I Wish

Chapter 27

I walked back inside and Ivy didn’t follow me. As soon as I was back indoors, I put a hand over my mouth and tried my best to not make a sound. I was going to cry, and to hell with letting that happen anywhere that she’s going to hear it. I refused to wave that kind of sign that Ivy had in some way won, not while I was this furious. Not that I knew exactly why I was this furious, I mean I knew, but this felt like too far. It felt unreasonable. Was I scared? Was this how I dealt with being scared because that’s a problem. One I’m not comfortable with, at all. Whatever the answer to that was, I did know what else I was afraid of. I was looking right at it. There was a long hallway from one end to the other, and a suite. One side of the hallway had a door that went upstairs and out, the other direction went down and into the castle. I stood facing the one that went down the tower, my hand reached out inches from the handle and completely frozen. What if it was locked? What did I do? How would I cope? I’m ashamed to say that a couple of tears slid silently down my face, and I felt the need for a tissue, before I let my hand drop and stalked away from the door altogether. I couldn’t do it. 

“s**t,” I cussed, with the world's most suppressed hiccup. I kind of just wanted to crawl into the gorgeous bed and go to sleep, hoping to god that I don’t still feel like this when I woke up. I didn’t because I felt like a terrible person, and violent to boot, and thus I didn’t deserve it. I stretched out on one of the thick rugs coating the stone floor, and stared up at the ceiling. My whole body still thudded in time with my pulse, heavy with the promise that if I just went up there and threw the first hit, it would stop. It would just stop, and completely go away. I didn’t move. Not when the rug stopped helping against the stone floor, or when various parts of my body went numb. Not even when the sunset came, and I was still exactly where I started. I did not move, until Ivy came back. 

“Hey,” she said, knocking on the door softly. I tilted my head to look at her tiredly, and didn’t really respond. Eventually, the anger had melted away, and the hollow emptiness it left in its wake made it seem like everything was slow, and far away. “Can we talk?” she asked, and I sighed.

“Until what?” I responded bitterly, “I go mental, and decide to hack up my emotions all over you and make you leave again? Because that’s always worked so well for us. I think it’s time to admit that we’re toxic.” She slowly walked to sit next to me crossed legged on the floor, and maybe that was another reason that I didn’t suspect she was a queen. She was far too casual. To at ease while, at least to Lady Nia’s thoughts, she lowbrow it and took me on a date at the local dive. At least that was what it had sounded like, listening to Nia describe it. I’d thought Ivy’s story about the rulers was sweet, though, so I guess it didn’t matter what the opinions of the Spring court were.

“You could always stop sending me away, and act like an adult,” she replied scornfully. If she thought that she was the adult in this situation, and that wasn't to imply that I was perfect either, then she was sorely mistaken.

“We’re not happy now. We’re not going to be happy if we stop trying, and really that’s all I want out of this situation,” I retorted in a monotone voice, “For you and I to be some kind of happy.” She blew out a passive-aggressive sigh.

“Then stop fighting it so hard,” she seethed, sounding out each syllable as if it was going to help me understand how to do that any better than I already did. 

“I’m sorry. I’m doing the best that I can. I was normal, before I met you,” I told her with quite a tone of my own, “Actually that’s a lie. Everything was normal, and then almost two years ago they went and broke the world. Do you have any idea how wild it is to talk to someone, in person, that I don’t already live with? That I don’t have to strap on a mask to cover my nose and mouth while I stand one point five metres away to talk to? Everything was already so messed up, and then I get this on top of all that?”

“What’s your point, that I’m too hard? You’re exhausted thinking about it, so now you won’t even try?” she asked bitingly, “I thought you understood how this works.”

“No, I used to be able to read how other people dreamed this would go.  I used to be able to read about some place where everything that was wrong with the world now never happened, and go places when really I was trapped in that house,” I explained tiredly and shifting the barest amounts, “You deserve better than to be my way out, into a place where none of that matters. You deserve to be something someone was privileged to be with, not because of what you can do for them, but because they get to have you out of the deal.” That was clearly hard for her to hear. Her face fell, and the expression on her face was reminiscent of someone unexpectedly realising that they were sucking on a lemon. A rotten lemon. 

“I’ll take it anyway,” she said, and her voice was floaty and far away. Like she was having some kind of silent panic attack,, and I was still too numb to be able to do much more than twitch a toe in response. My scepticism about her words was high, and visually apparent, judging by the way that she felt the need to expand on that. “I’m serious. I’ll take it anyway, I can work with that,” she promised, “I just…”

“Madness, death,” I finished, remembering her earlier claim, “I know. What do you want out of this? What is it going to take to get to the kind of life that you imagine?” She looked startled, like she’d thought that I wasn’t even going to give her an opinion, let alone a vote. The stung, but I couldn’t argue that I didn’t deserve it.

“I want to go to sleep with you at night, and wake up with you in the morning. I want to drag you around every square inch of this place until you find something that makes you happy. Together or separate, I want you to find something worth filling your days with, and be a team. You and me against all comers, until either live happily ever after or we have to ‘Thelma and Louise’ it.” I’d heard of Thelma and Louise, but I’d never seen the movie. What struck me as odd was the part where Ivy had used them as an example, she’d made it clear that human pop-culture? It wasn’t high on her list of priorities. My stupid heart was flip-flopping in my chest ridiculously enough that I didn’t think on it too hard, and it started to return feeling to my extremities. 

“Okay, so you’ve been surprisingly honest with me,” I said, and I was pretty sure about that but the dirty look she had thrown me had me scrambling to amend that, “I mean it isn’t like you have a lot of choice, but you could have kept your mouth shut if you really didn’t want to tell me something. So now I’m going to be honest with you. If I didn’t know the difference between magical conviction and genuine, this would have sounded really awesome.” Her face scrunched up even further.

“There’s a difference?” she says, and as genuine as the question is, it doesn’t sound like she wants to believe me. It was a shame, the facts weren’t going to change just because Ivy didn’t like them.

“I made a decision off my own back based on the choice I thought was right. It felt different. I didn’t have to convince myself of it. I didn’t have to weigh up the pro’s and con’s, and skew things to make it seem more reasonable. It didn’t feel like I was back into a corner,” I struggled to explain, “This… it’s a starter, and it doesn’t… it doesn’t feel the same. If we don’t put the work in, it doesn’t matter how magical the bond is. We’re just going to fall apart anyway.” 

“So… just… just jump,” she struggled to find the right words to explain what she wanted to say, “Just give it your best shot, and maybe we’ll crash and burn, but we have to try. The alternative is to stay like this, running this cycle for the rest of forever.” I closed my eyes for a moment, and it was my turn to scrunch my face up. That sounded horrible, and it was enough to make me want to promise that I would try. I didn’t, that would have been a cop out. A safety net that said I only had to try as much as I wanted to. 

“My family matters,” I said finally, “I can’t, and won’t just abandon them. No matter how good life here is, or how happy I could be, or how many places or people I could see. They matter, but if you can remember, then let go and do whatever you have planned.”

“Are we going to talk about the way I murdered Isaac?” she asked after freezing for a moment. I blinked.

“You get so many points just for admitting it was murder, but no,” I told her, almost amused. Hysterically so, but still. “That was terrifying, I seem to be surprisingly okay with it, and I’m not dealing with that now.” She nodded, as if she could understand that, and held her arm out to me.

“Dinner?” she offered, letting the subject lie. I was starving, so that sounded great. I couldn’t remember the last time I ate. In all of this it slipped my notice that she hadn’t actually made any promises, and really in the great scheme of things it wasn’t what I had to worry about. Ivy was about to get sneaky, and I was too damn dumb to realise what she was going to pull until long after she’d gotten away with it.