I Wish

Chapter 5

Because I – I didn’t even finish the thought and rejected the very idea, for reasons I wasn’t even consciously aware of. “No,” I told her flatly, “It’s a nice thought, but people wish for things all the time. It doesn’t mean that they come true.” Her eyes gleamed, a glowing leafy green shinning with pride. A smirk on her red-red lips that I acknowledged that I was going to be thinking about for a long, long time. My heart fluttered, hammering against my chest as if there were some kind of bird in there.

“No. They aren’t being listened to. You are. There are lines of people listening for you,” she said, very much satisfied with herself, “But I got to you first.” My first instinct was to compliment her, which was just odd. She was crazy, and this was creepy. Snap out of it, this was not flattering. Except it kind of was though.

“Well that’s just wrong, even if they did come true, there are plenty of people around more interesting than I am,” I stated the obvious, trying to buy myself some more time to figure out exactly what I wanted to say about all of this.

“Not to me,” she told me, and it struck me like lightning as she said it that honestly I believed her. Great. More information that I didn’t know what to do with. Wonderful.

“What would you even want with me?” I asked, stalling to prolong the amount of time before the inevitable argument about the validity of a wish occurred. It couldn’t be real, and if it was… I didn’t want to think about how I might be forced to consider the possibility of literally everything that had happened so far being a firm part of reality.

“I need you Little One,” she said gently, “You need me too. That’s why you got so sick. You were too far away. You should be okay now, as long as you don’t try to shut yourself away. We need to spend as much time together as we can.” And you’re nuts, was my internal counter, but I didn’t want to tell her that. There was a wonder in her tone in that last sentence, as if she couldn’t quite believe it, like she couldn’t want for anything more, and it spooked me because I didn’t know her. The wind whistled through the trees.

“I was sick, there wasn’t a cosmic magical reason for it,” I explained with the frustration just pouring out of me in exasperated waves. She laughed. I didn’t. Crossing my arms over my chest, because I didn’t think it was funny.

“That’s what you think,” she says, ushering us to take a seat on the grass. I couldn’t tell if it was a statement or a question, or why I sat down next to her, “You have to admit that it wasn’t like anything you’d ever experienced before,” she pressed with something I couldn’t place buzzing low in her tone, “Keep being contradictory, and there will only be more consequences. It will just keep happening, getting worse the more you fight.”

“Says you,” I refute, because this was just too much information that made no sense being thrown at me. I couldn’t deal with it, and what was more, I didn’t want to.

“I do,” she confirmed with a sad sigh. There was a startling lack of negative emotion being expressed by me right now. I know myself well enough that I should be freaking out, raging and storming. None of this was happening with my consent. All of it disrupted my world view, f**k you very much, and I knew myself well enough to know that I should have been really angry. I just couldn’t hold on to it. Have you ever tried to hate a situation, when you can’t even manage to stay angry at it? Justified anger in my opinion, but others might disagree. I waited for her to speak, and she didn’t. She just seemed happy to sit there and stare at me, as if just being there with me on its own was enough for her. Say she did get me all the way out here somehow. There wasn’t a lot to want from it.

“Wishes aren’t real,” I said finally when the silence had stretched on as far as I could bear it, “Be careful what you wish for is just something little old ladies tell their grandchildren. They don’t matter.”

“Then why did people know to say it?” she argued, although there was nothing in her tone that would lead a person to believe that she was being argumentative at all. She spoke as if she were delivering some great and terrible secret. I didn’t have an answer for that, and her follow-up comment didn’t help. “Ideas that aren’t important don’t survive for that long unless they matter,” she said wistfully, leaning towards me and I because I was aware of how incredibly close she was.

“Say you’re right. How, exactly, how did what I wished for equal up to you?” I asked, done with debating it.

“Are you saying that I’m not interesting?” she quipped, throwing a mock offended look that was so adorable that some strange fizzing fluttering feeling sparked in my stomach. Interesting, that was one way to put it. I buried my fingers in the thick grass, and began fiddling with it. “How unkind Little One,” she teased. Nope.

“Will you stop short-shaming me? I’m fun sized, it doesn’t mean I need it rubbed in by you and all your leggy…” I trailed off, because as I waved my hand to indicate her legs it registered how each word I could think of to put after that one were all complementary and from the way she looked at me, smirk firmly returned, she knew it. A blush rose on my cheeks and I would have covered them if it wasn’t for the fact that it would have made it more obvious. Why didn’t I wear make-up when I needed it?

“You’re a tiny treasure, and I adore you,” she said fondly.

“You can’t adore me, you don’t know me,” I said, blowing out a loud exhale of air as a possum rustled around somewhere close by before turning my attention back to her incredibly offended, “And I am not tiny.” That made her laugh, and I pouted. Why did I want to laugh with her every time she did? It felt downright unnatural not to.

“If not a Little One, or Tiny Treasure, then what?” she asked as she held her hands up, as if to offer some kind of truce. Nine times out of ten, speaking out of anger only comes back to bite you. This was not the tenth time out of those nine.

“Sienna, my name is Sienna and I’m not your anything,” I threw back, throwing up my hands, and then froze with them still extended to the sky. The bad thing was, I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d just done. The good news was that I knew enough to know it wasn’t good. She just smiled triumphantly, as if somewhere in the background someone had just announced her flawless victory.

“Well you’re half right,” she said in a conquering hiss with a joyfully bright smile that was all teeth, “You gave me your name, now I own you, and you were mine before any of that even occurred. No, you’re not my anything. You are my everything, and I’m going to be yours.” It was a promise, and I didn’t have a chance to reply, or even think about it. Her hand reached to touch my face with absolutely no compunctions about doing so and slid behind my neck, fingertips fiddling with the baby hairs there before she pulled me forward and brushed her mouth against mine. Zip. Electricity crackled so deep that if a storm started, and lightning rained down from the heavens, I wouldn’t even have noticed, let alone be surprised. Her lips slid over mine in heated closed-mouth kisses that left me almost boneless to an embarrassing degree. Warm, safe, home, and the echo of the word mine in my ears as if all was right in the world. I could feel the vibrations from the contented hum she let out, and it was that everything she was talking about, while my pulse raced so fast it might actually stop.

Well, f**k a duck.