Jade
“You can’t keep doing this,” Cat said, and I sighed, turning away, back to the bookcase. She put her hand on my shoulder, tugging me back towards her. “Don’t do that. Look at me.”
I sighed, a short and frustrated noise. Not that it would make any difference—Cat was deaf, and if I had my back to her where she couldn’t read my lips, I could scream and she wouldn’t notice—but my head was a jumbled knot of angry thoughts, and I was frustrated with myself trying to pull the threads out of the tangle. I pulled down a book, and I held it in a tight grip as I turned back to her. “I’ve got plenty to do,” I said, holding up the book. “I’m just not feeling an event.”
She shook her head, eyes welling up with emotion. Dammit, her and the puppy-dog eyes. Why was I being beset by helpless girls with puppy-dog eyes today? Her voice wobbled when she spoke—she’d lost her hearing as a teenager, and she generally had good volume control, but it wavered when she was emotional, and she signed the important words as she spoke. “I don’t want to ruin things for everyone.”
“You didn’t ruinanythingforanyone.I just…” I spoke while signing the key words, or at least as best I could aroundwhere I was clutching the book like it was life support. “I don’t feel like going out tonight.”
“You’re a liar.”
I held up the book. “I’m reading.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Without looking right now, what’s that book even called?”
“Uh—it’s, er.” I looked. Didn’t even do it consciously—my eyes flicked down, and I realized there was nothing I could say to salvage it. She took the book from my hands.
“You don’t want to read,” she said. “You want to go see everybody again.”
I groaned, walking past her and dropping down on the faded old green couch by the big window, here at the back of the living room, where the view opened up over the mountains beyond. I picked up the mug of chai that Cat had made me, with just a splash of almond milk, how I liked it. “It’s complicated,” I said, finally, hunching over the mug.
“If you just said something, I couldn’t see it.”
I sipped the tea, forcing myself to relax, letting some of the tension out of my shoulders, before I looked up and met her gaze, sinking into the armchair across the old teak coffee table from me. It was a cluttered table in a cluttered room—busy, but everything in its place, with a system I knew well. I didn’t have a lot of visitors over here, pretty much just Cat and Daniela, and now it was down to just Cat.
She was a short woman with warm, tanned skin and short auburn hair, a little coarse and shaggy, like she was a little scruffy cat herself. We’d always made jokes about her being top-heavy, and she was living up to it today, with a high-collared sweater and a heavy jacket on over top, and tiny shorts.If my heart is warm, the rest of me is warm,she’d always argue, even though when she’d kick her feet up on my lap in a group setting,I’d feel like her legs were icicles. Linda always teased her about it, too.
But none of that was happening now. After the whole falling-out, Cat was persona non grata with the friend group, and I was the only one who’d taken her side, which meant I’d made myself a public enemy too.
Hard to sit with the fallout in a small town like Paxton Ridge. I’d gone from being friends with everyone in the street and being able to drop into the queer community lounge and bar the Birdhouse whenever I wanted and have a spontaneous evening with friends I’d known for years, and then overnight, I was alone.
“I said, it’s complicated,” I signed, not really up to putting it into words this time. She frowned, mimicking thecomplicatedsign back in confusion, and I shrugged, sipping moodily from the mug before I spoke. “I don’t want to see everybody, not while I’m angry with them for what happened. It’s not like I want to go but won’t because of you. It’s just…”
She sighed, slumping back in her chair. “I should really have just let things go, huh?”
“You did the right thing, and you know it.”
“I don’t know if I do.” She drew her body language in closer, signing in smaller gestures. “I mean, things had been going on for a while without me saying anything, and I could have just talked things over with Drew in private, and maybe—”
“Stop,” I signed, and that was enough to get her to drop it, slouching. I waited for her to look at me again before I spoke. “It’s not your fault. You’d never fault anybody else for doing what you did.”
She pursed her lips. “Okay, but I’ll fault myself for it.”
“Don’t make me get the spray bottle, kitty-cat.”
She hissed, mimicking cat claws. I mimed a spray bottle, and she laughed, waving away the imaginary spray, and Irelaxed a little bit, although it was just the moody irritation settling into something quiet and sad.
“Youdowant to go, though, don’t you?” she said, and I groaned.
“Not really,” I said. “Party at the Birdhouse. Whatever. Happens twice a week at a minimum.”
“It’s for a new person. That’s exciting, right? You don’t want to meet them?”
I cleared my throat. “Already met her,” I said, and she stopped, cocking her head.
“You met her? When?”
“Out on road patrol,” I said. “I got called in to help around a fallen tree, and this girl comes streaking in with her Camry sliding like an emergency brake drift and almost hits the tree.”
