Chapter 10 #2
“Well, okay. Just don’t burn yourself out. And I’m here too. And Ez. We both are. Always,” I smiled at him before plopping my own spoonful of strawberry waffle into my mouth.
“You know I would tell you if I was struggling.” I really hope that’s true.
“I don’t know how you fucking do it, I certainly couldn’t,” I mused.
“You could, and more importantly, you do, like all the time. It’s not easy juggling studying, having a job, and having to help out at home.” For a moment, I could see my own sadness and tiredness reflected at me. Somewhere hidden between forced smiles and glazed-over eyes.
He knew all too well how much Maura being ill was affecting me.
“You have to give yourself a little bit of credit. Add one more thing to the mix and you might internally combust.”
Add one more thing to the mix. I laughed.
It sounded awkward and a little bit off.
Not nearly as happy or carefree as I had envisioned it sounding.
Isaac instinctively narrowed his eyes as if he was reading me the same way I had been reading him only moments ago.
I threw him off by miming an explosion around my head as he shook his.
“On the topic of adding things to my plate,” I started, “do you think I should start dating?”
“Are you really asking me that? Miss love-is-a-four-letter-word.” Isaac huffed out a soft laugh as he looked at me, an amused grin etched across his face.
“I’m willing to admit that I might be too cynical for my own good.
It’s just that a guy from my course asked me to study with him and the way he was looking at me…
” But it wasn’t images of Jude Watlings that pooled into the forefront of my mind.
It was the grumpy demon I now called a roommate.
The one that left me feeling angry and confused, short of breath, and all too pent up in his company.
“He was looking at you like…?” Isaac laughed a little louder. “Like he wanted to fuck you?”
“Ew, don’t say fuck, you’re like my brother.”
“What would you like me to say instead? Ravish? Devour? Make love to?”
“Never mind! How’s Ez?” I asked as if I didn’t get her stream of consciousness in text form at all hours of the day. Today was the third time this week that I’d woken up to around seventeen texts and a five-minute voice note on two strangers she’d made it her personal mission to psychoanalyse.
“We are doing really well. It was hard there for a minute…making time for each other. But we are communicating a lot more. She comes to all my practices, and I’m trying to be more present when we talk. It’s better. We are both trying and I think that’s what counts.”
“Of course it does,” I said gently, staring up at him like a proud parent. “I was scared there for a second…”
“Not that I want to put pressure on you guys. I’ll love you both equally, whatever happens.”
“You’re a good egg, Quincey.” He looked at me seriously. “How are you doing? How’s Maura?”
“She’s doing okay. Some good days, some bad.
She still likes to push herself to prove that she can do things.
I think that’s quite hard for her. Which I completely understand.
Gramps is being a trooper as always.” I let out a shaky breath and take another bite of waffle to give myself something to do.
And it was that look. That look that he gave me, the same one everyone gave me before saying, ‘I hope they get better.’ I don’t know why I hated it but I did.
It felt like they were already writing her off as gone before even being given a chance.
But that wasn’t going to be my grandmother.
Not if I had anything to do with it. I’d spent a couple hours each day in the library scouring for occult texts on demon contracts for ideas on how to proceed.
As expected, there hadn’t been anything pertaining to my specific circumstances in there, but the takeaway overall was that demons were tricky with their wording. So, I had to be too.
“Work’s shit too. Some creep won’t stop coming in. I’m pretty sure he’s figured out my schedule.”
Isaac finally perked up a little. “How creepy are we talking?”
“He put a handful of peanuts in his fucking pocket.”
His brows furrowed as his brain furiously worked to make sense of what I’d just said. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” I settled Isaac with wide, over-exaggerated eyes and let every word roll off my tongue with purposeful pronunciation, “he put a handful of peanuts in his fucking pocket.”
“Like…loose?”
“Yes.”
He stared at me. “That is fucking weird.”
“It is fucking weird!” I threw my hands up, finally feeling validated in my sentiments. “That’s not even the half of it. He wears this suit that’s two sizes too big and puts an entire bottle of gel in his hair every time he leaves the house, I’m sure of it.”
“I’ll make sure they use a good photo if you end up on the news.”
“Nick has pegged him the Boardroom Butcher, so make sure he gets his recognition too,” I groaned before taking a sip of my brain-freeze-inducing Coke float and hoping that, despite our jokes, he really was just an odd man with a poor sense of style.
There was a reason I did not participate in group studying (aside from having a lack of friends).
It was unproductive, one person always ended up doing the majority of the work and the communal spaces in the Cedar Ridge library were always painfully busy.
The one time Esme and I decided to study together, we lasted an hour before discovering we could cast movies from our laptops onto one of the library TVs.
What had started off with good intentions quickly evolved into an afternoon of gloriously awful romcoms. Somewhere between the flirty banter, the airport chases, and the kisses in the rain, our afternoon of studying had quickly disappeared.
That would have been fine, a perfect way to spend an afternoon, in fact, had Caldwell not surprised my course with a pop quiz the following morning in what could only be described as a deliberate act of violence.
Struggled to remember anything other than the endless monologues that were burned into my brain from the previous day.
I’d come away from that test with a C+ and a resolve to never study with anyone again.
Which is why every time Jude glanced down at his phone or drummed his pencils against the table, I silently cursed myself for, once again, being led astray.
By perfectly messy hair and Superman frames no less…
“What are your thoughts on this?” I said, turning a heavy book toward him and tapping at a paragraph in quiet encouragement as if he hadn’t checked out our study session forty-five minutes earlier. “I think it makes some good points.”
He looked up from whatever he was doing on his phone and smiled before shifting to take the passage in. When he didn’t pick up on the point I was trying to make, I pulled the textbook back to myself so I could explain it to him properly.
“The accuracy of divination is wholly dependent on God’s willingness to provide answers rather than any lack of talent on the diviner’s part. Meaning their credentials are boundless and their roles indispensable. Even if they are full of shit.”
“Like a so-called tenured professor then?” Jude asked, and I nodded in agreement, although most tenured positions were founded on years of dedication, hard work, and contribution to whatever vertical being studied.
“Do you think that’s how Caldwell got his job?
Told the university it was God’s will or some shit like that? ”
A few girls on a table opposite us laughed loudly, which caught Jude’s attention, pulling him away from where his eyes had already dropped back down to his phone.
He then turned so he was looking directly at me.
When he didn’t stop staring at me, I let my eyes meet his, moving from where I was, continuing to sprawl notes in a notebook.
“Are you hungry? I’m hungry.”
“Yeah, I’m actually starving but…” I said as I began to write out another sentence, pushing all thoughts of food to the back of my mind so I could focus, instead, on the structure of our essay.
“But?” Jude prompted, before cocking his head toward the hallway that led to the stairs of the library. “Okay, you’re hungry, I’m hungry, let’s go to dinner.”
“We can’t.” I rolled my eyes but didn’t look up from my piece of paper.
“We can, and more importantly, should.”
“We have a paper to finish. Or at least, I have a paper to finish. Can’t you at least pretend to work so it doesn’t look like you just came here to stare at me?” I looked up at him and was greeted by the same cheeky grin he’d worn at the lift the previous week.
“Who said that wasn’t the reason I came, Quincey?”
I had worked it out pretty quickly that Jude hadn’t wanted to be my partner because I was relatively well-read when it came to our major, but more so because he wanted free rein to flirt with me under the guise of productivity.
Even now, I could see Jude working hard to fight the smile tugging at the corner of his lips and the cogs in his brain that whirred, looking for an excuse to justify all these library visits when he seldom did any actual work.
I supposed for the most part I found it flattering.
And he was good-looking. Just insufferably annoying in a charming ‘I know you kind of love it’ way.
I crossed my legs in the chair as I scrawled down a few other sentences relating to omens before the sound of something hard hitting the table pulled me from my thoughts.
The bag of jellybeans was obnoxiously large and filled with pastel coloured globs that were sweet enough to rot my teeth simply by looking at them.
Certainly not my favourite snack, but I appreciated the thought.
“Did you know that diviners had to go to school for years in order to be approved for entrail examination?” I said. He started organising jelly beans into a picture until a candy-bodied stick man lay between us. “Are you going to do any work, or is today a write-off?”
“Oh, come on,” he said, but the grin plastered across his face suggested he felt absolutely no remorse for his lack of participation. “You know, I like it when you get all nerdy. But I like it even more when you get a little stressed. You go all intense. It’s very sexy.”
I blinked and felt as though my brain had malfunctioned for a moment.
The words repeated in my mind again and again, but their meaning continued to evade me as a slight blush crept up my cheeks.
Jude leaned in closer as I continued to blink frantically as if I could find respite from my embarrassment in the momentary darkness when my eyes closed.
When I opened them up properly, I was suddenly more aware of how close we were sitting.
Which was odd because I hadn’t seemed to notice until now.
Where my mind seemed to track each and every one of Thallor’s movements.
Committing every small detail to memory.
Like the time his leg had brushed against mine under my breakfast table, or the moment we both stumbled into the hallway, and for one moment, one singular moment that was still seared to my mind, there was no space between our two bodies.
My mind seemed less fussed about Jude. But maybe that was a good thing.
I wanted something easy. I needed something easy.
Every other aspect of my life was so complicated; if I was going to add dating to the mix, I wanted it to be with someone fun.
I wanted it to be with someone who didn’t infuriate me.
Didn’t roll his eyes at me. Didn’t leave me feeling like I’d stumbled through static every time he walked into a room.
“I’ll make you a deal,” he started. Another one?
“You said that the last time, and I’m not sure if that went very well for me.”
“I’ll do some actual work if you promise to go out with me when we get an A.”
“Go out with you where?”
“There’s this restaurant downtown with terrible cocktails, cheesy music, and string lights.
The acoustics are terrible, and it gets far too busy on the weekend.
But the tables are close together. Very intimate.
I can’t tell if you’d love it or hate it.
” He shrugged as he started to pack his things away.
“But you want to take me anyway?”