“What if Idowant the answer?”
“You don’t,” Ainsley answered flatly. “You think you do, but then the next chapter is just as depressing as the one you just finished. Trust me, it’s a terrible book. It’s betternotknowing some things.”
"I want to go back to this morning before I got out of bed. Before I knew that you jerk off in the same sink where I brush my teeth."
His laughter was a rumble against her and her eyes closed. His long fingers walked down her spine, his palm settling against her hip. "Tomorrow, you’re not getting out of bed until my tongue has an indent from your clit, I'm going to make you the best breakfast you've ever had, and we can start all over again. And I'm sorry."
She breathed him in, keeping her eyes closed. "I know you are."
He was perfect ninety-eight percent of the time, she thought, her breath evening. Two percent was negligible for such a small vial of sand.
Lurielle
The tick of an invisible clock seemed to follow whatever she went. Morning, noon, and night. It was always there.
When she arose each morning, stumbling out of bed and hastily dressing, leaving her driveway with a breakfast bar held between her teeth and scant minutes to get to work on time, she heard the ticking. She could busy herself at work — they were in the midst of a project that had the whole team involved, necessitating some longer hours and her absolute focus, but there were quiet moments at her desk — checking her email, grabbing a cheap machine-generated coffee from the break room, when she would sit and eat lunch with one of her friends — when the ticking would find her.
Evenings were the worst of it.
She would be alone in her house, making a sad dinner for one or else distracting herself with the gym, or therapy, or pestering Rourke, before climbing into her big, empty bed, staring up at the ceiling as the sound reverberated through the empty hallways. It was a wonder Junie wasn’t bothered by it. The littleterrier would sleep through the noise, oblivious to her mistress’s ticking-induced insomnia.
The worst nights, ironically enough, occurred when he was there, ordering rich take-out and telling her about his day, holding her hand at the garden center that had become their second home, kissing his way down her body until the heat of his tongue became one with the heat between her thighs, hot and solid as a stone beside her as he slept. On those days, the ticking was nearly too much to bear. A heavy reverberation in her skull, vibrating against the back of her eyes and on her tongue, matching the cadence of her heartbeat until she felt as if she were one big moon-faced clock.
Lurielle didn't know how to stop the title wave of despair overtaking her on those nights. She would curl up beside him in their bed, pressing as tightly to his form as she was able, until the warmth of him seemed to seep into her bones. She had begun keeping a pillow, specific for crying, on her side of the bed, small and squishy and utterly worthless as far as performing the actual task of worthwhile lumbar or cervical support, but it absorbed the sound of her sobs brilliantly. She would fold the formless thing in half, burying her face into its soft side and let out all the ticking-induced emotions that had built up within her.
When she was wrung-out enough to sleep, she would slip out of bed as soundlessly as she was able, tiptoeing to the bathroom to splash her face in cold water and blowing her stuffed up nose hard enough that her ears popped. She was exhausted. Lurielle knew the routine was unsustainable, but she didn't know what else to do, didn't know how to escape it, and she wondered if this was what Ris had meant when she’d said some nonsense about grains of sand, several months earlier. She felt as if she were trapped in her head, screaming inside of her skull, and there was no one on earth who could hear her.
For the first time since she had begun therapy, Despina was of no help.
"I'm not typically a fan of doing this, because it's not always helpful to think of things as a net positive or negative, that sort of black and white thinking is something we usually try to avoid, but let's indulge for just a moment.”
She slumped back on the sofa as the sphinx across from her began to enumerate on her long, manicured nails all of the things in Lurielle's life she should have been celebrating.She's right. This is the happiest you've ever been. Ever! Why are you trying to make yourself miserable?
“You’ve already discussed marriage, you seem to be on the same page, even if his timeline is a little laggy for you. You've already discussed your living arrangements. You're keeping your house; you don't need to start from scratch somewhere new. You don't need to figure out how to make his home your home. You've met the family. You've discussed kids. All of this is a sign of a very healthy relationship with good communication. You and Khash are on the same page. You have the same goals; you're working for the same future. Right? You said you both want to get married this year?"
Lurielle nodded, sitting up so that she didn't completely resemble a petulant child.
"Um, yes, I hope so. I don't want a long engagement, and he's fine with that. Planning something is a bit of a problem . . . or at least it will be. Especially this quickly. Most elves . . . well, wedding planning usually starts in infancy. I'm not even kidding!"
Despina had begun to laugh, shaking her head and jotting down a note on the tablet she held.
"That's something your parents start planning before you can walk,” Lurielle went on. “By the time most girls are secondary school-aged, we have the whole wedding planned and paid for.All that's missing at that point is the groom." She slumped back once more, uncaring if she was regressing into her morose teenage self. She didn’t have a wedding binder either. "I don't have any of that. I don't even know where to start with planning. I'm counting on my friends to help me throw something together this year."
"Okay,well," Despina went on with a chuckle, "wedding planning can be its own category of stress, so just keep that in mind as you get started. Start journaling your feelings if you get overwhelmed during the planning phase and we can talk about it. Actually, I’m assigning that as homework. But—" she raised her stylus at Lurielle, peering out from beneath her blunt cut bangs, "flower arrangements and seating charts are not what's keeping you up at night, Lurielle. At least, not yet. Let's try and figure out where this feeling of despair is coming from, okay?"
"I don't need to do any thought exercises or journaling," Lurielle blurted out. Her face felt hot, her throat thick, as if her heart had climbed up into it and was wedged there, filling the space as she struggled to swallow around it. She wondered if Despina could hear it, the reverberation of that ticking. It was so loud that Lurielle could not believe it existed only within herself. "I already know what it is."
She watched as the sphinx leaned forward in her chair, dark eyebrows drawn together in concern at the obvious change in her patient's demeanor.
Lurielle attempted to remind herself that she was an ugly crier. There would be no dainty Silva-like sniffles. Once the waterworks opened, it was like releasing a floodgate. She would splotch red like a tomato, her nose would run, she would be unable to control her sobs, and would be turned out of the therapy office a snotty, drooly, tear-streaked mess, her eyes swollen and her head pounding, left to stagger the streets of Cambric Creek like some sort of poxstricken forest witch, justfinding her way to civilization for the first time.C’mon, you need to go to the pharmacy after this!
"What is it, Lurielle?"
She could not keep the tears from falling then. A year's worth of appointments in this office, and it all seemed so silly now, so trivial. Her weight, her mother, all of it. None of it mattered, not a bit. Not when it was measured up againstthis.
"He's going to die," she choked out, squeezing her eyes tight against the pain of even speaking the words. "He's going to die and I'm going to have to live without him, and I don't think I'm strong enough for that."
She was overtaken by her tears, speaking this terrible thing out loud for the very first time. She hunched in on herself against the pain — it was an inevitability, not even something abstract that she could tell herself might never come to pass. Even if he remained as hale and healthy as he was at that moment, his lifespan was less than half of her own. It was a simple fact, and not something she could simply wish away.
