22 COSMIC INTERFERENCE, COMET HEAT
22
C OSMIC I NTERFERENCE , C OMET H EAT
Waking with Finch’s nose pressed up against my throat was a new delight. It had been months since I’d slept so well. My eyes were sticky with sleep, skin overwarm where her thigh was thrown over mine, cold seeping past the inch of window we’d left open. She shifted and tightened her hold around my hips. That touch gave me new awareness—I was mostly naked in Finch’s bed, hair a mess, teeth fuzzy in my mouth. I closed my eyes and savored it. The cottonmouth, her hair against my shoulder, her breath against my collarbone, the soft slide of sheets, the steady press of her fingertips.
Slipping out of the bed without ruining her sleep was impossible. I carefully lifted her arm and shuffled free. Found her hoodie on the floor and yanked it over my head, then her sweatpants. I thought I could still smell her on the clothes and then thought maybe that smell was on me, pressed into my skin.
“Are you leaving?” she asked, her voice coarse. I shouldn’t have turned around. She looked so beautiful there, messy and dream-soaked, propped up on her elbows and watching me.
“Gotta change and shower again before we leave to get Amrita,” I murmured. Now that our night had passed, I didn’t know where to put my hands, what to say, how to move. She looked equally unsure. We’d been naked around each other before, but only in short bursts—changing clothes, skinny-dipping after dark. I was newly aware of her body, unable to keep my eyes from dragging. She gave me a half smile. I could feel questions rising in her—a coming talk, an agreement, we move past this, we pretend it didn’t happen —so I looked away. “Are we okay?” I asked.
“’Course,” she said. I waited for more. She rolled over onto her back, dragged the blankets up to her chin and shut her eyes. “Always.”
I swallowed. Everything I could’ve said felt insubstantial. There was an unspoken agreement in the air—last night would live with us in this room. The threat of implosion was too possible, neither of us willing to spark that fuse.
I pushed my hands deeper into the pockets of her hoodie. “I’ll see you in a couple hours, okay?”
She nodded, holding on to that listless smile.
I knew I’d find the Manor waiting empty. But I was still nervous when I crept in the back door, turning the knob slowly and clicking the door shut with a careful hand on the jamb, as if someone might hear. The house was silent. The only sound was my footsteps, carrying me up to the third floor.
I stripped off Finch’s things and stepped into the hot shower. Caroline’s hair remained on the wall in swirls. I twisted my finger in one, watched it move against the tiles, water steaming up the room.
Part of me wanted to cry at the thought of washing off the memory of Finch’s hands on me. The other part needed to scrub myself clean of all my desperate wanting—the need to know that we would all stay friends, the hope that maybe Finch and I could drift into something tenuously more. I closed my eyes and leaned into the heat.
Finch pulled around the front of the Manor around ten thirty. I was already waiting for her on the stoop with a hat pulled over my wet hair and an old parka of Caroline’s zipped up to my chin. She stopped at the curb and I slid into the passenger seat. Finch turned her head just slightly as I closed the door behind me, eyes not quite meeting mine, as if afraid to show me the wrong face.
“Haven’t seen you in ages,” she teased, but I could hear an undercurrent of worry in her voice—the unspoken plea to know that we hadn’t fucked things up. In my peripherals she was a cozy shape, all oversized jacket and hand-knitted scarf and hair slipping free from where she’d tucked it behind her ears. Looking at her felt like it would crack me open. A fracture in my resolve that couldn’t be mended.
Overhead the sky opened like a slit throat, rain turning the car’s roof into a staggered drumbeat. It was a thirty-minute ride between the Manor and the airport, the scenery mostly trees and roadside gas stations where only a pump or two worked at a time. The group chat kept pinging with notifications against my thigh as I kept my eyes on the trees. All I could think about was that dead boar in the road. I was so afraid that we’d pass it and find the body still there, equally terrified that it might be entirely gone. But Finch turned off the two-lane highway before the exit where I had wrecked. Instead, she took a detour past the cornfield.
My palms prickled. The corners of a headache thrummed at my temples. It was probably just a hangover from Finch’s, still reeling from the beer and the weed and the tender way she had put her mouth to my hip bone. Finch hummed along to a playlist. Rain spat, and spat, and spat.
I leaned against the cool glass of the window, the heat puttering from Finch’s vents too constricting. Corn blew by us, gray in the drizzle. The car wavered.
“Shit, sorry,” Finch said, knuckles tightening around the wheel. “Road’s slippery.”
I jabbed a thumb against the window button and rolled mine down. Frigid air and droplets hit my face. I closed my eyes, let it wash over me.
“Can you roll that up? Your hair’s still wet, and we’re going to freeze half to death.”
My tongue was heavy and dry. Tastebuds grated against the roof of my mouth.
“Pull over,” I whispered. The car kept on. “Pull over, Finch, please, I’m gonna be sick.”
The cold air coming through the window wasn’t enough. I bent and let my head hang down between my knees and sucked serrated breaths down. Finch screeched to a stop on the shoulder. The car rocked as it hit the dead grass.
“Jesus, are you okay?”
I shoved the door open. Outside smelled like woodsmoke. The sky was so wet it nearly glowed purple where it touched the trees. Asphalt gave way to cornfield where I crouched, dry heaving, nothing coming up. Under my jacket I was damp with cold sweat. I couldn’t get that burning scent out of my nostrils.
I kneeled there, breathing hard. The field went on and on. Her door slammed behind me, and the sound echoed forever. I flinched when Finch’s hand landed on my shoulder. “What happened? Are you sick?”
There was so much concern in her voice. I shook my head hard. Her hand slid down my back, stroking the slick material of the parka. Fabric bunched around my neck, suffocating me. Spitting rain misted over us both.
“What do you need? Wanna stop at a grocery store, get you a ginger ale or something? You can lie down in the back seat for the rest of the drive.”
I staggered to my feet, her hand falling away and her words drifting somewhere I couldn’t reach. The corn rose over our heads. I hesitated at the edge of its boundary and took in the black smear against the sky. A crucified shape hung from a pole.
The resurrected scarecrow stood in the field, towering over the corn, covered head to toe in carrion birds.
“What the hell? Where are you going?” and then, “Jo, stop!”
I forced my way into the dead corn. Stalks crumbled beneath my grasp, brittle with frost and decay. Finch called after me again, voice growing smaller the farther I pushed on.
The flattened circle of stalks was the same as we’d left it that first time. Rotten growth and frozen dirt underfoot. That pole teetering above me. Most of the birds took to the sky as I interrupted their meal, only a few left to peck at this new scarecrow’s body.
Someone had retrieved the Boar King’s suit, but it was in a horrific state now, the tusks just gluey stumps, holes in the chest with straw poking out, empty pants hanging limp and shoeless. I’d assumed that the farmer who found the suit would have disposed of it or let St. Roche collect it. Who could have gotten their hands on it again? Who would know how to bring it back to life?
A dead smell permeated the air, cut past the clean cold of December. Grackles pecked at the stomach where snakes poured from the scarecrow’s center.
No, not snakes—the twisted shapes were slack, hanging listless, fleshy and purpled and gnarled where the carrion had started to eat. The answer came to me like knuckles to the jaw—they were entrails. Something’s intestines drooping from the cavern of the Boar King’s abdomen.
“What the fuck?” Finch whispered. I spun to face her. Her eyes were wide with horror, her mouth hanging open. “Did you do this?”
I blinked once, twice, before I realized she was asking me, accusation in her voice. I paled and sputtered. “No, of course not.”
We stood dwarfed beneath it, looking up at the strange picture the figure made against the sky. The meat appeared recent, or maybe just half-defrosted by the rain. The birds were unperturbed by the weather and starving for more, but they flitted away to the trees to wait for us to leave. Finch gestured to the entrails. “Are those—where do you think—are they real?”
They looked real. They had the old, browned hue of meat left exposed to air, but winter had done a decent job of keeping them intact.
“I think someone made a new offering,” I whispered.
We stood in taut silence. I could feel Finch pulling away—there was so much distance between us, yesterday’s warmth erased and her distrust taking its place.
“I’m done with this,” she snapped. She turned and started to crash through the corn again, back to her car, calling over her shoulder, “I’m fucking done!”
“It wasn’t me!” I called after her. Birds flocked back to the scarecrow and resumed their meal.
In the car, Finch shifted into drive and refused to look at me. But she left my window rolled down a crack. I drank in that air like a dog, with my eyes closed and my fingers pressed over my mouth.
We drove with the music turned off, the only sound the ping of ice on the windshield.
Amrita was so happy to see us. She launched into the back seat and yanked me into a hug smelling of her vanilla perfume. Finch was too quiet. I could feel the moment Amrita noticed we were uncomfortable—she stiffened slightly but hooked my hand in hers and held tight.
“I’m heading to Grainer,” Finch said as we pulled back onto campus. Her tone was strained, her knuckles still white with tension. “I’ll let you guys out in front of the Manor.”
Amrita obeyed without question as Finch pulled to a stop at the front door. I stayed where I was in the passenger seat, and Amrita paused.
“Not gonna come inside and hang out with me?” she pushed.
“I’m going with Finch to get some work done. I’ll be back this evening, promise.”
Finch exhaled hard through her nose. Amrita just gave me a nod and closed the car door, turning into the Manor with her bags. The tires hissed as Finch pulled around into a parking lot centered in the hub of Rotham’s campus, where Main Lawn led to Grainer. We didn’t speak. She silently maneuvered into a spot and yanked the key from the ignition, then ran her hands down her face. When she finally hefted herself out of the car and started down the promenade, I hurried to follow, ducking beneath the rain.
Grainer was a flurry of activity, busy students passing us on the stairs and the studio itself filled with familiar faces—Mars in their cubicle with Cameron sitting by the doorway, Veda scrubbing brushes at the sink, Phoebe stapling canvas down to a frame. The greetings they called felt more cursory than friendly. Finch’s responses were short. I had to nearly jog to keep up with her.
“Wait,” I tried once we were out of earshot of the others. “We should talk.”
Finch beelined for her studio and spoke without facing me. “What is there to say, Jo?”
I hesitated in her doorway. My stomach was still uneasy, head pounding with urgency. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t make that.”
“Honestly, I don’t really care, Jo. I don’t care about any of this. But you clearly aren’t okay. You came to my apartment looking like you saw a goddamn ghost or something, cut up and freaked out, and I’m just supposed to pretend everything is normal? Don’t say some bullshit like ‘I’m fine’ to me because I know you. I know you really fucking well. And I’m tired of being lied to.”
She was fuming. Papers and sketches fluttered as she rushed to pile materials, gathering them in her arms.
“What are you doing?” I asked, faltering.
“I’m going to work in my room,” she snapped. “I want to be alone. Is that a problem?”
I rocked back as if hit. “No, of course not. I can just go,” I said.
Finch gave me a scathing look. “Didn’t you already leave once this morning?”
I flinched, eyes betraying me by welling immediately. Her expression softened a little. But she just shook her head before continuing, “I need some space, okay?”
My face must have fallen somewhere deep and irretrievable. She crumpled, fight drooping out of her shoulders and sketches wrinkling in her arms, smearing against her wet jacket.
“I’m sorry,” I tried. I didn’t know what else to say. I needed her to pull me into her again, to press her lips to my temple, to tell me she was sorry, too, that she didn’t mean any of it, that we could figure this out and go somewhere where ritual and resentment couldn’t touch us. I wanted to remember nothing else but the warm brush of her mouth. Her body aligned with mine. The comfort of her reaching for me in her sleep.
“I just need space,” Finch whispered, and she brushed past me, paper fluttering out of her arms and landing on the studio floor.
I caught the hem of her jacket in my fingers. “Wait,” I tried again. Finch’s eyes met mine, shadowed with frustration. She stepped out of my reach.
“Gotta go,” she muttered sadly, like she was sorry for saying it. But I let her leave. And the studio door swung shut behind her with an echoing bang.
I could tell that she wished she hadn’t hurt me. I could tell that she would do it again.
Fuck the studio, and fuck painting. Fuck the rain and fuck my useless heart. In my cubicle I thrust my headphones on to block out Phoebe’s music. Sleet hit the window, caked the sill, fogged the glass until the darkening sky and the lights across campus looked like a ghoulish recreation of a James McNeill Whistler Nocturne , all speckled dots of yellow against blue. Something passed behind me over and over again while I worked at my desk—each time the shape of its body blacked out the light behind me and cast a shadow over my sketches. But when I turned and snapped at it to leave me alone, one headphone pulled away from my ear to listen for feet, I found the doorway empty.
The sketches I made were horrifying things. Pencil lead dug so hard into paper that it tore lines down into the surface of my desk. Graphite smeared all over the side of my hand as I carved out terrible apparitions—the boar on its side, snout parted in a dying exhale. The creature in the glass case. The whorls of Caroline’s hair on the shower wall. I hated them all. I could barely look at them; just finished a drawing before flipping the page and starting another.
The building rage was all-consuming. It took everything in me not to tear every painting I’d ever made into rags. Instead, I crumpled a sketch and ripped it into pieces, staring at the painting of us in the trees, my women hovering between the black trunks like apparitions in the dark.
I always thought they’d made me softer, kinder. Now I felt like a girl that would have killed for them. I wanted to fill with fury, or obsession, or some brutal intertwining of the two. I was afraid that my desire was different. That hunger came out of me like a transfigured heart.
I could see the cracks splintering between us—those awful tendrils spiking away from the dissolution of our perfect five. The poison had to be cut out.
But I was nearly sure that the poison was me.