Chapter Thirty-Five
Thirty-Five
If Only
There was a beer fridge. Aoife stared at it until her vision split and the one beer fridge became two.
More beer. Wonderful. Aoife didn’t want a beer even though it was five o’clock and now socially acceptable.
Drinking one would just remind her of the cocktail Shadach had made her once upon a time.
Her chest tightened and she looked back to her monitor screen.
The open-plan office was suffocating in its exposure, full of doe-eyed, early twenty-somethings ready to change the world.
Infinity Now was the name of the startup.
Aoife was still trying to figure out what they did.
Something related to medicine. But also social media.
The company was in the baby stages and trying to figure out who it wanted to be.
“Aoife, can you review my pull request?” Eoin said. His front teeth were just a little too big for his face, but his smile was always sweet. “I know how much you like ripping apart my code.”
I hate it, in fact. “It’s the best part of my day,” she said.
Aoife wondered if she had created a Shadow, before remembering there were no Shadows here.
“The scary part is she’s not joking,” Eoin said to Cian who was sitting on the other side of Aoife.
Aoife opened Eoin’s pull request and started combing through the C++ code, looking for potential problems or areas she couldn’t understand.
She’d joined Infinity Now a week ago, because she’d been gone for several months in the Kingdom of Shadows and had lost her previous job.
Fortunately, she hadn’t just disappeared.
The Gates had sent everyone important in her life a notice that she would be travelling.
As if the Gates had known she’d be coming back.
Aoife had had a fun little tryst in the Kingdom of Shadows. It had been exciting and wild falling in love with Shadach, but it had all been an illusion of happiness, hadn’t it? The time had come to get back to real life. Aoife took a long drink of coffee then refocused on Eoin’s pull request.
Real life was kind of shite.
~*~
Aoife was drunk. Not nearly as drunk as she wanted to be, but at least she was drunk.
“Lemme get this straight,” Eimear threw back a mouthful of Panther Passion Cocktail, “you went to a whole-ass other world?”
“The Kingdom of Shadows.” Aoife laughed at the silliness of the name, at how ridiculous it sounded, as she also drank a Panther Passion Cocktail. Eimear had been ecstatic about her drink choice.
“But I thought you went travelling.”
“To the Kingdom of Shadows.”
“I can’t tell if you’re messing or if I should call psychiatric services.”
Neither could Aoife. “His name was Shadach,” she said.
And out poured a tale so absurd Aoife began to convince herself it hadn’t been real at all.
That she had gone travelling, seen a few tigers, forgotten to take photos.
She began to really believe that Shadach and the Kingdom of Shadows had only been a nightmare.
For, in the end, the story had been about her worst fears being realised.
That she could not be trusted with her own life.
Her own choices. The worst of her mistakes had been not leaving Shadach sooner.
“Wait,” Eimear reached into the purple tub of Cadbury Heroes on the coffee table and pulled out a yellow-wrapped chocolate, “I still don’t understand what happened with yer man. Shadach?”
“He dumped me, I told you. Because he’d realised I was planning to leave. But I had to.” Aoife’s voice sounded like she was begging. She wasn’t sure if she was begging herself or Eimear. “I wasn’t going to do it before he stopped Aristen. I’m not a monster.”
“Right.” Eimear unwrapped her caramel chocolate and chewed on it thoughtfully. “Why did you have to leave him? He sounded like an x-rated fairytale prince.”
Aoife sighed, trying not to be frustrated. Hadn’t Eimear been listening? “Because we were a terrible idea, everyone thought so. It would have ended badly anyway and what business did I have being Empress?”
“What business does anyone have being an empress?” Eimear laughed. “It’s not like people actually deserve to be kings and queens.”
“But nobody even wanted me as their Empress.”
“Shadach did.”
Eimear’s words struck Aoife like a knife to her heart.
“But also,” Eimear continued, “why was it definitely going to end badly? It sounds like it didn’t end badly until you decided it was going to.”
“No.” Aoife set her cocktail on the table. Eimear wasn’t getting it. She wasn’t listening. “Everyone thought it was a bad idea.”
“So? ‘Everyone’ can feck off.”
“You don’t … whenever I don’t listen to everyone else, it ends badly.”
Eimear hesitated. “What?”
So Aoife told her. The teapot. Karate vs ballet. Her career. Everything. Others could see her life more clearly than she could. They were always right in the end.
Eimear unwrapped another Cadbury’s chocolate, the movement slow and methodical. “When was the last time you chose something you wanted and saw it through? Was it seriously when you were eight?”
Aoife hesitated. “Well … maybe … but if I had done the things that I had wanted, like ballet, then—”
“Then maybe you would’ve been an amazing dancer. Or if you’d done art in college maybe you would have an art career. Maybe not, but you only know the outcome of the choice you made. Who’s to say what could have happened?”
But … the teapot. The teapot and Mum’s laughter and—
“And for that art competition,” Eimear said, as if reading Aoife’s thoughts, “your mam’s a cow. Sorry, but she is. If you’d taken some pottery lessons, practiced some more, who’s to say you wouldn’t have won the next competition?”
Aoife had the distinct sensation of being submerged in ice water. “But that was art. That was something silly. This was my life, my future. It was too big of a risk to ignore everyone.”
“I mean, don’t be an idiot, don’t jump into bed with a lad who’s a walking red flag, but that doesn’t sound like yer man.” Eimear reached out, putting her hand over Aoife’s. “Love is always a risk. If it wasn’t, everyone would have it. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking.”
A cold, violent claw gripped Aoife’s heart, the fear that Eimear was right gripping her with a loathsome terror. What if Aoife had ruined everything by refusing to take a chance? What if she’d been doing it wrong this whole time by refusing to trust herself?
Aoife felt her body falling deeper into the sofa.
Drowning. There had been moment after moment in recent memory of Aoife trusting herself and it working out right.
Going through the Gates, meeting Shadach, allowing herself to fall in love with art again, falling for Shadach, trusting Hallus in order to see Lord Patin, loving Shadach.
Granted, she had nearly died on that second-to-last one, but it had still been the key to them succeeding.
Why had she decided every one of those things meant nothing?
That people like Kesra, like Hallus, like Mum ought to have the final say?
She’d relied on Mum her whole life to tell her who she ought to be.
In her family, Aoife had always been the different one, the artist one, the right-brain one.
They’d told her so many times she was wrong that she believed it by default.
But what if that wasn’t true? What might have happened if she’d been brave enough to take a chance?
What if she’d been bold enough to tell the voices she’d listened to since childhood to, finally, shut up?
Aoife pulled her knees to her chest, her stomach feeling like it was made of rocks. If only she’d listened to her desire and not her fear, she might still have the love of her life.
If only.
If only.
If only.
~*~
One day later
“Desire, my desire. Come to me and light the fire …”
The Gates did not answer.
~*~
Two days later
“Desire, my desire. Come to me and light the fire …”
The Gates did not answer.
~*~
Three days later
“Desire, my desire. Come to me and light the fire …”
The Gates did not answer.
~*~
One week later
“Desire, my desire. Come to me and light the fire …”
The Gates did not answer.
~*~
One month later
“Desire, my desire. Come to me and light the fire …”
The Gates did not answer.
~*~
Aoife threw herself onto her sofa. “I’m never going to find happiness again and I’m going to die alone.”
“Stop that, yes you will.” Eimear handed Aoife a Blueberry Rush cocktail in a can. It was the latest gourmet cocktail at Lidl. “Find happiness again, I mean. Not die alone. When are you handing in your notice at work?”
“Not yet.” Aoife sighed, taking the cocktail and pouring it into a glass. “I need the money, but I’m looking for something different. More flexible so I have at least a little time to sculpt.” Working for a startup trying to make it big didn’t exactly lend itself to hobbies, let alone passions.
“How’s the sculpting class?” Eimear crashed onto the sofa, a bit of her cocktail spilling.
Aoife smiled, the gesture filtering warmth through her whole body. “I love it, it’s the one good thing in my life. Other than you of course.” Eimear gave Aoife a wink. “I can’t believe I waited this long to get into sculpting.”
“Better late than never.” Eimear raised her glass in a “cheers.” Aoife met Eimear’s glass with her own. After a moment of silence, Eimear said, “No word from the Gates?”
Aoife shook her head, the warmth replaced with a chilly sadness. “I don’t think they give second chances.”
“That’s bullshit. Here, try again. This is where we were last time, maybe it will work if we repeat everything exactly.”
“We already tried that. Ten different times.”
“But it’s been a month. Surely the Gates can’t stay mad at you forever?”
“Oh, I think they can.” Aoife sat back into the limp sofa pillows. Trying not to admit to herself that she was sulking.
“Just try again.”
“Eimear—”
“Come on. What’s the harm?”
The harm was Aoife getting her hopes up again only to have them shattered.
Again. But Eimear wasn’t going to take “no” for an answer.
With a sigh, Aoife said the words. She had said them so many times in the past month that there was no risk of her ever forgetting them. Not even after a hundred years.
Aoife waited, holding her breath. Nothing happened. She sank deeper into the pillows, drowning her sorrows in Blueberry Rush.
“Oh, come on!” Eimear shouted into the air. “Stop being a little bitch, she knows she fucked it up. Can’t you see how hard she’s trying to make it right?”
“Eimear,” Aoife sighed, “I don’t think the Gates are going to show up because you call them a bitch and—”
The scent of sulphur and fresh rain.
Bars that shimmered like a stained glass window.
The Gates.