Chapter Two #2
He gives a lopsided smile and digs in his pocket to pull out—my phone? “You asked me to keep you from calling team management and making big changes. But then you kept saying how you’d make the change anyway because we were free now, and you wanted to be totally free.”
He sets my phone on the island and takes my hand, threads our fingers together.
The contact is grounding, an overlap of dozens of moments like this throughout our lives when I used him as a way to calm down, to center myself.
“What change were you talking about, O?” Seb asks.
I peel my fingers out of his and push off the stool to pace behind my bright white couch.
The shelves framing the fireplace are directly ahead of it, and as I walk, my eyes run over the baubles, statues, iconography, and other odds and ends I started amassing in grad school.
My degree was in theological evocation, how magic gifted by gods interacts with wizardry, specifically focused on power drawn from holy items in spell work.
It spurred yet another of my obsessions, but this one is more of a quirky collection.
I happen to have a lot of paraphernalia from various gods and religions. People collect weirder shit.
Staring at it all now, it settles me. I have trinkets from dozens of gods.
Thio switches off the griddle and finishes stacking a huge mound of pancakes on a platter next to it. The potion in that coffee seems to have softened my nausea and headache, but I’m not the least bit hungry.
Seb climbs off the barstool. “You’re not quitting rawball, are you?”
I stop pacing, hands beating on my thighs. “No. Not that.”
“But you are quitting something?” He squints. “Or … changing something? You—”
“I’m going to renounce Urzoth as my patron god.”
Seb’s brows vault up. Thio, on the other side of the island, whistles low and mutters, “Well, shit.”
Seb says nothing, his blue eyes huge behind his glasses.
“That makes it sound far more serious than it really is.” I start pacing again. “Renounce. Like it’ll be some grand ceremony. Really, I’ll take his badge off my jersey. It isn’t a big—”
But I can’t even finish the lie.
It’s a huge deal.
In particular because—
Seb closes the space between us and stops a foot away, forcing me to quit pacing. “Does your mom know?”
I bark a laugh that sends a splitting bolt of pain through my tempered headache. “Ha. Have you heard of any small towns in western Pennsylvania spontaneously combusting? No. I have not talked to my mother about it.”
And I don’t know how I will. I’ll need to, after I tell management, but gods, how do I say I’m withdrawing from the thing she’s built her life around? From the thing she ingrained so deeply into our family’s existence that it would never occur to her that I’d want to undo it for myself?
It was hard enough to tell Seb. And I only did it because it’s the eleventh hour, and I know how hurt he’d be if I did something like this without talking to him about it first.
His gaze goes more critical the longer he looks at me. Like I’m a new experiment he’s trying to unlock.
Finally, he nods, but it’s cockeyed and uncertain. “Okay.”
“Okay?” I match his head cock. “That’s it? No why would you do that, Orok? This is a huge, crazy change you’re making, Orok?”
He gives me an unimpressed look. “In what universe would I talk to you like that? But you’ve been unhappy for a long time, O.
Like … a long time. And I kept thinking it was all these other milestones you needed to hit to be happy.
Getting out of undergrad. Getting out of grad school.
Getting back to Philly. Finishing this lawsuit.
But you’ve always been … held back?” He flinches.
“That’s not the right phrase. Like you’re happy and you smile and engage people, but none of it gets to be yours.
You make other people happy, but it doesn’t ever seep back into you.
So maybe this is it? Maybe Urzoth’s been the thing holding you back from being happy. ”
“I am happy,” I tell him. But it tastes bitter. “It’s not that I’m unhappy.”
Thio comes out from behind the island and leans against one of the barstools. “Why are you separating from Urzoth now?” he asks. Not accusingly, but curious. “The lawsuit just ended. Is it too much all at once?”
He’s been Mr. Caretaker since the lawsuit started. Making sure Seb was okay, making sure I was okay. Even though us suing the family members of his who owned Camp Merethyl caused issues for him, too, Thio’s been the one to monitor our emotional states like becoming a nurse unlocked his final form.
I resisted it at first. Part of me thought he was keeping tabs on me out of obligation; I paid for his mom to stay at her previous care facility for a few months when I first got signed to the Chimeras.
But Thio’s a persistent bastard, and once he realized I thought he felt duty-bound to me, he actually flew out to Vegas, sans Seb, to confront me about it.
“You’re my friend, too,” he’d said. “And this lawsuit is a huge, suffocating life event we’re all going through, and that’s what friends do: help each other breathe.”
Yeah. They do.
I never stopped helping pay for his mom’s care. Her new facility has an anonymous auxiliary fund, and Thio and Seb don’t know I’m one of the main donors.
I gave into Thio coddling me.
When I pointed out his mulishness, Seb sighed all dopily and said, Isn’t it sexy?
One of the many reasons Seb and I never would’ve worked romantically. Who finds antagonism sexy?
“Yeah, it is a lot all at once.” I swallow, throat dry. “That’s kind of why I want to do it now. Get it all over with. Let people speculate and say whatever they want about me in one big, toxic cloud, then maybe I can move on. From everything.”
“And you want to move on from your patron god?” Thio clarifies.
I nod, muscles stiff, like even saying all this out loud is going to have my mother calling me in a fury. “I need a fresh start. And Urzoth, the church—it’s tied up in our past. I can’t think about him without thinking about…” I flounder to silence.
Clear my throat, and start again.
“Being back in the city with you both, in a new team, with the lawsuit behind us…” I shrug, my eyes pricking. “I just need to begin.”
Alexo bursts into my head. The fire in his eyes as he sang, the way each word felt both begging and demanding.
It solidifies the torrent of emotions whipping through me—guilt over how my Urzoth-infatuated mother will react to this; resignation that it really will make me a traitor; hope that I’ll get to figure out who I am beyond being forced into boxes defined by someone else.
Through it, I see Alexo belting out his song, a gilded beacon.
Seb throws his arms around me. I hug him back instinctively, even more of my chaos settling, eyes fluttering shut.
“Okay,” he repeats into my chest. “I support you, whatever you want to do.”
“When are you talking to team management?” Thio asks.
I squint at the clock over my stove. “A few hours.”
Seb yanks back. “Today? You have a meeting set up with them today?”
“Hey, you guys marked this lawsuit ending by getting engaged; I marked it by disengaging.” I waggle my eyebrows, wresting some lightness into this discussion. “Get it? Because I’m disengaging from—”
Seb snorts. “Oh, I get it.” He swats my arm. “I wish you’d told me sooner. We could’ve, I dunno. Talked it through.”
I smile. “Nothing to talk about.”
This is as much as I wanted to talk about it with him at all. I told him what I’m going to do, that I’m making this big life adjustment; it was a healthy, normal exchange.
I didn’t call him in the middle of the night having a meltdown about it.
I didn’t spend hours texting him all the reasons I should or shouldn’t do it.
I kept this admittedly monumental decision to myself, and presented it to him in a perfectly mature, responsible way.
This is what it’s like to have a healthy friendship. I can maintain boundaries.
I expected to feel relieved that I hit this goalpost my therapist and I have talked about. But I only feel … ashamed? Empty.
Unsatisfied.
Although, maybe that has more to do with being violently hungover while having this discussion, so the whole mature aspect is kind of nullified.
Speaking of.
I glance down at my bare chest. “Um. Why did I wake up naked?”
Thio sputters a cough that’s definitely a poorly restrained laugh and whips around to face the kitchen, but not before I see his face turn flaming red.
Seb unleashes an evil smirk. “Oh, babe. Do you really wanna know?”
“I … feel like I need to?”
“Well.” Seb takes a running leap at the kitchen island so he can sit on it, kicking his legs as Thio white-knuckles the edge of the counter. “I told you. You said you wanted to be totally free last night.”
My eyes widen and my empty stomach contracts. “Oh my gods. I didn’t.”
“Don’t worry, we got you home before you stripped down. That was just for us, apparently.” Seb scrunches his nose and nudges Thio with his socked foot. “Baby?”
Thio shakes his head, shoulders heaving like he’s holding back laughter.
“No,” he says, voice reedy.
“He asked you for it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I asked Thio for what?” I choke out.
Thio goes slack with a heavy sigh and takes a second to gather himself.
He turns from the island, pulls out his wallet, thumbs free a few singles, and throws them at me.
They flutter off my stomach and I lift an eyebrow at him.
“While Sebastian was getting you some water,” he starts, face still red, voice still pitchy, “you stood on your bed, told your sound system to play, and I quote, that sexy thub-thub hubba-hubba music, and asked me to, and again, this is a direct quote, throw some singles all up in this bitch, please.”
My face goes slack. “Please?”
“It was the politest drunk striptease I’ve ever received.”
Thio’s trying hard not to laugh. He’s maintaining eye contact, lips in a flat line, nodding sagely like this is a totally normal conversation to be having.