Chapter 7
Night Air
Maisie
The ceiling fan clicks on every third rotation.
I’ve been counting.
Eighty-seven clicks since I turned off the lamp.
Eighty-seven clicks during which I have stared at a water stain shaped like Oregon and thought about the fact that there is an eight-foot sentient slime somewhere in my house, and that three hours ago he made me come so hard I forgot my own middle name.
It’s Louise.
I remember now.
I roll over on the couch and pull the sheet up to my chin.
I have a perfectly good bed, but ever since my back started spasming in the middle of the night, I’ve found this couch to be the only place I can sleep.
But tonight, nothing in my body hurts.
It’s strange.
Good-strange.
My body is loose in places that have been rusted shut for months.
My lower back, the spot that seized up in the studio, is a warm hum instead of its usual ice pick.
My shoulders sit where shoulders are supposed to sit, rather than somewhere around my ears.
I press my face into the pillow.
Somewhere beyond the living room, something clicks.
A soft, wet sound, then a mechanical hum.
The refrigerator.
I lie still for another three clicks of the ceiling fan.
Then I push the sheet off and swing my legs over the cushions and stand.
The hallway is dark.
I walk barefoot over cool tile, wearing an oversized shirt that hits mid-thigh specifically because walking around in my underwear while a strange monster explores your kitchen feels like a line I should draw somewhere.
The light from the refrigerator spills across the floor in a pale rectangle, and in front of it, crouched in a shape that is almost but not quite human, Oz is staring at a piece of leftover pizza like it contains the secrets of the universe.
His surface catches the fridge light and refracts it like sunlight moving across water.
He’s holding a pizza slice at eye level, if he had eyes in the traditional sense.
The two luminous patches where eyes would be are fixed on the cheese with the intensity of a jeweler appraising a diamond.
“That’s from last Saturday,” I say, leaning against the doorframe. “It’s not going to get better with scrutiny.”
He doesn’t startle. He simply turns toward me at the speed of honey, and the gold threads on his surface brighten.
“It’s undergone many rapid changes in temperature,” he says. “From the oven, then into the box, then into the refrigerator, it became something different. The fats solidified. The structure reorganized.” He tilts the slice. “Is this still food?”
“Technically.” I cross my arms, then uncross them because the posture feels defensive and I don’t know what I’m defending against.
A slime holding cold pepperoni pizza in my kitchen at one in the morning?
Sure.
“Most people reheat it,” I continue. “Some people eat it cold. It’s a whole personality divide, actually.”
“Which are you?”
“Cold.”
He considers this with the gravity of someone receiving important intelligence.
Then he lowers the pizza back to the shelf, exactly where he found it, and closes the refrigerator door with a gentleness that makes the bottles inside barely clink.
The kitchen goes dark.
Not completely: the moonlight through the window over the sink lays a silver grid across the counter, and Oz himself gives off a faint bioluminescence that shifts with his mood.
Right now he’s all deep teal with those gold threads winding through, and the kitchen looks like the inside of a tide pool at dusk.
I should go back to bed.
I should absolutely go back to bed, because tomorrow starts at five-thirty with a batch of lavender-honey bars that need to be poured before the Verdance labels arrive, and sleep is a resource I can’t afford to waste.
I pull out a chair and sit down at the kitchen table.
“So,” I say. “Do you eat?”
He settles across from me, his form pooling into something chair-shaped against the opposite wall.
The humanoid silhouette softens at the edges, shoulders rounding into curves, legs blending into a broader base. He’s less careful about maintaining the shape when it’s dark.
I wonder if he knows I can still see him.
“I absorb.” He pauses, selecting words with the care of someone who’s learned that the wrong ones get you put back in a box. “Minerals, mostly. Calcium. Trace elements. Your water here has a high mineral content. I absorbed some from your dripping faucet. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. You’re a guest in my house. You can absorb water from my leaky faucet all day.”
He jiggles slightly, it seems in contentment.
We sit for a moment.
The swamp cooler rattles.
A coyote yips somewhere up toward the ridge, and two more answer, their voices braiding together and falling apart.
“Can I ask you something?” I pull one knee up onto the chair, resting my chin on it. “You don’t have to answer.”
“You can ask me anything.”
“In the studio. When you were—” I gesture vaguely at the air between us, which does absolutely no work as a communication tool. “Could you feel that? What I was feeling?”
He goes quiet.
The teal deepens, the gold threads slowing their drift.
“Yes. I felt the release in your body as a kind of warmth. A saturation. The way a dry thing takes on water and changes weight.”
The violet blooms along his edges.
“And I felt something in myself that I don’t have a comparison for. Slimes don’t have a history of language for this.”
“For sex?”
“For being chosen.”
The word lands in my kitchen like a bell struck once and left to ring.
I stare at him across the dark table with my chin on my knee and my hair falling out of its bun and mica still glinting on my forearms, and I feel the full weight of what he just said settle into place alongside everything else I’ve learned about him today.
The storage unit.
The listing nobody clicked on.
“Come here,” I say.
He goes still.
“To the living room. I want to show you something.” I stand up and tilt my head toward the doorway.
He follows me down the short hallway, moving in that eerie silent pour across the tile.
The living room is small and crowded with the evidence of a life run by one person: the couch buried under a quilt my grandmother made, a coffee table stacked with supplier invoices and a half-empty glass of water, a bookshelf that’s sixty percent fragrance references and forty percent romance novels that I’ll only acknowledge under oath if pressed.
I drop onto the couch and pull the quilt into my lap.
Pat the cushion beside me.
Oz hesitates at the threshold.
His form fills the doorway, teal light catching on the frame, and I can see him calculating the geometry of fitting himself onto a piece of furniture designed for a person half his size.
“Sit,” I say.
His form lowers and widens, settling onto the couch beside me in a shape that’s more wave than person.
He fills the cushion and part of the next one, warm and heavy, his surface gleaming faintly in the dark room.
The couch creaks once and accepts him.
I lean back against the quilt and feel the heat of him along my right side.
I tip my head back against the cushion and look at him sideways.
This close, I can see the layers of him, translucent depth upon depth, like looking into colored glass.
The gold threads pulse slowly, almost in time with my breathing.
I reach out and lay my hand flat against his surface.
He goes warm under my palm.
“Is this okay?” I ask.
“It’s okay.” His voice has dropped to something barely above a vibration. “It’s very okay.”
I spread my fingers wider, pressing gently, and feel him give beneath my hand.
Warm and smooth and alive, yielding just enough to let me in before firming around my touch.
My fingertips sink a quarter inch into his surface and I feel his pulse against them, steady and deep.
I trace my hand up his arm.
His surface ripples ahead of my touch, colors chasing my fingers.
“You’re warm,” I say.
His whole body brightens, gold flooding his edges, and I realize that he wants to hear me narrate this.
That my voice describing what I feel is its own form of contact for him.
“You’re always this warm?”
“Not always. My surface responds to—” He stops. The violet deepens. “It responds to touch.”
I curl my fingers against his surface and watch the color follow, a comet tail of gold and violet trailing each point of contact.
My heart is fast and tender and a little terrified.
Outside, the coyotes have gone quiet.
The swamp cooler hums.
The ceiling fan clicks.
I have four hundred and twelve units left to produce.
Less than a month on the deadline.
I have a town full of people who would have opinions about this that I’m in no way prepared to manage.
I lean into him and rest my head against the warm curve of his shoulder.
His body shifts to cradle me, adjusting its density until my head rests in a perfect hollow that fits like it was made for this exact configuration of skull and neck and tired, overthinking brain.
“Stay,” I murmur.
The gold threads pulse once, slow and deep.
“I’m here,” he says.
I close my eyes and feel the warmth of him settle around me like bathwater.
My breathing slows.
His pulse adjusts to match it, or maybe mine adjusts to match his. I can’t tell anymore, and the distinction seems less important than it did an hour ago.
“Oz.”
“Mm.”
“Tomorrow I have to pour four batches of lavender-honey before noon. And label three hundred units. And my shoulder is going to start up again the second I pick up the immersion blender.”
I open my eyes and stare at the ceiling, where a shadow from the window lays a crosshatch of moonlight.
“Can you help? With the production, I mean. Stirring, lifting, whatever. I’ll show you what to do.”
“Yes,” he says.
One word.
Simple and unhesitating, the way he said hello in the studio, the way he said take your time as I was struggling to process his existence.
Like the answer existed before the question.
I pull the quilt up to my chin with my free hand and let my eyes close again.
The numbers are still there behind my lids: four hundred twelve units, twenty-seven days, eighteen dollars in checking until the first Verdance payment clears.
They tick through my mind like the ceiling fan clicks through its rotation, steady and mechanical and impossible to fully silence.
But the couch is warm.
The quilt smells like Gram’s house—cedar and lanolin and the particular dust of the desert that never fully leaves anything, no matter how many times you wash it.
And the body beside me hums with a slow, tidal rhythm that presses against my ribs and says here, here, here with every pulse.
I wonder what Gram would think.
Thank God she’s up north right now.
She winters here, tending her alpacas and selling felted animals at the Saturday market alongside my soaps.
Which means eventually I’ll have to face her.
Eventually she’ll take one keen-eyed look at me and know something’s different, because Gram has always been able to read me like I’m printed in large type.
But she doesn’t usually arrive until later in the year.
I have time.
Time to figure out what this is.
Time to find the words for it, or at least words that don’t sound insane when spoken aloud to a woman who tried to imbue me with scripture and common sense.
I’ll figure this out.
And hopefully figuring this out doesn’t mean having to choose between Oz and my quiet, uneventful life.
I fall asleep between one breath and the next, my hand still resting against his surface, his glow dimming to match the dark.