16. Too Many Hands
Chapter sixteen
Too Many Hands
Lorelei
I’ve been trying to take my makeup off for twenty minutes.
The makeup isn’t the problem. Every time I lift the cotton pad toward my face, I catch sight of my phone on the bed, put the pad down, and read the same four threads without answering any of them.
Rafe: you good? you went quiet
Ash: drove past your building. didn’t stop. just wanted you to know I thought about it
Cassian hasn’t sent anything. He never texts first. The last message in our thread is mine from three days ago, and I haven’t reopened it because I don’t remember exactly what I said and would prefer to continue living that way.
Nico: I meant what I said about the questions. Ask me one sometime. I’ll answer honestly, which is rarer than you’d think.
I set the phone facedown on my comforter and pick up the cotton pad again. One eye is still fully done, and the other has a gray smear beneath it. I look like a before-and-after picture where neither side recommends the product.
I’m sober tonight, and that matters more than it should. There’s no flower fog to blame and no coke making every thought move too fast to catch, just me, my own pulse, and a feeling that has been building for days without giving me a chemical excuse to hand it off to.
I want them.
All four of them.
The problem starts when I try to decide whether one of those wants is supposed to cancel the others.
Apparently three months in this house have trained me to assume everything ends in selection. Someone gets chosen, somebody gets crossed out, and everybody else is expected to treat the result like proof the system worked.
Rafe should be easiest to put first because he’s the answer that costs me the least to admit.
His sweater is balled up at the foot of my bed despite his deeply unsuccessful campaign to reclaim it, and before the Offering swallowed everything, he gave me one ordinary night in my apartment where we ate bad soup pretending to be pasta sauce and watched a detective arrest the wrong man.
Then I think about Ash, and the ranking lasts less than a minute.
Rafe is movement, but Ash has weight. He sits inside me like something that has been there longer than either of us knows what to do with, turning small things into evidence I collect against my better judgment: the way he locks the car doors as soon as I get in, the way he can make control look so much like care that sometimes I don’t know which one I’m responding to.
Cassian should be the easiest to eliminate and somehow isn’t.
I have the best case against him. He is bound to the system built to consume me, handles truth so carefully that honesty sometimes looks like a lie arranged beautifully enough to pass inspection, and stood in that circular room while doctrine made what happened to me sound sacred.
I want him anyway.
Apparently desire is not on speaking terms with my ethics committee.
Nico should barely belong in the argument.
We’ve had one conversation beside a dead fireplace.
That should not be enough to put him in the same category as men who have been stitched into the last several months of my life, except I keep remembering the way he asked what I liked and waited for me to answer.
No correction. No rescue. No deciding I had taken too long.
I am apparently hungry enough to be asked and then actually heard that one conversation did more damage than it had any right to.
I carry the used cotton pads to the bathroom because I need to move. My reflection follows me in the mirror: half-clean face, hair wrapped badly, Rafe’s old T-shirt hanging off one shoulder because apparently I’ve progressed from stealing his sweaters to occupying his entire wardrobe.
Maybe there are explanations for all of them. Ash could be unfinished business with a seat belt. Cassian could be trauma with a nice jaw. Nico could be novelty. Rafe could be familiarity dressed up as safety.
The explanations sound plausible until I test them.
Making one desire smaller doesn’t make any of the others feel more true.
That is probably the part I’ve been avoiding.
They aren’t four applicants fighting for the same position.
This house runs on rankings. The Reaping ranks girls, the circuit ranks drivers, fathers rank their sons and call the damage motivation, and the Offering put me in the middle of a room and turned desire into a contest the house could record, witness, and seal.
My body has apparently decided it is not interested in cooperating.
That doesn’t mean the men have to cooperate either.
The thought lands harder than I expect.
Wanting all four of them does not mean I get all four of them. If I ever ask for something beyond wanting, they get to answer for themselves, and some of those answers could be no.
I hate that possibility.
I also feel something unclench around it.
Desire isn’t a contract.
Lark would probably laugh at me for taking this so seriously. Lark exists specifically so she doesn’t have to sit under bad bathroom lighting and ask herself what anything means.
I’m not Lark tonight.
I’m Lorelei, sober enough to understand that freedom apparently comes with the deeply inconvenient requirement of having conversations with people who may not want the same things I do.
I go back to bed and open my Notes app instead of my messages, mostly because it is the only place I can think of that nobody in this house has asked to inspect yet.
I type four names.
Rafe. Ash. Cassian. Nico.
For a few seconds I consider numbering them.
Then I don’t.
The names look better without hierarchy attached to them. Four separate truths in the same note, none required to erase the others just because the house would find that arrangement untidy.
I close the note.
The messages remain unanswered, and that feels fine for tonight.
Ash can survive not knowing whether I’m impressed that he managed to make driving past my building sound both romantic and mildly threatening.
Rafe will probably ask if I’m good again tomorrow.
Cassian can continue his personal war against initiating text conversations.
I turn the phone over one last time.
Nico’s message is still there.
Ask me one sometime.
I stare at it until the screen goes dark.