Ah. Some of the tenseness in my shoulders loosens.
I suppose I will not tear the perpetrators of my wife’s sadness limb from limb then.
A pity.
“What led to the crying?” I ask, swiping a fingertip over the puffy red skin surrounding her eyes.
She winces. “Remember how you said they love me, but they’re fixers?”
I frown. “Yes.”
She waves a hand out in awell there you gosort of gesture.
My frown deepens. “Doyouremember how I also said you’ll no longer have to take on dealing with the fixers in your life on your own?” I ask. “How I said I will be here for you, spreading the burden of their emotional weight across both of our shoulders?”
Her cheek concaves as she bites it. “Yes?”
I stare at her, counting the speckles on her cheeks as I wait for her to elaborate.
She stares back, not elaborating.
Hm.
“We’ll add it to the meeting agenda,” I decide, having counted each of the stars on her skin three times over with still no reply. There are exactly sixteen-and-a-half.
She nods, then flutters her eyelashes at me, the picture of perfectly innocent princess behavior.
I kiss the tip of her nose and grab her hand, leading her to a room that I hold all of my meetings in on the first floor.
Previously, the room held nary but a sad little table and a couple of chairs beneath a singular dangling lightbulb. Previously, I delighted in that aesthetic greatly, and all the more at the strength with which Stryker loathed it.
“I’m not being interrogated,” he’d grumble. “And I don’t appreciate you trying to make me feel like I am.”
My lip twitches at the memory, but softens as I hold the door open to my new-and-improved meeting room for my bride. My heart stutter-steps as she steps inside, jaw dropping at what I’ve spent the morning setting up.
“It’s a library!” she exclaims, eyes alight. “With fairy lights!”
“And all your books,” I show her. “Plus a few others I had lying around.” Or every single book I could find in the house because I didn’t have time to drive to the city to fill up the shelves. As it is, there are only shelves at all because I had somein storage meant for Heidi’s Christmas gift last year—before Basil went and built her an addition to their home full of custom hand-made built-in-bookshelves, the gift-stealing louse. I’d had to pivot, getting her a giant blow-up yeti for her yard instead, but I couldn’t quite part with the sturdy, mahogany slabs I bought.
I found myself grateful for my hoarding today as I hauled them from the shed to hang in the meeting room and further grateful when they covered the entire wall as if they were always meant to be there. After they were hung, I began my search for books, finding Sarelia’s, of course, and Camilla Evergreen’s lexicon as well. I gathered work-related tomes, too—CubeCraft and torture both—then, getting a wee bit desperate to fill space, I grabbed my collection of cookbooks. “Collection” being a generous term, as I own exactly two.
After spacing out the hundred or so books on the wall-to-wall shelves, I went on another hunt, this time for knickknacks and shelf filler. This hunt wasmuchmore fruitful. If there’s one thing I own, it’s an excess of tchotchkes.
Small plants scatter the space, sharing real estate with figurines, gaming awards, framed photos, fancy rocks, candlesticks, LEGO creations, mini hardware buckets, and more. A mish-mash of items, all with a story to tell about my life, proudly sitting for Sarelia’s perusal.
“Did you make this?” she asks, peering at one of the miniature room dioramas nestled between a copy of Camilla Evergreen’sThat Time I Played the Mafia Bossand a wooden chicken figurine I whittled in the style of a Stardew Valley chicken statue.
“The mini rooms are kits I bought online,” I answer. “You get everything in little wooden sheets that you punch out and turn into tiny furniture and decorations.”
“So cool,” she breathes. “They must have taken you hours.”
They did. Hours as well as skin. Cutting the little art prints for the room’s walls is not as simple as one might assume. More than one of the prints boasts the added artistic touch of my blood.
“They took a little while, yes. I did them as I reviewed footage of you writing. It was as if we were working together.” I sigh, wistful for times past. “I thought of them as dates.”
Her skin pinkens as her bottom lip disappears between her teeth.
I stand stock-still as my body demands I take that lip from her teeth and put it betweenmine. Agony slithers over my flesh. Want encapsulates my brain.
