14. May #2
“I will pay you an exorbitant amount of money to make him look like a naked mole rat,” Cya said, and Dex narrowed his eyes at them.
“What’s a naked golrath?”
“Mole rat,” half of the group corrected.
“Whatever,” Dex dismissed. “Is it buff?”
Fighting to keep their expression neutral, Cya nodded. “Yes. Very.”
“Alright!” Dex fist-pumped before frowning suspiciously at them again. “Wait a minute…”
As everyone smothered chuckles and smiles, Dex yanked out his phone and typed furiously. When he found what he was looking for, he released a cry of dismay and rounded Cya with wide, horrified eyes.
“This thing’s not buff!” he accused, phone screen filled with search result images. “It’s hairless and disgusting!”
“Oh, my bad,” Cya deadpanned, turning to Rusty. “Seriously, though. Like, so much money.”
“You think Rusty’s loyalty can be bought? He’s better than peppy bribes,” Dex declared confidently as he crossed his thick arms over his chest.
“Petty,” Cya, Zef, and Quin corrected.
Dex ignored them. “We’re practically brothers, forged in the fires of furry adversity. Rusty would never betray our Mammylion bond.”
“How much money?” Rusty asked.
Gasping dramatically, Dex turned his outrage on the Pyclon. “Dude! The Mammylion bond!”
Rusty raised his palms in surrender. “Sorry, man, but you don’t understand the extent of Gem’s credit card debt.” To Cya, he asked, “Seriously, how much?”
With a hair-flip, Cya grinned in haughty satisfaction. “We’ll talk numbers later.”
For most of May, Cya’s parents weren’t around.
They saw them periodically, an evening here, a weekend there, but they usually had the house to themself.
They were accustomed to the quiet, to the solitude.
They spent a lot of time working on their jewelry, experimenting with mixed metals while their rocks tumbled for weeks at a time.
Hemersyn accompanied them to The Pentagram’s annual mineral fair, hosted in Envy. They browsed quartz and topaz, pilfered through obsidian, onyx, and labradorite. They filled their basket with rough agate and jasper and tourmaline.
In the more heavily secured areas, they inspected emeralds and rubies, sapphire and fire opals.
They wasted the whole day, dragging Hemersyn here and there, rambling excitedly about the different classifications and molecular makeups.
He was a good sport through it all, helping them shoulder the many bags they filled with fresh supplies.
As they lunched at one of the many food carts, Cya watched the crowd full of Hellians and humans alike.
Parents carted around children, and couples meandered through stalls, fingers and tails twined.
An Avia couple stood a few feet away, waiting for their food, and they were laughing together, their beaked noses touching sweetly.
Cya took a bite of their wrap, gaze ping-ponging between the couple and Hemersyn. “Why didn’t you ever marry?” they asked as he twirled his fork to capture a glob of wriggling spiced worms on his plate.
With a smirk, he brought the bite to his mouth. “I was married.”
Genuinely shocked, they nearly dropped their wrap. “What? When? Who? You can’t possibly still be married?”
“Think so highly of me, do you?”
“No, that’s not—I just mean, because you’re always with me.”
Chuckling, he swallowed his food and took a sip of his milkshake. “Accurately deduced. We were together for seven years before we separated.”
“Oh.” They took another bite, crunching through crisp vegetables and savory meat. “Did you work for my parents then?”
“No, we were married very young. I was around your age, actually,” he said, and Cya made a face. “It was a different time back then.”
“Back in the Dark Ages,” they teased, and he tutted.
“The cheek on you.”
“Don’t change the subject,” they ordered sternly.
Tossing his empty plate into the bin at the end of the bench, he sighed. “We met in secondary, and we married after her second year of university.”
“Her?” Cya asked, blushing hotly when Hemersyn cocked a feathered brow. “Not that you—I didn’t mean to assume. I just…”
“Assumed?” he asked, and they winced.
“Sorry.”
He chuckled. “I take no offense, and you’re not exactly wrong. Just because I married a woman doesn’t mean I am averse to other options.”
“How very fluid of you,” they praised, and he flicked their cheek with a talon. “So you married in her second year?”
“We did, and for a while, we were very happy.”
“What went wrong?” they asked carefully.
A shadow passed over Hemersyn’s face. “Well, the loss of a child can either strengthen a bond to nearly unbreakable, or it shatters it quite completely. I am sad to report we fell within the latter.”
Slowly, Cya lowered their food to their lap, ignoring the greens that spilled onto their skirt. “You had—”
“A daughter,” he said before they could finish. “Zoe. She was ill, a hereditary mutation. She didn’t make it past her third birthday.”
Unexpected tears sprang to their eyes, and Cya blinked rapidly to clear their vision. “I never knew. Why didn’t you tell me?”
He reached out and hooked their long hair with a talon, securing it behind their ear. “You never asked,” he said, not unkindly, but it landed like buckshot all the same.
No, they had never asked, because they’d never wondered. They’d been so self-centered, so consumed with their own life and miseries that they’d never once considered, well, anyone else. Dex was right; they were a selfish piece of shit.
Allowing their wrap to roll off their lap and into the grass, they reached out and took Hemersyn’s hand in both of theirs. “I’m so sorry.”