“I take it there's no bedroom here?” she asked with a sigh. “No bed either?”
“Do you need a bed to sleep?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
I didn’t remember the last time I slept in a bed, definitely not since I’d gotten this chair. But she wasn’t me. If she needed a bed, however, I didn’t have one to give her.
“There is no bed,” I said. “And there won’t be one for a while. You’ll have to make do with what’s in here.”
“This rug?” She grimaced, but there was no fire in her question. She looked simply too tired to sound angry or demanding.
“The rug,” I echoed, stretching my shoulders.
Caves were expensive in Ashgate. In comparison, the shacks on the beach cost almost nothing to rent. But they provided no protection from the daily heat and only very basic reprieve from sunlight. The heat inside the dwelling rose as midday approached. The Joy Vessel had finally loosened her sweater around her neck. My skin itched under the coarse fabric of my cloak. If I were alone, I would’ve taken it off long ago.
I cast a furtive glance at the Joy Vessel. It was best to wait until she fell asleep before taking off my cloak. But maybe I could at least pull my hood off? My hair bunched around my neck under my hood, making the heat increasingly more unbearable.
She didn’t appear particularly happy with my buying her. Would she hate me even more if she saw my face?
But then again, what did it matter if she did?
I had no reason to care what she thought about me. Raising my good hand to my hood, I slid it down, watching her closely as I revealed my face.
Her eyes were on me. She couldn’t have missed my gesture. But her expression hardly changed. She squinted momentarily, then her features relaxed with exhaustion.
“Are you not afraid of me?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said carefully. “Should I be?”
It was a bizarre reply in these circumstances. She seemed to be afraid of everything before, and now…now she just looked tired.
I rarely revealed the physical effects of my affliction to anyone. Mostly because it felt like exposing my weakness, which I loathed. But the Joy Vessel was to share my living space with me now, and I wasn’t inclined to endure the heat inside my cloak simply to spare her the displeasure of looking at me.
Oddly, she didn’t seem displeased by my appearance either, just as she wasn’t scared.
“Do my looks not repulse you?” I pressed, confused.
Apparently, I did care about what she thought of me. I really needed to hear her answer.
“Your looks? Why?” she sounded puzzled by my question at first, then a puff of breath escaped her. “Oh… I can’t see you.”
Her words made no sense. She was staring straight at me. I’d heard that human eyesight wasn’t as good as the shadow fae’s, especially in the dark, but the darkness wasn’t absolute in this place. The wooden door had plenty of gaps and cracks for sunlight to get in and illuminate the space in pale muddy yellow.
“It’s not that dark here,” I pointed out.
“I know but… I lost my glasses.” She rubbed her eyes.
“What do glasses have to do with anything?”
“Myeyeglasses,” she corrected. “I have weak eyesight and need eyeglasses to have the perfect vision. It’s like…” She waveda hand in front of her face. “Custom-made lenses to correct…” She dropped her hand wearily. “It doesn’t matter. I lost them, okay? I can’t see anything clearly now. Just blurry shapes of color, shadows, and light, that kind of thing. Anyway, it's not like you would understand an impairment of any kind. You fae are perfect in every way, aren’t you?”
“Perfect? Right, we are,” I scoffed bitterly. “Until we’re not.”
Her semi-blindness had its advantages. I could finally get out of this stuffy cloak without the uncomfortable sensation of anyone’s prodding eyes on me.
I unclipped the pin holding the cloak at my throat. The heavy fabric slid off my left shoulder but got caught on the bumps and spikes of my right one. I left it like that. With hardly any skin left on my right side, it didn’t matter. The suffocating heat escaped from around my body. The warm air inside the dwelling still felt cooler than my flushed skin, allowing me to breathe a little more freely.
I scooped my long, black-and-white hair up, fanning the back of my neck with it. Then I exhaled, leaning back in my chair with relief.
