Chapter 10
CASSIEL
The week after Halloween, Cassiel identified two problems.
He stood at the window in his boxers and a t-shirt and breathed until his arms prickled, then closed it, returned to bed, and stared at the ceiling where the fan was not moving, not ticking, and ultimately, not the problem.
The second problem had no tick. What it had was a shoulder blade that wouldn’t release from his ear, a jaw that woke him at three in the morning, and a persistent buzzing behind his breastbone that he couldn’t attribute to caffeine or arrhythmia.
His social obligations had doubled in eight weeks and the effects of that had arrived in bone and nerve.
He tried the numbers. He’d calculated the total weekly hours of social contact, September versus November.
Seventy-three minutes more per week, averaged.
Not dramatic in absolute terms. But seventy-three minutes of interaction with a person whose patterns he was still learning took more out of him than seventy-three minutes of family dinner or Lauren or the shop.
New people required effort, invited or not, and familiar people didn’t.
His body made no distinction between pleasant and unpleasant.
The numbers explained what. They didn’t explain anything else.
On Halloween morning, he’d come into Sparrow late with nothing in the tank, his ring still, his hands inert.
May had been waiting in a striped shirt and a wig for which no charitable description existed, and said nothing.
Sat there across from him, doodling empty checkboxes in a notebook while the espresso machine cycled.
The ring had been still that morning. May had put his hand on Cassiel’s arm and then blamed it on brain damage. All Cassiel had managed to say was ‘okay.’
He hadn’t appreciated the enormity of this until the following week, replaying it at the bench with a pair of needle-nose tweezers in his hand and the Omega’s mainspring still unresolved. May had been quiet for him, despite what he’d said otherwise.
On the first day of November, a text came:
May
Nice Mr ratburn cosplay yesterday btw
Cassiel stared at it for six full seconds. Mr. Ratburn was the name of Arthur’s third-grade teacher, a cartoon rodent man with a green blazer whose primary character trait was ‘strict’ and had notably married another cartoon man a few years ago, to much furor across the country.
And Cassiel was—the comparison was—
The green blazer. He’d been wearing a Spier his little sister knew the hug tolerance (two seconds), and released.
“Happy birthday,” she said. “Your hair-part looks good.”
“Thank you.”
David raised the wine in greeting and meandered away to speak to someone he’d spotted.
Minju had also brought a card—Jaewon’s work. Thick cardstock, markers, a drawing of Cassiel with rectangular glasses he did not wear, and a speech bubble that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY UNCLE CASS I LOVE YOU AND FOXY. Cassiel looked at it longer than he looked at most things.
Lamaria from the shop was talking to one of Lauren’s roommates near the bookshelves.
She’d been at Linden & Pratt a year. Front desk, ran a successful Etsy store selling her illustrations and handmade jewelry that Peter didn’t know about and Cassiel did.
She was wearing a pair of her own earrings tonight, brass wire bent into intricate geometry.
She caught his eye and raised her glass. He raised his back.
Cassiel found his corner, the window seat by the harlequin fireplace, which had lines to both the parlor entrance and the kitchen doorway.
The doorbell rang at 7:40.