Chapter 16
COME BACK AND STAY
Micah - Snagged Thread
The threshold to Cosmo’s apartment was a silver strip of textured metal, dented and scuffed with dirt and bits of dead leaves.
Cosmo stood just inside on the front room’s low pile carpet – green with rainbow pinstripes.
It was a fitting contrast to his purple Oxfords with their shiny toe caps.
Micah focused on them, pulled in a breath, and stepped over the threshold.
He straightened and sighed. It was only people in his apartment that were the problem. Thank god.
Cosmo smiled and shut the door. “You’re okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” He swept his arm across the front room. “Make yourself at home. I’ll fix us a drink.”
A bed and large art desk took up much of the space.
Against the other wall was a turntable, speaker towers, and a crate of records.
All of it looked vintage. ’80s postmodern and Memphis Group art in eclectic frames covered so much space that Micah wasn’t sure what to look at first. Sketches of divided skulls were tacked above the art desk.
Glass jars full of buttons, electronic parts, food wrappers, and fabric scraps sat on top of clear storage drawers.
Inside were tubes of paint, bottles of what may have been resin or silicone, brushes, and spools of wire.
Sitting on the desk were slices of a skull, encased in resin.
Pushed together, they looked like a stack of coasters, or maybe some hideous flavor of aspic dessert.
A hand lightly touched his waist. Cosmo offered him a glass of orange juice. “Thanks.” Micah brought the glass to his lips, then paused. “Is it candy corn-flavored?”
Cosmo chuckled. “It’s a screwdriver.”
“There’s a reason candy corn only turns up at Halloween. It’s evil.”
“You’re standing in my bedroom with a cocktail, and you choose to bash candy corn again.”
“Am I doing the flirting thing wrong?”
“I’ll give you another chance.”
Micah sipped his screwdriver and cleared his throat. “It’s a delightful, only slightly-cursed confection in cheery fall colors, and the aftertaste of having licked an envelope only lasts for five minutes tops. The chocolate ones taste like death.”
Cosmo narrowed his gaze. “I meant flirt with me, not the candy corn.”
“Are you jealous?”
“Very. No one ever tells me I taste like death.” He drew in a deep breath.
“And you don’t want to flirt with me anyway, do you?
Because you don’t like me. You like the idea of me.
The dream of me. You lied when you said you found me just as fascinating alive as you did when you thought I was a ghost.”
“It’s not that I like you less now that I know you. It’s the opposite. It’s just that the dream of you was safer. Easier.”
“I’m difficult?” Cosmo huffed. “Ask any past lover, and I’m sure they’d say the same.”
“No. You’re not. You’re captivating and talented. And so beautiful. I have not been able to stop staring at you today. But even so, we can’t ignore the things that separate us. I can’t pretend that my baggage isn’t there, or that where I’m at in my life isn’t different from where you are.”
“Who said anything about ignoring it? It’s part of your package.
I get that.” Cosmo leaned against his desk and sipped his screwdriver.
“Just like my baggage is part of mine. And despite what you think, I don’t believe we’re that different.
I find your art unsettling. You find my art unsettling. What more do we need?”
He put up a convincing argument – that, or Micah just badly wanted it to be true. “Promise me something then? Anything else happens, you get another creepy message or Zedd threatens you, don’t push me away. I’m not going anywhere just because he or Royce are jealous.”
“I promise. But in return, I don’t want your mental health to be a reason to push me away either.” He poked Micah in the chest. “And stop saying you’re too old for me. You’re not.”
Baby steps when it came to moving forward in life.
That’s what they’d promised each other. Cosmo wouldn’t remember – that conversation was three years ago for him – but Micah had no doubt he would still encourage Micah to go at his own pace.
If they could embrace each other’s eccentricities, then why not their flaws too?
“Alright. Deal.” Micah pointed to the skull on the art desk. “What is it?”
“A badger. I encased the entire skull in resin before slicing through, because I needed thinner slices and didn’t want to compromise the structural integrity of the bone.
I’m recreating the negative spaces in clay, which I’ll then cast and mold in colored resin.
Then put all the pieces together and dip it again so it’s a solid block. ”
“So much work goes into your pieces. Will there be a trompe-l’?il aspect to this one too?”
“Yes. The sculpted slices will look like candy.”
“I can’t wait to see it finished.” He glanced at the cubes stacked haphazardly in the center of the coffee table. A long crack spidered through one, and the corner was jagged and cloudy. “Can you fix the damaged one?”
Cosmo shrugged. “Probably, but I’m not sure I care enough to.”
“Do you want to talk about what happened?”
“No.” Plucking a remote from a small bookcase, he aimed it at the TV above the bed, then flipped through channels. “One of my favorite things about October is all of the classic horror movies play on a loop.”
On screen, a man with filthy fingernails slapped a wad of cash onto a table. Someone dropped a sugar cube into a glass of absinthe and urged the man to take the puzzle box sitting between them.
“Hellraiser!” Cosmo said.
“I’ve heard of it. Never seen it.”
“I am all sorts of disappointed in you today.” Cosmo sat on the bed and patted the space next to him. “It’s only just started.”
He didn’t want to talk through anything, and Micah wasn’t going to push him. If company from someone safe while they watched a movie about Hell’s BDSM community was what Cosmo needed right now, then so be it.
After kicking off his shoes, Cosmo slid up against the pillows, burrowed in Micah’s sweatshirt.
Micah sat beside him, then set his drink on the coffee table.
The man on TV solved his puzzle box, then screamed as hooks dug into his bare flesh.
Cosmo jumped, then gave Micah a sheepish smile.
The scene transitioned to a gore-coated floor, racks spinning with bloody body parts.
“Damn it,” Micah said. “His torture dungeon is way better than mine.”
“You should be taking notes. Although that blood is sure to damage the unsealed hardwood.”
The urge to put his arm around Cosmo suddenly overwhelmed Micah.
His pulse throbbed, fingers numb at the sudden realization that this was the moment.
This hour, this interaction, was when he was supposed to kiss Cosmo.
Except… It should have been late evening, and they shouldn’t have been watching Hellraiser.
Cosmo stared at a blank spot on the wall, his mouth parted. “I have that strange sense of premonition again. Do you feel it? It’s like déjà vu. Only it’s not ‘already seen.’ More like presque vu: ‘almost seen.’ The movie is wrong. It’s supposed to be–”
“Psycho.”
Cosmo’s eyes widened. “Yes. And we should be drinking wine. It seemed too early right now to open the Merlot, but I thought some OJ with a splash of vodka would be perfect after what happened at the gallery.”
“This is so weird.” Déjà had told them not to push the sense away, so Micah focused on it instead.
It was indeed a feeling of having done something before, but in a way just different enough to be noticeable.
It was disorienting, like knowing you set your cup of coffee on the desk moments ago and having it suddenly be gone.
“Are we agreeing that these are Other Micah’s memories?
Other Cosmo’s? What would have happened to them had I not intercepted you last night? ”
“More like, what’s currently happening to them.
They’re still at their point on the timeline string.
And us changing the events didn’t create a ripple effect that goes through the future, it snagged out a little thread from the string.
” Cosmo clapped and grinned at Micah. “How’s that for a parallel universe theory? ”
Goosebumps erupted on Micah’s arms, the hair on the back of his neck tingling. The implications of that were hard to fathom. “If you’re right, then we’re feeling not past or present, but time adjacent.”
Believing Cosmo was a ghost haunting his studio had been so much simpler.
“I wonder if we’ll continue to run parallel, or if the timeline is trying to course-correct.
To get us back to where we’re ‘supposed’ to be.
” Some of the tension left Cosmo’s face.
“If the thread is being integrated back into the string, that could mean I’m always destined for a future away from Identical Dog.
Perhaps even if Déjà hadn’t pulled me out of the bar and stayed with me afterward, I would have texted Simone at Night Gallery and asked for a position anyway. ”
If that thought gave him comfort, Micah wasn’t going to dispute it.
However, if this was indeed the kind of spacetime fuckery they were dealing with, it could also mean Cosmo was destined to keep working for Identical Dog despite clearing out his things and upsetting both Royce and the gallerist. Being drawn back by a predestined future.
Ice water flooded Micah’s veins. That wasn’t the kind of course-correcting they needed.
“Micah?” Cosmo tugged on a lock of his hair, a shy smile playing on his lips. “I said, I think you’re supposed to put your arm around me. We are trying to get the timeline back to the way it should be, right?”
But what if the way it “should” be was something they didn’t want? How big of a snag in the thread of the future could they make?