Chapter Twenty-Nine • Cooked • Lillith
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My mother’s journals sit on my nightstand, where they’ve sat for close to a week. I continue to stare at them and not do much else. I haven’t really eaten. Haven’t checked my phone. Haven’t showered or opened the shop.
Wren and Damien told me when they got back about the journals, but I don’t know how to process the fact that something killed my mother.
I don’t know if I want to read the journals of the woman who birthed me and left me.
I don’t know if I want to risk the chance that they’ll humanize her—that they’ll make her a person and not just a phantom figment of abandonment and loneliness.
I just got through grieving Nan. Going through that again so soon would wreck me. Tear me apart on a cellular level. Unmake me.
I feel hollow.
Weight settles in behind me. Warm arms wrap around me. A soft kiss behind my ear. Warmth where there was once only cold.
“Can we get you out of bed today?” Damien asks. “Please, sweetheart. We don’t have to read the journals. But let’s get out of bed and find something to eat for you.”
I keep thinking that I’ve run out of tears, but more come.
My voice is craggy with disuse. “I’m not hungry.”
“Yeah, you are,” Damien says, kissing behind my ear again.
“You can’t tell that you are, because you’re sad.
But I promise you that you are. And Wren, and Buttstink and the guys...
They’re all worried about you. And I’m worried.
I don’t wanna suck my own cock here, but I think I might be the most worried. ”
I sniffle and Damien cranes his neck up to see the path of my tears and wipes them away with calloused fingers.
“I don’t want it,” I say. “I don’t want to rewrite my mom.”
“No one expects you to do that, Lillith,” he says.
“If I read it, I’ll have to face it.”
“You’re facing it either way,” he says. “All that changes is how informed you are.”
“I hate this. I hate all of it,” I say through bitter tears.
“I know.” He combs his fingers through my hair, brushing it back behind my ear. And kissing my temple. “And that’s why we’re just going to focus on getting out of bed and getting something to eat. Alright?”
This isn’t the first tactic he’s tried. Day one, he brought Wren and Bastion over to try and help me convalesce.
After a couple days, he tried to dom me out of bed.
That backfired. I absolutely lost my shit on him.
Screaming, crying. I think I even accidentally broke a few glasses in the kitchen with my magic.
Yesterday, he cleaned up whatever I’d broken, and, afterward, he just lay with me in bed all day long, holding me in silence until he kissed my forehead and told me he had to go to practice.
I feel like we’re going through the five stages of grief together, only his is over the girlfriend he had before. I’m in ‘anger’, and now he’s ‘bargaining’. I wonder what ‘acceptance’ is going to look like.
Maybe it will be him giving up on me and leaving me to bed rot until I die.
It’s probably what I deserve. A little fidgeting movement catches my eye, and I look down to see Damien spinning the protective ring I made him around his thumb—catch it on the same arm that wound up with the red band around its wrist. I remember that Damien and I are entwined in far more ways than one, and it shifts something inside of me, opens a window to let a little fresh air in.
“I’m right here, baby. I’m not going anywhere,” he says, right on time. Right when I’m reminding myself of it. The surreal tilt of the world flattens out by a few degrees. And I feel something tangible and real for the first time after being outside of my body for a couple of days.
“I don’t feel good,” I say.
“I bet,” Damien says, brushing his fingertips through my hair.
“No, I... I mean I don’t know if I can get myself out of bed,” I say.
“Ah,” he says. “Could I help you with that?”
I think about it for a few moments and then finally nod. “Okay,” I say.
“Yeah?” he asks, carefully, like he can’t believe it. “We’re getting out of bed?”
“Yeah,” I croak. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he says.
He gets up and circles around the bed until he’s standing in front of me.
“Up we go,” he says, lifting me without even an exhale of exertion.
He carries me to the couch and kneels in front of me after setting me down on it.
His two-toned eyes search mine as he waits a few moments, holding me upright—holding me steady.
“Any auras?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“Alright,” he says before pulling out his cell phone and handing it to me. It’s already playing Practical Magic. For the first time in almost a week, my lips curve with a smile. “You watch this. I’m going to make you some breakfast.”
I sink into the couch and let the comfort of the familiar movie bring me back to life a little bit more.
After a while, Damien sits next to me, giving me a pumpkin muffin, the top separated from the bottom, both with generous pads of butter that melt on the warmed pastry.
There’s also a bowl of berries and cut peaches, and a bit of cheese cut into cute little triangles and arranged like sunrays around a single raspberry.
Nothing too heavy, nothing too hot, but also nothing too healthy.
The appetite I claimed I didn’t have just a few moments ago suddenly returns, my mouth watering as I pick up the top of the muffin and sink my teeth into it.
Little bits of streusel crunch between my teeth as I focus on the satisfying texture of the dense pastry.
When I let out a contented sigh, I think I hear Damien release a sigh of his own.
A sigh of relief. He pulls my head to his lips and gives me a lingering kiss right above my ear.
“I’m sorry,” I say again after I swallow.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he says. “I just worried that I made a mistake in bringing home the bombshell I did. I just... I know nothing is perfect, but I’m so relieved to see you at least eating something.”
“Pumpkin muffins are my weakness,” I say.
He chuckles and kisses the side of my head again, like he can’t help but show the affection. “Yeah?” he asks. “Mine too. I asked Roxie to make these. They’re obnoxiously good at baking, and I knew I couldn’t bring some sort of Starbucks bullshit to the best cook alive.”
“Now you’re just kissing my ass,” I say as I take another bite, relishing the pleasant texture of a walnut coated in a sugary, streusel topping.
“I can kiss other parts too,” he teases. “If that would help.”
The flirtation comes out tentative and gentle. Like he’s not sure he should be making jokes like that quite yet. Like he’s doing his best to meet me where I’m at. I love him for that. I love him so much.
My lips curve again despite the way my insides have been tied in knots for the last almost-week. “Oh, I’m very aware of what you can do,” I say.
His eyes warm with hesitant hope. It makes me feel guilty. It’s been hard to take myself out of my own crisis of identity, but now that Damien is carefully extracting me from it, my empathy centers are coming back online, and I’m seeing the last few days through his eyes.
Coming home with complicated news about your partner’s estranged parent.
Doing your best to keep her together while she’s spiraling until she eventually cries herself into a semi-catatonic state.
Trial and error to try and get her out of said semi-catatonic state, only to have her crack and lose it on you.
I can’t seem to swallow the bite I’m chewing past the lump in my throat.
“I’ve been fucking awful to you,” I say as tears blur my vision.
“Hey, that’s alright,” he says, bracketing my face in his hands and wiping my tears away with his thumbs. “That’s okay. I’m your boyfriend, if I can’t take a little rough handling when the earth is cracking under your feet, then I don’t deserve you. That’s what I’m here for.”
“That’s not what you’re here for. You’re not here to be my punching bag,” I say.
“Listen to me,” he says, his voice slipping into something a little more dominant—a little more intense.
It’s lighter than his attempt a couple days ago, though.
Testing. “Needing a few days to process information like this is not the same as treating me like a punching bag. Lillith, your mental health struggles are not an assault on my person. Requiring care is not the same thing as abusing someone.”
I sniffle, a few more tears falling onto my cheeks. “I—It’s not?” I ask.
His brow crumples as he brushes more tears away and tucks my hair behind my ears. “No, baby. Of course it isn’t,” he says. “And fuck whoever in your life who made you feel like it is.”
My mind flickers to Nan, and my heart cracks in half all over again.
The...There were very few times she didn’t get fed up with my moods.
It occurs to me that reading my Mother’s journals might provide even more context for Nan’s quiet brand of impatience.
It occurs to me that my view of Nan might change even more. And not necessarily for the better.
I heave out a sigh and lean into Damien. He doesn’t miss a beat, immediately wrapping me up in his warm, strong arms.
“I need to read the journals,” I say softly. “But I feel so overwhelmed. There are three of them and they’re all packed with writing. I should have just talked to her ages ago.”
“It will feel like that for a while,” he says. “But it won’t always. Remember, she cast a spell so you didn’t think to look for her. And that’s not your fault.
“As for doing all that reading... I’ve actually been talking to Wren and Bastion about all of that.”
“You have?”
He tucks my head under his chin and nods once.
“Yeah. We’ve been trying to figure out how to help you out.
I’m usually fucking useless, of course, with no magic.
But I did mention that maybe we could split up the reading for you—give you some spark notes until you’re ready to read them with your own eyes. ”
I blink against his chest, tilting my chin up just as he leans back to look down at me.