17. Chapter Seventeen
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MAVEN
The door slams behind me hard enough to rattle the crappy little mirror next to it, and I stand there with my back pressed against the wood, breathing hard and frantic.
My hands won’t stop shaking.
I hold them up in front of my face and watch, entranced by this fine tremble that starts at my fingertips and works its way down into my wrists.
I keep waiting for the guilt to hit me the way it always does.
That gross, sludgy shame that pools in your gut after you try to do the thing and fail at the thing, because apparently I can’t even manage to die correctly, which is honestly so on brand it would be funny if I weren’t standing here doing my impression of an earthquake.
But the guilt doesn’t come.
That’s the truth that’s freaking me out most, if I’m being honest, because I know that guilt.
I know it like a toxic ex I keep taking back.
It should be here, curling up in my sternum, whispering, ‘You’re so pathetic you couldn’t even die.
’ Instead there’s a loud humming static filling up all the space in my awareness where the shame usually resides, and under the static, one single sentence that I can’t shove down no matter how desperately I want to:
He’s real.
“He’s real,” I repeat out loud to the empty apartment. Can he hear me right now? I don’t know how god powers work, but I wouldn’t think so… “He’s—okay. Okay, he’s real.”
Saying it doesn’t help. No, it makes it worse, actually, because the second the words are in the air I have to deal with the fact that they’re true, and then my knees give into the stress, forcing my body to slide down the door until my ass nestles the cold vinyl.
I’m sitting here in a puddle of my melting sock-snow like a sad little popsicle.
What the fuck do I do now? I have spent the last weeks building this beautiful, airtight case for why I’m losing my mind.
I had theories and a whole ranked list. Number one, I conjured him up because I’m so desperate and embarrassingly lonely that my brain finally cracked and coughed up an imaginary friend—which, tragic.
Number two, ghost.
Number three, the one I refused to acknowledge because it made my stomach do a weird swoop—that he’s exactly what he says he is.
And I can cross off one and two now.
There’s no way I conjured a set of arms strong enough to yank a full-grown woman back off a ledge. Nor did I hallucinate the specific thump of the air getting knocked out of my lungs when I landed on a real, physical chest. Hallucinations do not catch you. They also don’t have tangible jaws.
I touched his jaw. His entire face and…he’s beautiful.
My fingers rise to press against my mouth.
It isn’t the same as touching him, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget that feeling.
The white fabric was there, same as always, and yet when I reached out to touch the draping silk, my hand went through it like it was nothing.
Skin greeted me instead. Warm skin. A hard line of a jaw with the faintest scrape of stubble along its surface, and brows that were thick and low, and a nose—a good nose, a real one that belonged to a face I couldn’t see but suddenly knew.
And a mouth. With a full lower lip. The shape of his mouth is rooted in my hands’ memory.
“That’s not normal,” I inform the puddle of melting snow, my only companion. “That is not a normal thing that a normal person’s hands do.”
The puddle doesn’t respond. Rude.
I press the heels of my palms into my eyes until sparks flicker across the dark expanse in my vision, as I try one more time to be scared.
I’m sitting alone in a dim apartment at whatever ungodly hour this is, freshly informed that the ghost wasn’t lying.
He’s a god from another world who has been following me around for thousands of years.
The appropriate reaction here is to lose it.
Scream, maybe. Call somebody. Except there’s no one other than Dr. Voss, and even if there were, what would I say?
Hi, so, remember how you asked me last week if I was hearing voices and I said no? Small update.
But the scared won’t come either, and it takes me a stupid amount of time sitting here on the freezing floor to understand why.
It’s because it fits.
Fuck, that’s the worst part. It just—it fits.
It clicks into place like the last piece of a puzzle.
He’s telling the truth: I really don’t belong here.
My soul is some borrowed thing shoved into a body that was never meant to hold it and dragged through life after life after life, then—well.
Then maybe there was never anything wrong with me.
The idea swirls around for a second.
Twenty-seven years thinking there must be something wrong with me.
Decades of therapists giving me that soft, careful head-tilt right before they refer me out.
Countless foster families trying really hard for the first three weeks before conjuring excuses to send me somewhere else.
How many times have I stood in the middle of a crowded room feeling like an ugly duckling surrounded by beautiful, normal-looking ones?
I’ve moved nine times in eight years, chasing the sensation of fitting somewhere, and I have never once found it.
Not in any city, and certainly not in anybody’s bed.
This whole time it wasn’t that I’m broken. It’s that I’m in the wrong place. Like a book shelved in the wrong section of a library. Someone could look for that book for years and never find it; all the while it was right there the whole time, just—filed wrong.
I laugh, the sound wet, cracked, and a little hysterical, and I slap a hand over my mouth like there’s anyone around to hear me lose it. “Filed wrong,” I whisper into my palm. “Oh my god. I’m a misfiled library book.”
He tried to tell me this. The man has said as much so many times while preaching about how it’s hard to leave the familiar even when the familiar is killing you.
Each time, I stood there nodding along in my head while simultaneously googling how to make a ghost leave forever on my phone behind my back.
Because I decided he was a liar. Or a symptom.
Anything but real and something I’d actually have to deal with.
Well. Dealing with it now, apparently. From the floor, in a pool of melted snow. How glamorous.
After an underwhelming shower, I throw on a big t-shirt; the soft gray one that’s gone thin at the collar. My bed calls to me, and I crawl into it with my hair dripping wet.
Lying here staring at the ceiling, my brain—my traitor of a brain—decides to ask the question I’ve been dodging.
What if I said yes?
I roll onto my side and pull the scratchy blanket up over my nose. It does little to warm me, but it’s more of a safety net at this point than anything.
Still, what if I did say yes?
I have to choose it, according to him. He can’t take me from this life, scoop me up and haul me off to his weird twilight garden world no matter how much he desires to, because there’s some rule about it.
Some line even a stalking god apparently won’t cross.
Which—I don’t know what to do with the fact that that reassures me.
The possessive, coat-wearing, million-year-old man who called me his on a rooftop will not actually take a single thing I don’t hand him.
It should be terrifying, having such control over someone like that.
Instead, it loosens something in my chest, making me feel warm and stupid.
“You are so easy,” I mutter into the blanket. “One guy saves you from jumping and you fold like a lawn chair.”
I mean, would I even consider him nice? Dedicated, yes, but nice? That’s an answer I have yet to discover.
My face presses harder into the pillow.
It felt good to touch him. That’s the last coherent thought I let myself have before my eyes become too heavy. This small, warm, dangerous little truth that I’ve been ignoring. It felt good.
And maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.