Page 30 of Odder Still
I don’t give up, slipping beneath his arm and leaning across his lap.
His laughter grows. He prods me in the stomach with his knee, and I shove down his leg with my own, practically climbing over him. My fingers brush the whiskey. Before I can steal it, his cane finds me right between the ribs.
I cave with a groan, plopping back onto the ground at his side. “I’ve been dismantled, I’m afeared.”
“Bested by a bureaucrat!” Tavish manages to poke me with his cane a second time.
I steal it from him with a quick twist. “I propose a trade! Your weapon for my whiskey.”
“It’s an aid,” he corrects me, his smile lopsided and gorgeous.
“So’s mine.” I accent the claim with a middle finger to the gods. And as I do, I realize they have already damned me, because I feel as though I’ve fallen through every barrier that should be keeping Tavish and me apart, and with the easy joy that fills his face, I can’t even find it in me to be worried. Right now, his friendship is worth its future loss. It’s worth being lonely again someday, in order to not feel alone with him right now.
“How so?” His bright voice bears a weight that would make gravity jealous. “I mean that with all sincerity. I’d like to understand.”
Each syllable pinches in my chest. I could sidestep the question or laugh it off. I could pretend that the person everyone else sees is a full being beneath the skin, that there isn’t a dying fragment of me that the brighter parts of life drown in. It would be safer.
I tip my head back, the ends of my braids coiling in the grass, and close my eyes. The weight of Tavish’s attention settles over me like a heavy blanket. But he doesn’t speak, only sits beside me, warm and real and listening.
“I have melancholia. Or I suppose the new term is depression?” The words bundle in my throat, barely forcing themselves forward, but once they’re out, the rest follows easily. “It isn’t your usual grief or trauma—it doesn’t go away when the stresses of life ease up, just keeps coming back and back again in what seems like entirely random cycles. It turns my useful emotions to ash and sucks away my energy until some days I have to pick and choose what’s worth using myself up for. The alcohol doesn’t remove it, but it coats it in—I don’t know—a film, I suppose. Rainbows and elation.”
My nerves flicker. It’s a light feeling, somewhere between happy and empty, like I’m suddenly made of helium. I turn my gaze to the cats, unable to make myself watch Tavish’s reaction.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, his tone marring a sigh with the peeking of the sun through rain clouds. “That sounds challenging, and highly uncomfortable. If there is anything I can do to help you with it, you’ll tell me, won’t you?”
The tension that binds my heart to my body settles, smoothing me back into place. This must be what friendship feels like. “I will. Thank you.”
He hums and his lips part, a curl of his hair tickling one corner. “If you let me pour you a glass of the whiskey, you can havethat.”
“You’re murdering my aesthetic, Tavish,” I grumble, as though the bottle somehow turns my apron, bathrobe, and fishnet gloves into a functioning ensemble.
“My dear fellow, I intend only to plague it for the night.” Tavish takes a swig from the bottle before digging out one of the whiskey glasses Sheona had tucked into the basket. He fills it so slowly I can’t decide if he’s in more danger of underpouring or not hearing it overflow.
“You know, I did put some aside for you, back in your room. I was considerate.”
“A true saint.” He hands over a crystalline cup filled perfectly to the highest whiskey line.
I watch him. The light from the ceiling casts silver ripples across half his face while leaving the other half in shadow. It’s like the picture of him in my head come to life: part gorgeous and part haunting, an enigma of compassion and wit and anxiety. I draw my fingers up and down his cane. “How do you do all of this?”
He pauses from his drink, the bottle pressed gently to his lips. “All of what?”
“Pour whiskey and move around the city and be a public ambassador?”
“The same way anyone else might, only a little different.” He sips his whiskey. “At this point, I have a map of the city carved into my bones—the upper districts, anyway—and no one in Maraheem would deny me directions if I needed them. The drink pouring is just sheer practice, but I read with braille, and my aids make the world a bit more accessible. I perceive a contrast between light and dark, too, which can help.”
I try to imagine growing up with my hands and ears as my only practical means of taking in the world. My heart lurches. I would miss the way the first plumes of fog roll across the water. No touch or rhythm could ever replicate its dance. “Is that why the bed’s so low? Some kind of aid?”
Tavish laughs. “It’s low because my shite sleeping habits used to roll me off it. Smacked my damn nose into the ground enough times to give up. That could happen to a sighted person just as easy.”
I turn toward him. “Am I being rude?”
He lifts his whiskey toward me. “I think you’re being drunk.”
I clank my cup against his bottle, harder than I intend, my arms moving in fluid lunges when I mean them to be small sways. “Fuck.”
He jolts, laughing, and takes a swig so long he could almost rival me. “I’ll be drunk, too, in a few minutes.”
“Lightweight,” I tease.
