I Wish

Chapter 43

It has to be said, before we go absolutely any further, that Kaede is a f*****g creep. And yes, I find the swearing to be the appropriate punctuation for the occasion. He lurked. Like, just stayed on the fringe of the crowds around us and circled around wherever we went. As if we were prey. Turns out that I was perfectly capable of wanting to rip his face off with my teeth when not on Nim, or involuntarily high outta my mind. There was just something about him that made me want to unalive him. It was unnaturally intense, and I didn’t even care. I hated him that much, and it threw something out there that I hadn’t really paid attention to. I hadn’t actually hated anyone before. Oh I know that I had strong opinions, and huge feelings about things, with zero hesitancy about making it known. I’ve disliked things so intensely that I thought it was hate, but it wasn’t and I knew that now because it wasn’t this. I hated Kaede.

“Surely someone’s tried to murder him before?” I asked Ivy in exasperation, whispering it into her ear as we were pressed together on the dancefloor once again. She giggled again, but this time it sounded hollow. Defeated, and it told me that she at least felt that the idea had merit. Good, it might be scary hating someone this badly if I was doing it alone. At least now I knew I wasn’t crazy for having such a strong negative reaction for someone. Once is a coincidence, twice is a pattern. Pattern says this guy’s an asshole.

“Oh people try all the time, unfortunately as you can see success has not yet been found,” she sighed pouting adorably and squeezing me in some attempt to seek comfort, “The don’t get a chance to try again, but it pretty much a guarantee that there's always someone lining up to give it a go.” It made me feel better that Ivy and I weren’t the only ones to experience uncontrollable murderous rage when he opened his mouth. Actually amend that, he didn’t even have to even open his mouth. The smug look on his face taunted us from where he leaned against one of the pillars. Eyes burned as he stared, making no bones about how intently he was observing us. 

Now this whole tea party wasn’t as bad as Nim, a lack of drugs equating to altitude helped, but this thing ran for a full three days. I’m not kidding, and it wasn’t like we didn’t get tired, it was like we were just having too much fun to stop. The best way I can think to describe it is staying up until six in the morning with your best friend during a sleepover. Your eyes are burning, your words are slurring, and every part of your body has been insisting that you go to bed for hours already. Something about the stupidly early hours of the morning is magical though. You have conversations you wouldn’t by the light of day, and the ones that you would suddenly feel more meaningful. Little snippets of life you put away on a shelf to remind you of when you were young and wild. There was a persistent nagging voice that said five minutes more. You can sleep later, the opportunity to make memories like this might not come around again.

So we danced, and we drank. Giving up on alcohol quite early on the first day was a nasty shock. It left me wondering how many things I had seen while I’d been under the influence that weren’t hallucinations. I felt drunk, people were surrounded by colours and my eyes were telling my brain I was seeing things that they shut down immediately. There was a reality at play here, and I couldn’t see it properly but the longer I stayed the more my brain twisted so that I could. 

“Hey, how come my brain hasn’t melted out of my ears already?” I’d asked her sometime during the second night. I wasn’t sure when the thought occurred to me, or when I’d decided to say it out loud, but during neither occasion did I show the right amount of concern that I should about it. Actually if you looked back from an outside perspective, I could have been asking about the weather. Ivy was a little more worried than I was though, so it was fine. She froze, looking both distinctly guilty and panicked at the question, and nibbled on her bottom lip as she tried to figure out how to reply to that. An action that was never not going to fill me with the urge to give it a go myself. The lip biting, I had the guilt-panic down perfectly fine thank you very much.

“Because I’ve been working really incredibly hard not to let that happen,” she replied evenly, “It’s not like I have to figure it out as I go along. Enough humans have moved here that we know how to take care of them while they transition over.” I knew I should have shut up then and there, but we were lying on the grass off to the side. Cuddled against a garden bed of thornless roses of all things, and that was just cheating on her part. I was far too comfortable to censor myself, and that was a bad habit that I was going to have to get rid of at all costs. Ivy would run with it for all it was worth, and I really couldn’t be affording for her to do that all the time. I also really had to stop asking questions if I wasn’t a hundred percent sure that I wanted to hear the answer.

“How many of them die?” I pondered aloud in a strange, empty, voice. Once I’d asked the question I wanted to stuff it back into my mouth. I didn’t want to know the answer to that, and as the music filled the lull in conversation and the chattering of other people in the distance highlighted the fact that neither of us were speaking I gratefully realised that Ivy wasn’t going to answer me. This silence in the face of a truth that I was betting that I wasn’t prepared to deal with was just daunting. In the background glints of Kaede blonde hair peeked through the crowd circling us still. Damn it… I couldn’t even tell what was a survival instinct anymore and what was the threat of him. Although I couldn’t put my finger on just what it was that threat was, it was just very obvious that it was there.

It was in the grass we ended up again when everything was considered over and done with. Exhausted, breathless, and filled with some kind of inescapable joy. There were a myriad of reasons for this. We’d danced, until our feet bleed, and our legs could no longer support us. There was nothing to drink anymore, and I’m not talking now we’re non-alcoholic. I mean oh s**t, there isn’t even water left. Liquid of any kind has run empty. The food is gone. All of the food, and that was just one great big how?! Finally even the musicians had fallened. The whole lot of us were lying in one great big spread out wave of near unconsciousness on the lawn. Forming in the spaces between tables, and piling together in groups on the dance floor in a messy tangle of limbs. So many heartbeats were thundering so fast and so loudly that the air around us hummed, and you could feel it vibrating off your skin. Tiny giggles bubbled up and started escaping my mouth, which was stretched so wide in a smile that it ached. The sky was empty ,and wasn’t that something? To think that I knew it had been full of people, even if I couldn’t remember it now or even picture it anymore. It was gone now but I knew it had happened, was true, and that… right at this moment was everything.

“Did you have fun?” Ivy murmured into my hair, sounding absolutely and completely content. I was draped across her torso, like a particularly stubborn grumpy cat that has decided that we were going to snuggle now, with her arms wrapped possessively around my waist. It was nice, there probably should have been some sort of outrage about that, but I was just too tired… and let's face it, comfortable, to be bothered with it. No bothers were given, no bothers at all… and now I was Winnie the Pooh delirious. Sleep. Sleep was definitely a priority here.

“Yeah,” I said, humming, and nuzzling deeper into her shoulder, “Are you sure it’s safe to sleep here when Kaede is so close.” She shifted incrementally to block me from his gaze. Well that’s not comforting. That isn’t comforting at all.

“He’s not going to get physical,” she admitted, but she didn’t sound sure, “One day he’s going to get magical, and it’s going to be the reason that he’s so terrified of you.” See now there were plenty of things that I knew I was forgetting, but that I was going to remember. This, although there was a great deal I didn’t understand about it, was helpful. She said going to be, not I think and not could be. Going to be. That mattered, even if I couldn’t put the pieces together as to why.

“He doesn't seem scared of me,” I say in disappointment, and I would have scoffed if I had the energy. Why would he be afraid of me? He was a Fae King? What could I do in the face of that? Other than keep Ivy from him, and intended to do that at all costs. Even if we didn’t work out she didn’t deserve that.

“Trust me,” Ivy promised with a peculiar amount of vindictive glee, “He is.”