and neither was I.
We had a mutual understanding that resided between us about that.
He didn’t trust humans, but he’d come to trust me. And I’d honor that.
I slipped back inside. Gordon, on the other hand? I hated that fish, but I’d be there when he jumped ship and I’d put him back in his bowl every time. No matter how much I gagged doing it.
Collapsing on the couch, I slumped back into my crater.
Maggie snapped up from the jar she stuck flowers into. Petals, glass, twine, and glue completely engulfed her. With no idea what she’d started, we clearly had our work cut out for us. “You’re done already?”
Squinting my eyes, I frowned at how she said it with such surprise. “Yes?”
“Last time it took you three times as long and you came back”—she tilted her head back and forth—“crispy.”
Oh. I guess I’d made a lot of improvement since she’d last visited.
I no longer got attacked by chickens or outsmarted by a raccoon.
I hadn’t lost any more of the creatures and wasn’t seen running down the streets yelling for Laken’s help.
Hell, I’d even befriended a bear. My cheeks pulled back into a grin with a subtle laugh.
“I told you you had a lot to catch up on.” I sprang off the couch, meeting her in her mess of jars and petals. “But give me instructions first.”
Reluctantly, as she wanted details, Maggie instructed me on the flower ceiling we were building.
Maeve would enchant it to float upside down over the dance floor, a heaven of lilies and roses, with lanterns all around.
The other bouquets for the tables were already made and prepped because Maggie finished them on the way here (somehow, in a carriage?).
So we fiddled with stems, stabbing and gluing them into Styrofoam bottoms in the glass jars.
It only took minutes for my friend to take a deep breath and demand, “Spill it.”
And there was much to spill. The jobs Laken and I’d worked, our time together, the market sales, the Augustus anniversary party, finding out he’d be leaving… and oh, Rebecca.
Maggie stared at me with wonder. “So you almost had sex with him?”
Grimly, I nodded.
“Why?”
My utter shock formed a wrinkle in my nose as my mouth opened to defend myself. “I don’t know! Because I wanted to, I guess?”
“Because you wanted to?”
“Well… either I wanted to, or she did!” I suggested with a little nod to the girl downstairs.
Maggie’s eyes almost popped from her head. “You’re blaming your almost-sex on your vagina?”
“I don’t know?” Instinctively, I shrugged, hoping to bury myself farther into my bones. “Can I do that?”
“No!”
“Well…” Words did not come to mind. “Fuck me, then!”
My flower stem snapped.
“Why are you all that mad at Laken leaving in the first place?”
By the way I glared at her, one would think she’d fatally wounded me. It took a brief moment of staring into her honey-pot eyes for me to realize. And once I did, I sank into my crisscross sitting position.
“Need I remind you of the last three years?” At a glimpse: I panicked anytime I saw a dark-blond man. I checked our mail hysterically. I tried and I tried and I tried to move on, even for one night, and time after time, I failed.
Because the only lips I wanted to tolerate on mine were Laken Augustus’s.
“No,” Maggie mumbled, “no, I remember.”
“I don’t want to sit and watch and wait for him to walk through our door again…”
“So you’d rather not see him walk through it at all?”
Silence.
“Reece…” Maggie paused. “Do you want advice or do you want to complain?”
Throwing myself backward onto the ground, I moaned with agony. “I want to toss myself into an abyss of my own tears where I can wallow in self-pity and not have to worry about it.”
The world could cave in, the land could shift and quake, the oceans could dry, and I would still be trapped inside of my own head.
“I don’t think you need advice,” Maggie started softly. “I think you know what you want. You don’t want to believe it and won’t allow yourself to have it.”
On my back, I side-eyed her, and she raised her brows. I didn’t love that look.
“Reece, when you built those walls to keep love out, you shut yourself in them. Unwilling to let it in, even if it’d make you happy.
” Nope. Not true at all. “I’ve watched you hurt yourself time and time again over the past couple of years and I’m sick of it.
If that’s what you want, fine. But stop pretending it’s anything but. ”
“Everything is easier on my own!” I defended myself.
“No,” she stopped me short, “you tell yourself it’s easier because you think you’re a burden.”
Okay, I thought, maybe a little true. But also, a little harsh.
“I say that as your closest friend.” Her voice lightened as if she noticed my flinch.
I said nothing. “Reece, I love you, but you’re hardheaded and bitter.
” Okay, and? I don’t see the problem. “And…” Her gaze changed, her features softening into a gentle whisper of a smile. “You don’t love yourself.”
What? “What?” My lips parted. “I love myself plenty.”
Maggie shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. You don’t love yourself enough to let yourself be loved.”
“I—” Nothing. “That’s not—” True? It was. “I don’t mean to—” Yes, I did.
I stopped trying to talk.
“Don’t hate me for saying it, but using Laken as an excuse is well, just an excuse.” Well, cluck me in the ass, it seems I’ve been perceived.
Sighing, I knew it wasn’t Maggie’s fault she knew everything. She’d been forced to learn at a young age and unfortunately, her wisdom had grown beyond her years, making her a perfect friend and truth-teller.
We didn’t talk about Laken anymore. We stuffed flowers in jars and glued them in place. And I prayed all night that by some Gods-given miracle, everything would work itself out.
The fundraiser.
The sanctuary debt.
The ex.
No matter how much I wanted to ignore it, I knew the truth. It wasn’t up to any Gods. It was up to me.
“Oh, yeah. That reminds me, I have to leave you here alone tomorrow night.”
Maggie raised a suspicious, bordering on scandalous, brow. “For what?”
With a deep sigh, I shrank into myself for even saying these words: “Pig rescue mission.”
What’s worse than arguing with someone you love? Having to go on a pig rescue mission with them the next day. And what’s worse than that? Not knowing what to wear.
What does one wear to an underground auction to smuggle some magical pigs?
Standing in front of my closet, a nauseous feeling tore at my guts at the thought of seeing Laken.
I’d have to run to the bathroom if it didn’t stop.
Sure, I thought about canceling. But then I remembered there were pigs probably stuffed in a cage somewhere, waiting to be saved.
And I couldn’t leave them there. I wouldn’t.
So what if I lost the best love I’d ever known?
At least I had a lethal porcupine, right?
Besides, Laken knew I needed the money, so he’d go whether I went or not.
And if he went on his own and gave me the money, I’d feel as if I owed him.
Then he’d reassure me I didn’t owe him, and then I’d think, He’s so selfless, I should love him and forgive him as if nothing ever happened.
And I wasn’t letting that happen.
Another thing I wasn’t letting happen? Laken out dressing me. Whether I decided to wait for him or not, he’d picture me looking good for the rest of his life.
A parting gift, if you will. A little something to haunt his mind. Why be a sad bitch when I could be a bad bitch? We were pulling out the silk dress and trading the boots for heels. The fate of my heart had to wait—there were pigs who needed saving.
With that in mind, I trotted downstairs in my pajamas and leaned over the wooden rail, spotting my friend in her nightgown, counting tulips. Her eyes trickled up the stairwell, finding me waiting patiently but nervously.
“Morning…?” she questioned.
I wasn’t doing this on my own. “I need your help.”