Page 118 of Wickedly Ever After
The fern sat on the stand, curled up into a brown, miserable ball in its pot. She stared at it sadly, trying not to remember how it had reached for her. She wanted to ask Hector if it was dead entirely, or if somehow, with enough care and fertilizer, it might come back from the roots. Then she saw Tinbit. He sat by thefire, naked except for a towel over his shoulders. It was warm in the room. She could smell him.
She glanced at Hector.
“The scent of decomposition will wear off,” he said. “The first few days are the worst.”
“Hari’s not with you, is he?” Tinbit said in a rusty, disused voice. “If he is, I’m not speaking to either of you.”
“Hari’s not with us,” Ida said.
Tinbit turned.
Ida tried not to gag.
His face looked melted. The skin hung limp and sallow over his cheekbones. His eyebrows overshadowed most of his eyes, and they weren’t filled with life but shrunken and dried up. His face slumped as he glared at her. Dismally, he tried to push it back up. “Yes, I know I look bad,” he said. “Why do you think I didn’t want to see him?”
Ida glanced at Hector again.
“It…should be better in a few days,” he said. “The longer between death and resurrection, the longer it takes the skin to go back to normal and—”
“You should’ve left me dead,” Tinbit growled.
“I couldn’t do that,” Hector said. “I owed you an explanation—”
“You could’ve explained it to my corpse!” He rubbed his slack face angrily. It oozed raw and red about the mouth and chin, like a scab. “He won’t want this. And I don’t want him to see it.”
Ida set her hand on Tinbit’s rotten one. “But he wants to see you. He has something he needs to say to you.”
“I don’t want to hear it. I don’t care anymore. Tell him deathruined my brain. Tell him I can’t remember him. Tell him not to care.”
“But hedoescare,” Ida said. “He’s waiting outside.”
“I don’t want to see him!”
“Tinbit, he won’t go, not without talking to you first.”
“Please, Tinbit,” Hector said. “I think you should see him. If you don’t want him to stay after that, I know he’ll go, but talk to him, please. I want you to.”
“Why should I do anything for you when you’ve done this to me? Leave, Hector. I only wanted to talk to Ida.”
“Very well.” Hector nodded to Ida before he left Tinbit and stepped out the door.
Tinbit stood and dropped the towel around his waist. She didn’t look down—the rest was surely as bad as his face. “You have to tell him for me. I want him to understand why I can’t be with him. This has to end here. And then I want you to take away his memories of me with a potion. Hector says he won’t do it.”
“What makes you think I will?”
“Because you love him. You don’t want him hurt either.”
She closed her eyes. “Tinbit—”
“Look at me!” Tinbit yelled. “Look at this! You don’t want this for him anymore than I do! I’m a rotting corpse—stinking, fallen apart, incapable of being the man he loved. The man he thought he loved.”
“Tinbit, he doesn’t care about that—”
“Icare! I don’t want to talk to him!”
Ida folded her arms over her chest. “I’ll make a deal with you, Tinbit. I’ll do what you ask—but only if you listen to him first and only if he wants the same. But he won’t. He loves you.”
“He can’t love this!” The corner of Tinbit’s mouth crackedand bled, a black stream running over his too-scarlet lip. He reached up and touched it gingerly. “How could anyone love this?”
