Page 91 of A Fae in Finance
My loss, I didn’t say with biting sarcasm.
“Okay, sorry,” I did say. “I didn’t mean to twist your words.”
Eventually, another month passed. I worked most days, so I didn’t know the difference.
Our buyers list dwindled as more people withdrew from the process, or in one dramatic case emailed Jeff to tell him a series of increasingly creative things he could stick into his own anus, were he so inclined. I wrote some of those suggestions down for future insults.
I went to meals, led the twice-weekly human classes teaching about everyday human monotony, and otherwise stayed in my room.
I answered questions shortly. I stopped picking up phone calls. And slowly, everything became muffled around me.
It was quiet in my head, but I didn’t mind. I worked from eight a.m. until I passed out at night. I traced a path from bedroom to dining hall and back. During the day, I let Lene sleep on my bed while I sat at the computer. Sahir came to my room after dinner and worked next to me, but we rarely spoke anymore. I didn’t have anything to say. Doctor Kitten curled up at my side at night while I slept.
My dreams became more vivid, stranger. Vermilion landscapes where trees grew with mirrored trunks, and I sat cross-legged on the ground watching my face wrinkle like a raisin. The ruins of a hall that looked like it belonged to an Ent, rows of fluted pillars giving way to equally stolid rows of grasping oak.
Once I dreamed of chocolate milk, and the next day, Sahir brought me a plastic bottle of Fairlife. “Humans seem to like this,” he’d said, dropping it carelessly onto the bedspread. I stared at it; I hadn’t had chocolate milk in two decades.
It was delicious.
Sometimes I imagined quitting my job, once I’d won the Princeling’s bargain. I’d call Jeff and let him have every piece of my mind.
“Hi, Jeff, you run-of-the-mill dingbat,” I’d start. It usually degenerated from there.
Time passed, as time always does. It had been eleven weeks since my sojourn to Faerie at the end of August, and I had become, to be blunt, quite depressed.
Chapter 15
In Which the Scenery Changes
Sahir banged on my door. I assumed it was Sahir, even though he usually didn’t knock with violent force, because nobody else visited me in the evenings.
I considered ignoring him. I lay on my back in bed, Doctor Kitten curled in the juncture of my head and neck.
“Get up, lazy human,” Sahir said, unaffectionately. I almost retorted with the timeless gem:I know you are, but what am I?
But Doctor Kitten stuck his nose in my ear and snuffled until I rolled away from him, squeaking. “Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll get up.”
Sahir, apparently listening outside, flung the door open. “Make haste.”
“Your mom should make haste,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.” I heaved myself off the bed and stood up. “What am I making haste for?”
He made a show of looking me up and down. “You look disgusting. When did you last bathe?”
Since he’d seen me last night and not commented on my appearanceorotherwise been remotely insulting, I bristled a bit. “What’s the point of bathing? I’m trapped either way.”
Sahir leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms. “When we go to war and our enemies imprison us, our armies maintain our discipline. We rise early and practice our exercises. We sit quiet and when they torture us, we make no sound.”
I had stooped and stuck my head under the bed, looking for a shoe.
“That sounds terrible,” I said. “And your enemies shouldn’t have imprisoned you in the first place.”
My shoe appeared to have nested in a pile of old shirts covered in cat hair. I fished it out.
“Who should have done what is irrelevant,” he snapped. He sounded close to the end of his tether—I wondered distantly if he’d explode back into a wisteria if I kept pushing him.
