Chapter 10
Arbor
I know she sees me.
She’s showing a house, trying to convince this couple that having a garden full of incredibly toxic plants will be easy to remove, and I’m buzzing around, getting a bit drunk on them. Not so toxic when you’re made to guzzle down pollen like your mom guzzles cum.
“And there aren’t any other options in town?” The husband is asking.
Aster takes a deep breath and shakes her head. “None that are built on a massive tree like this, up in the clouds, no. I know that was one of your must haves.”
The wife deflates, peering out of the front window.
“What about that nice little cabin on the edge of town with the green roof? I saw a sign in front that it was for sale.” She turns to Aster, who I can see is probably seconds away from throwing her career in the trash because she’s so frustrated.
This couple has taken her entire morning up, blasting her with the same inane questions over and over again, and I don’t think they’re anywhere near ready to make an offer on something.
“That cabin is only a two bedroom. I know it looks charming, but it’s about half the size you were asking for.”
“But it’s in our price range,” the husband argues. “Why won’t you just show it to us? This is ridiculous. We’re paying you all this money to help us find our dream home and you can’t do a simple task like that? Are you even board certified?”
The wife’s eyes light up with manic energy.
“I bet you aren’t. Why don’t you want us to see that house?
What are you trying to hide from us? I will be contacting your manager.
You can’t treat people this way.” She pulls her husband with her and starts to stomp out the front door, and I fly to the windowsill and watch them completely forget they’re up in a massive tree, listening to their screams as they fall to their death.
“Well. At least I don’t need to worry about them anymore,” Aster says as she sinks onto the plastic-covered couch, completely unbothered by the death of her proposed clients.
She glances at me. “I will never understand the physics of how your incredibly large-yet normal-human-sized body can turn into that tiny, itty-bitty thing, Arbor. I also don’t know why I know it’s you, but I do. Does that make me crazy?
“What am I talking about? I'm talking to a honeybee. Of course I'm crazy.”
I buzz around for few minutes, finding a bit of dust on the coffee table the current owners neglected to clean.
I throw myself into it, sort of like a pollen bath made of dust. It’s perfect for rolling around in and making designs.
I carry my little bee self all through it, making a big heart with mine and Aster’s initials in it. Then I shift back.
I grab a vase to strategically place in front of my flower stem region, knowing that Aster prefers me being modest. “You're not crazy. Need to call anybody about them?” I ask, just staring out the window where the bodies fell.
She shrugs. “I had them sign a waiver just to do the showing. They knew the risks. What are you doing here?”
“I'm not allowed to shadow my fiancée while she's working hard? Being a boss lady and kicking ass?”
She rolls her eyes, which is one of my favorite things in the world to make her do. “Roommate, remember? Why aren't you at work?”
“Roommate-fiancée,” I compromise. “Just missed you. It's fun to see you in action. You're all cute in your high heels and your customer service voice. I’m impressed you didn't stab those people; you should let us take you out to dinner as a reward for having such stellar self-control.”
She gets up, stretching briefly before gathering her cute leather briefcase she carries around for work. “I don't think I should be rewarded for not stabbing my clients. Seems like a bad precedent to set.”
“Do you have any more showings today? You've been avoiding us for a few days.”
She doesn’t look straight at me, but one of her eyebrows lift so that’s close enough. “You say avoiding, I say preferring not to acknowledge how weird it is to be living together. You're my brother's friends, wouldn't you rather have him as a roommate?”
I scrunch up my face in disgust. “Anderson? Hell no. Have you seen the way that man lives? It's disgusting. No, he is not allowed to even stay at my place. We set those ground rules up early. Why are you fighting us?”
She gathers up her keys and heads for the door, locking up. I contemplate taking the vase with me so I can stay covered, but she tells me to get over myself and starts the trek down the treehouse, so I figure she's momentarily okay with the nudity.
When we're at the bottom and safely on the ground, she's done gathering her thoughts.
“Alright, maybe I have been avoiding you.
It is weird, but I have other reasons. I found something very interesting in the cabinet with your dishes.
I guess I was nervous to ask you about it?
Didn't know what it meant. Instead of just asking you about it, I kind of flipped out and avoided you. Sorry.”
When we get to her car, she reaches into the back seat for a blanket and puts it down for me, presumably because she doesn't want my bare ass in her seat. That's fair. We sit down and I wrap it over me so that I don't distract her. I would hate to be the reason we get in a car crash.
She reaches into her glove box, her knuckles brushing my knee.
Being in such tight quarters with her makes it hard to focus myself.
I'm hyper aware of her always, but especially when it feels like we're in our own private world, like now.
I can smell her perfume, soft and feminine and sweet, with notes of— “Are you wearing honey perfume?”
She freezes, halfway into the glove box to grab some papers. When she unfreezes, she moves slowly. “I happen to like the scent a lot, okay?”
I smile because I know she's so gone for us. “Okay.” She narrows her eyes at me and then unfolds the paper she's got on the middle console. I know immediately what it is, but whatever. It's the official stationery from the bee shifter headquarters, halfway across the country.
“What is this about?”
“Clearly you read it. You're a smart woman. You know shifters have rules to follow among their own species.”
“It says you have to show up and make an appearance for a mating ceremony to a princess. What the hell is that about? Are you guys like engaged already or something? I don't understand why they want you there.”
There's a dull thud, and then Hawthorne is suddenly in the back seat, cussing and rubbing his head. “Why is the door back here so hard? It's terrible place to shift. We're buying you a new car.”
This seems reasonable to me.
“No! We’re not doing anything of the sort. I should have known you followed me, too. Have you been in here the whole day?”
He pulls out bag of pretzels that were stashed under the seat, ripping them open before he starts shoving them in his mouth. At least he offers us some as well. “Two-fourths of our family was here, so I felt like I should be too. Oh. We still have those papers? I thought we threw those away.”
“Why would you throw them away? Aren't they important?”
I shrug. “Eh. We were just planning on ignoring them indefinitely.”
She reads through the papers again, and it's silent aside from me and Hawthorne munching on pretzels. When she gets to the end, she throws them down in her lap and twists to see us both at the same time. “Now, I'm no lawyer, but I don't think this is the sort of thing you can just ignore.”
Hawthorne sighs, flopping back against the seat. “Yeah, well, they shouldn't get to dictate our life.”
“They want you to come and meet with the princess, because you haven't aligned yourself with a queen yet, is that correct? You're supposed to go and be her little worker bees or something?”
“There's a reason why we live so far from other bee shifters.
Our parents all worked together to get us out of there when we were young.
My parents were the only ones that got permission to leave with us though, which is why Dev and Hawthorne lived with us.
The bee community is not a great place to live if you're a male.
We pretty much exist as disposable resources.
You know in the wild, the females do all the work for the hive, and the men rarely get to leave it?
Their only job is to knock up the queen over and over again.
“When we outlive our usefulness, they get rid of us like actual bees do. With shifters that’s either through a disease that magically infects nearly every male drone when their queen tires of them, or hunger because the females refuse to keep feeding them so they can conserve all the resources for the women and the young, or because the men are thrown out into the world alone to try and make a life for themselves after knowing nothing about the outside world.
No resources, no skills, no nothing to offer anybody.
They usually stay homeless and die anyway. It’s rare to find bee families intact.”
“Well, that’s fucking awful. Why are they contacting you now? Why is this summons just coming to you when you’ve been in Trash Haven your whole life? Did you lose a lottery or something?”
I look to Hawthorne, who looks back at me, and I shrug and crunch on a few more pretzels before answering.
“We’re aligned with our parents until we find a new queen.
The three of us are registered as our own colony, so when my parents died, we lost that protection.
We filed something hoping to stave the bee leadership off, but clearly no one did their homework by looking into it.
We aren’t bothering to answer the summons because we aren’t obligated to. It’s on them that they think we are.”
She sucks in a breath, processing, as she starts backing out of the elaborate wooded driveway. “What happens if you don’t show up on the appointed date?”