That was the only way she could think of it. Tate was a ghost in the room, a third roommate she’d not agreed to. One Ainsley talked around, and the entire prior decade and a half of his life had a pall over it as a result.It would be easier if he were dead.
Ris tried her best to understand.
He felt betrayed. Used and lied to. He felt as if a full decade of his life had cast him at the center of a web of intricately constructed lies, and he trusted less now because of it.
He wasn’t just grieving the loss of the friend he thought he’d known, she understood. He was grieving for the orche’dbeen then, the orc with a close circle he’d trusted implicitly, a version of himself that had disappeared as completely as Tate, one he’d never get back.
You couldn’t ever go home again, and thatwasa concept she understood. And when she was alone, when the room was too quiet and her mind too unoccupied, Ris mourned both the orc she had lost and the version ofherselfthat had existed a year ago as well.
“Look,” the goblin said finally, slipping her glasses back on. “I get it. I understand you don’t have a reference point. I wish I could tell you there was a playbook you could follow along with. A checklist. You know, five stages of grief, nice and neat. But there’s not. I can’t tell you what to expect or how long it will take because grief looks different for everyone. So does healing. It’s complicated and messy, and it takes as long as it takes. We’re shaped by our experiences, right? Your partner is being reshaped right now. Youhelpinghim through his complicated grief is going to be part of that reshaping.”
She nodded, her eyes filling with tears again. She wanted to help him as much as she could, but for the first time in her life, Ris was at a loss on how to manage the situation. There was no SOP she could email out, no existing policy to adhere to, no paperwork she could file to expedite the change in Ainsley.
“We’re almost at time, but this is something worth considering . . . if you’re in this relationship for the long haul, Ris, you’re going to have a point of reference eventually. You might want to dip your toes in the waters of experience before that day comes.”
She was being hasty. She liked the goblin, and it was good to have someone force her into seeing a different perspective.
That had been nearly a week ago; another week to go before her next appointment.Maybe next appointment you should talk about other things. Like why you can’t be alone anymore.
The silence in the apartment was heavier once he was gone. There was an almost imperceptible buzz prickling at the back of her neck, and she followed the hum of it across the living room and down the hall, finding the source in the second bedroom. She smiled, envisioning him in here before he’d left, flicking the switch on his amp. The sound vanished immediately.
She had loved quiet moments, once upon a time ago. She’d loved taking her mat to the roof on warm, sunny mornings,breathing into her poses, relishing being alone inside her body. Now the silence was too quiet, and in the quiet, she couldn’t escape from her own thoughts. It was why she liked keeping busy.
Too busy to overthink the future. Too busy to compare the orc she lived with to the orc she’d first fallen in love with. Too busy to examine why she needed to keep so busy, what scared her so much about silence and empty rooms, in a way they never had before.Maybe you should add another therapy appointment to the month. Keep busy with something genuinely useful.
She missed her friends. It was hard to conceptualize, for she had never been busier. Her life had never been sooccupied, her calendar so full . . . yet she had scarcely felt this alone. Restlessness in her bones, those chafing grains of sand, still there. Still chafing.
They’d talked about how hard it was to make friends as an adult on that very first night they’d met, more than two years earlier, and it never seemed more prescient than it had in the past few months.
A first night together you can never talk about again, because Tate was there, you met at Tate’s bar, you went to Tate’s restaurant. Ris glared at the empty chair across the kitchen, pulling her lasagna and garlic bread from the oven.Fuck you, asshole. If the barkeep ever showed his sharp-toothed face again in her vicinity, she had already vowed to dislocate his jaw with a baseball bat.
Ainsley had told her once that the one thing musicians and artists all had in common was that they were, by and large, terrible friends. Flakes, there for a good time but not to be counted on in anything that constituted not merely a good time.
She was sad to have to burst her boyfriend’s bubble — it wasn’t just musicians and artists. She loved her ballet classmates, her friends at the yoga studio, the nymph she sat with at pottery . . .but not a single one of them had ever been able to follow through on doing something outside the class, even as simple as grabbing coffee.
Ris took her plate to the sofa, settled in with her phone, tablet, and the book she was supposed to be reading for the book club in Cambric Creek, which she still attended. It wasn’t the same without Silva, and she’d been meaning to drop the club for the last several months.
Chewing slowly, Ris contemplated her options. It was the phone she reached for first.
Hey, Mama, just checking in,
I haven’t seen you in like 2 weeks!
You have no idea how much I miss being able to just meet up on a moment’s notice.
Lurielle was pregnant, a surprise to absolutely no one. She knew Orcish pregnancies lasted a bit longer than the common gestation, and Ris wasn’t entirely sure how far along her friend actually was . . . but her role in HR put her in the position to have asmidgemore information than she would possess otherwise, and if Lurielle confided that she’d already been pregnant at her wedding, Ris wouldn’t have been shocked. She’d tried to count backwards from the projected leave time that had been discussed with the engineering team lead, and the math wasn’t mathing.
The phone buzzed, Lurielle’s response coming quickly.
Tell me about it!
I really don’t appreciate you disappearing off to the city
at the EXACT SAME TIME Khash moved in for real
He’s always here!
He never goes home!
