Page 9 of Bottoms Up
I swallowed hard around the lump in my throat.
“I did the right thing. I know that. But I keep wondering… what if I hadn’t? What if I’d waited a day? What if there was a way to get rid of the necklaceafter?”
Kirsten didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.
“I was still turning it over in my mind when I thought about Mount Doom, wondering if there really wasn’t a way to destroyit, or whether I was just being told there wasn’t, and then I had this idea. What if I bought twenty pounds of gold, melted the coin into it, and then had all that gold plated onto silver pieces that looked like the coin? Plenty of people saw it on me on the red carpet. No doubt I’d be able to sell them all and send them out so they’re widely distributed around the planet — would that dilute it enough it was no longer sentient? Or would there suddenly be thousands of sentient necklaces?”
I blew out a breath. “Once there was a possibility of destroying it, there was never really a decision anymore.”
“The decision was still there,” Kirsten said quietly, and then grinned. “But you’ve got titanium morals, inconvenient as hell, but you walked away from something that mattered because it wasn’t just about what you wanted. It was about what’s right.”
I didn’t move. Didn’t look away.
“It was a real choice,” she added. “Which means the grief is real, too. Don’t sweep it away. Acknowledge it.”
That cracked something open in my chest, and my eyes watered.Fuck.
“It doesn’t matter how theoretical it was,” she went on. “You let yourself want it, and now it’s gone. A future you started to imagine and then had to burn down.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat and breathed through the ache in my heart.
Kirsten gave me a small smile, a sad one. “It’s okay to grieve a version of yourself you never got to be. That’s not selfish; it’s human.” She reached across the table and touched my hand. “You’ve dealt with worse, and I feel certain you have the tools for this, but give yourself time.”
She was right. I’d had less than a day to get my hopes up. It hurt, knowing I couldn’t have kids, but no one ever promised life would be fair, and only children and idiots lament about the shit life throws at you rather than just dealing with it and moving on.
“Yeah. Okay. You’re right. A nice session with the heavy bag at the Beast Mansion, letting my inner child rail about life not being fair, and I’ll be fine. The grief is real, and you’re right about me having to acknowledge it. So thanks for that.”
I took a drink of my beer and continued the story from where I derailed it. “Mordecai told me a sentient necklace that could read my mind and teleport would never let me do it, but then he started talking about how it’d originally been a torc, and I guess he got some ideas of his own that he didn’t share with me, and managed to keep from the necklace.”
She nodded. “It’s apparently best I don’t know what he did, at least for now. I’m guessing he’ll tell me in Alfheim or on Olympus, eventually.”
“Olympus.” I shook my head. “It’s almost too much. Has Freya ever come looking for her necklace?”
“No, but I ran into someone else who had it a couple of centuries, once. She’s nice, and we’re… if not friends, friendly, at least. Acquaintances, I suppose. You’re right, it’s way too much, there being an actual Olympus where the once-worshiped gods-of-old now live, but it’s reality.” She tilted her head a tiny bit. “So, there’s no way for them to harvest sperm from you, if you want to father kids?”
“I have pussy lips instead of balls, basically, and I’m not actually upset about that. I’m pretty happy having both a vaj and a dick. If I want to be a parent, I’ll adopt. I’m not interested in it right now, and maybe I’ll never be, but if I decide I want to be, I will.”
“But the loss is there.”
It was a statement, not a question, but I had to answer it, regardless.
“It is, and I’m sure it’ll come up again and catch me off guard when I least expect it, but like you said — I’ve dealt with worse, and I have the tools to deal with this.” I blew out a breathand shook my head. “Mordecai did the right thing. He told me I was the current chosen caretaker, so it was my call. I could’ve stopped him. Or, I assume he’d have stopped if I’d told him to. I got that vibe from him the whole time.”
Hell, he’d even asked me for some silver to put into it, just to make sure the damned thing remains my fucking responsibility.
“Yeah. He has all these moral lines in the sand. Sometimes it’s frustrating, but I respect that he’s intent on doing the right thing, even when it’d be easier not to. Did you get enough sleep?”
“More than enough.” I walked my dishes to the sink, rinsed them, and put them into the dishwasher. “Does your Shifù not know about dishwashers?”
“He lives where there isn’t electricity. He probably knows about them, but he believes in keeping life simple.”
“There’s this song Hailey wrote, and I guess she originally wrote it about how much she missed the warmth of the sun on her skin, and then she changed the wording enough so it sounded like she broke up with someone who’d been her sunshine, and she missed them.”
She turned and looked at me without comment, so I finished with my question. “I tried to write about Alfheim without naming it — just about different worlds, but I couldn’t.”
“She took an oath, like you, when she was young, so she’d know about her stepbrother and could help him if she thought he was losing control, or get herself to safety if she couldn’t help him. When she was turned, that oath was burned off. Or, that’s what I’m told happens. At that point, shapeshifters and vampires follow the rules because if they don’t, they’re either killed or enslaved, and it’s usually the latter. There are much worse things than death. So, she could write the song, but she probably ran it by someone in power before she released it. Or, maybe she didn’t, if she was certain it was safe.”
“So, a vampire could go on TV and tellThe Secret?”
