Chapter Thirteen #3
The music had switched to something with screeching vocals, and more partygoers crowded themselves into the middle of the living room.
A trio of vampires writhed against one another in a slow, sensual dance; one of them caught David’s eye and raised their eyebrows in invitation, but he shook his head.
He wished he were back in his own room with a cup of tea and some suitable reading material. He’d much prefer a quiet night in and a sensible bedtime over this, and was not altogether sure why he’d allowed Meredith to talk him into coming.
A brief tap on the shoulder brought him back to the reality of his surroundings, and he turned to find Kinley taking a long drag of prophet’s balm while Meredith, slowly exhaling smoke, leaned against him with a dreamy expression. Corpseflower and Mary Alice had departed in the meantime.
Kinley offered the joint to David. Against his better judgment, he accepted it.
“Only if you want to,” said Meredith. He closed his eyes and snuggled contentedly against Kinley, who draped an arm around him and rested his chin atop his head.
David decided that he did.
Though smoking, as usual, sent him into a violent coughing fit that made his eyes water, a few hits were enough for the mild high to set in and dull the sharp edges of his surroundings.
The overwhelming mixture of too-loud music and unintelligible conversation settled into a tolerable background noise, and David was content to lean against the wall and half listen to the conversation between Kinley and Meredith as it drifted in and out of his awareness.
“It’s the principle, man,” said Kinley. “What do I want to hang around a bunch of wealthy elitists for, huh?”
“But you’d be hanging out with me,” protested Meredith. “It might be fun! Besides, it is for a good cause, and it would help David out.”
David blinked at hearing his name and managed a vague sound of acknowledgment.
“Oh, please, won’t you at least think about it?” Meredith fixed Kinley with that irresistible pleading look of his that David was all too familiar with.
“I’ll think about it,” said Kinley grudgingly.
Meredith rose up on his toes to give him a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” muttered Kinley, but wrapped an arm around Meredith’s shoulders and gave him a brief squeeze.
David cleared his throat. “I think the young lady over there is trying to get your attention.” He nodded in her direction.
One of the vampires who’d been trying to catch Meredith’s eye gave a little wave and threw him a kiss, and he waved back.
“David, come dance with us,” urged Meredith, tugging at his sleeve.
David pulled away from his grasp. “I don’t dance.” Then, feeling somehow responsible for Meredith’s crestfallen expression, admitted, “I can’t dance.”
“Oh, neither can I, that don’t matter.”
“Language,” chided David absently.
Something sharp and searching flashed to life in Kinley’s eyes, some question that Meredith seemed to understand without words.
“ ’S all right,” he said softly. “C’mon.” He pulled Kinley after him to join the vampires, leaving David behind.
Alone, he drifted to the kitchen, conscientiously placed his empty beer bottle in the recycling bin, decided against a second drink, and helped himself to a handful of pretzels, avoiding both the prophet’s balm brownies and the shrinking violet cake.
The latter seemed to be a hit, though Meredith hadn’t touched it himself, and David had no intention of doing so, either.
He commandeered a kitchen stool at one end of the counter and spent an indeterminate period of time scrolling aimlessly through house listings and home-design magazines until he’d ended up deep down a rabbit hole of virtual paint swatches and heated debates in online upholstery forums. Perhaps, David mused, he’d have to go and have a look at Ralph’s wares after all.
Though his own taste tended toward quiet neutrals, he had to admit there was something to be said for a touch of color here and there.
In the restroom, David splashed cool water on his face before venturing back out into the main room.
The effects of the false prophet’s balm had already faded considerably, as they tended to do.
He half expected to be met with the unwelcome sight of Meredith still entangled with one or more of the vampires, but, in fact, he was nowhere to be found.
David swore, if he’d gone home with someone and left him without so much as a word—
Kinley was sure to know where he’d run off to, but he, too, had vanished. Perhaps the two of them had stepped out for a cigarette—Kinley was oddly fastidious about not smoking tobacco indoors, even if everything else appeared to be permissible.
David was just reaching for his phone to text Meredith when he spotted Corpseflower and Mary Alice at the edge of the crowd.
The blond woman knelt before the open window to converse on eye level with a group of pixies perched on the windowsill, while her black-clad companion who’d struck out with Meredith gazed around the room with evident boredom.
As she appeared otherwise unengaged, David approached her. “Pardon me, Mrs…. er, Corpseflower, was it? I wondered—”
“I’m Mary Alice,” said the woman flatly, and jerked a thumb toward her friend. “She’s Corpseflower.”
“…right,” said David. “My mistake. I seem to have lost track of my roommate, I don’t suppose you’d have any idea where he’s ended up?”
He received only a wordless glare in response, and then, at last, she pointed toward the kitchen. David thanked her and started back in that direction.
Even before he reached the kitchen, he heard Meredith’s voice from within.
“—asked him to ages ago, I swear it. I just don’t want to s-sound, you know—” he faltered.
“I know,” said Kinley. “Honestly, I’m glad I was misreading it. He seems like a decent dude, but I just wanted to make sure, you feel me?”
David paused, uncertain. Perhaps this was a private conversation—some oblique reference to Meredith’s secret crush? Again, curiosity needled at him, but if Meredith didn’t want to share, it was none of his business (even if Meredith had revealed their identity to Kinley and not to him).
“I know you can take care of yourself,” Kinley went on, “but you know I’ve got your back if you need me, okay?” He glanced up as David strode into the kitchen. “Hey.”
Meredith hopped down from his perch on the edge of the countertop and drifted over to wrap his arms around David; false prophet’s balm always seemed to amplify his tendencies to seek affection. “There you are. I didn’t know where you’d got to and was about to come looking.”
“I think you were a cat in another life,” grumbled David. “You’d be happy as anything among a litter of kittens all piled on top of each other, wouldn’t you?”
Meredith giggled and nuzzled against David’s shoulder. David scratched him gently between the shoulder blades, as he might do to a real cat, and admitted, “I was looking for you, too, as a matter of fact. Thought perhaps you’d gone out to smoke.”
“I haven’t been smoking,” said Meredith. “Not cigarettes, I mean,” he added quickly when David pulled back to look at him in disbelief. “Prophet’s balm, yes, but you’ve no room to talk there.”
David supposed he hadn’t.
—
The moon hung full and silver in the sky by the time the two of them walked home along the dark road. David supposed, as far as parties went, he had no reason to complain—no more than usual, at any rate.
He might grudgingly admit—if only to himself—that perhaps it had done him some good to go out, to allow himself a little indulgence; there was no denying that he felt more relaxed.
Perhaps that was why, as they made their way past the edge of town, David’s mind wandered through snippets of conversation from the past week to Meredith gazing longingly at emerald-green satin and the single frantic kiss between them, how desperately he’d returned it—
David pushed aside that last thought. “Can I ask you something?”
Meredith, who’d been humming quietly to himself in the midst of his own contemplations, said, “Hmm?”
Ordinarily, it was a question serious enough for David to shy away from, but right now, it didn’t seem so daunting. “Wouldn’t want to bring on your, er, allergies, of course, but I realize I’ve never asked, about the dresses and so forth.”
“But, David,” said Meredith, “I’m not wearing a dress.”
“Some of us, Meredith, are capable of thinking of a thing without it being directly in front of us.”
They’d reached the foot of the hill now, not far from the low dark shadow of Mrs. Jupiter’s cottage.
David went on, trying to gather his thoughts as he spoke.
“At first, I thought you were trying to be subversive or punk or something, but that’s not it, is it?
” He’d begun to realize it went beyond that—how far beyond was the question. “It’s…important to you.”
“That’s not a question,” objected Meredith placidly.
“I mean,” David said with an inarticulate wave, “do you want me to call you differently, they or she or something?”
Meredith shook his head, no more concerned than if David had asked his plans for the weekend. “Nah, I don’t think so. I mean, you can try if it’ll make you feel better, I don’t know that I’d mind really.”
“How would it make me feel better?”
Meredith gave a soft laugh. “Come on, David, I know you. You like to go putting everybody in neat little boxes, with labels on.”
“Meredith,” said David sincerely, “nobody could ever fit you into a box. You’re far too…” He gestured, seeking a word, and settled on “expansive.”
“Thank you.”
#88: It wasn’t meant as a compliment.
The two of them walked in silence for a moment before Meredith said, “I just like what I like, is all. Don’t see what’s the big deal about it.
” He gave David a quick sideways glance.
“Only if you’re asking, what am I, in my head—if you want me to put a name to things—s’pose maybe I am a bit of this and a bit of that and a sprinkle of what-have-you, but I mean, in the end, I’m just me, aren’t I? ”
David thought about that for a long time and wasn’t sure that he came any nearer to understanding, but ultimately there was nothing in that statement that he hadn’t already known. “Yes, well, on the off chance that you ever find it does make any difference, you will tell me?”
“Course I will,” said Meredith, and then, softer, “Thanks for asking.”
He wrapped both arms around one of David’s as they walked along.
“You’re clinging.”
“I’m cold.”
Before David could point out that Meredith was always cold, and that it was entirely his own fault for not bothering to wear a proper coat, Meredith had stopped in his tracks, staring into the murky depths of the Midnight Wood. “Did you hear that?”
David hadn’t heard anything and was about to say so when there came, very faintly, a distant sound that an imaginative person might take for a squeak of alarm, the cry of a Midnight Mouse in distress.
David was not an imaginative person. “I’m sure it’s nothing. The wind in the trees, more likely than not.”
Meredith shook his head. “There’s something wrong, I know it.”
Arguing that point would be fruitless, and in any case, Meredith did seem to have an instinct for this sort of thing. Still, David protested, without much conviction, “Anything that lives in the Midnight Wood can surely look after itself.”
“They’re my friends, David,” said Meredith softly. Without waiting for an answer, he started off into the Midnight Wood, and David had no choice but to follow.