Cosima coughed. This was actually dire.
“There’s over a thousand unread messages in my text app, just since I arrived,” she said. “Twice that many in my inbox, and all of them carrying with them a certain amount of worry that I, personally, will end the world.”
“What?”
Cosima still was not looking at Edie, but she could hear her confusion. She trained her eyes on a marble ceiling goddess.
“I’m the person who selects the next head of Phoebe Frank Studios. Because I wouldn’t ascend to my mother’s throne, I have to choose who sits there. At a certain level in the movie business, money and power metamorphose into emotions. Dark magic. Fortune-telling. It’s dangerous if there’s a vacuum. Guys in suits start reading signs and wonders like an astrological chart, and I wouldn’t care, Edie. I wouldn’t care at all, except there are good people, regular humans, who simplyworkat PFS. They feed their families with paychecks that bear a facsimile of my mother’s signature.”
“But you haven’t done it,” Edie said. “That’s not a dig. I probably wouldn’t have done it either. I’m having secondhand decision paralysis listening to you.”
Cosima risked a look at Edie, who smiled a small but kind smile that made Cosima feel as if a marble ceiling’s worth of psychic burden had been removed from her body.
“Yes. I should have done it. As soon as the funeral was over, I should have selected this person from an array of preapproved candidates, any of whom would fill the vacuum, but instead I got on a plane and came here. Duncan isn’t mentioning any of it. He’s assuming I’m having a polite meltdown but that I will definitely return and do my job before any harm has been done.”
“But what’s the harm? If you take the time you need to grieve your mother before you decide what’s next, why is that a problem?” Edie’s expression of distaste made her skepticism clear.
Cosima unbuttoned her jacket, welcoming the air on her neck, her sternum. “The longer I take, the lower the PFS stock price falls. I probably lost the company ten times more money this morning over breakfast than you borrowed and lost for Fauxmage.”
Edie put her hand on her shoulder and squeezed it, raising goose bumps on her skin. “Cosima.”
She had to look at the ceiling again, touching her throat, trying to believe she could breathe. “And I already know what’s next. Of course that’s been decided. When I was disappointing my mother by refusing to take the reins of her company, Duncan rescued us. He reminded Phoebe thatmypassion was gardening—something I did with him, learned from him—and that I obviously wanted to make and grow something that was mine. He suggested he and I star in a gardening series.” She framed out the title in the air in front of her. “An AmericanCastle’s Garden.We start filming on the grounds at the Castle in a few weeks. And when I say ‘we,’ I mean Cosmos, the film studio I’ve just started with PFS money.Mystaff. My mother actually loved this idea. It made her happy. It made Duncan happy. I should be happy. Right now, I should be in LA, working on my show, reassuring the dozens of people that Duncan and I hired that they have work.”
“I knew you were a gardener.” Edie smiled.
Cosima exhaled, shaky. “You did?”
“I put it together. I also put together you were dealing with something big. This happened around the time Morag was forcing her scary telepathic powers on you about whatever it was.” Edie picked up and squeezed Cosima’s hand. “My only question, princess, is if you’re trying to run your points up in the game just because I pulled ahead with my tantrum in the church yesterday?”
Edie had turned her body toward Cosima. Their eyes met fully, but Cosima couldn’t let herself stare into Edie Whitelock’s caring green eyes, so she studied a constellation of blond freckles under her eyebrow in the shape of Orion’s Belt. “I will take my points,” she said, stiff enough to guard her feelings.
“We’re a pair, huh?” Edie asked. “It might be hard to believe, but if I don’t take my recipe technologist job at A Presto! Pizza at the end of this month, the world will also end. It’s true that I’m the only mouth that needs to be fed in my scenario, but I’m twenty-eight years old. I am conscripted by capitalism to make money for another forty or fifty years so I can have nice things like shelter and transportation. Save up to see the doctor. You know. Luxuries. Like you, it’s all been decided already, and there’s something about a lack of choice that really has a way of breaking your heart, doesn’t it?”
Cosima smiled in an attempt to hold her tears at bay but feltthem race down the sides of her nose anyway. “Are you saying we’re rebelling?”
“Hmm. More like we’re putting on a show similar to my four-year-old niece’s when I start filling the bathtub. Suddenly, theBlueyepisode she’s seen seventy thousand times has depths she hasn’t mined that are vital to her continued existence. Then she’s hungry. Then she has to poop. Her free will demands encore after encore while reality gets more annoyed. We’re in our encore era.” Edie looked around them at the magnificent staircase. “You have to admit it’s pretty fucking good. We really know how to stall, you and me.”
Edie pulled one of her legs out from the knot she’d folded them in, bent it over both Cosima’s legs, and gathered her close for a hug.
Her forearms pressed against Cosima’s shoulder blades. Her cheek against Cosima’s ear.
The hug thawed her on the inside, leaving behind the mess of a garden in spring—unregulated, terrified, and so thrilled, it made her nauseated.
Edie started to pull away.
No.
Cosima dragged her hands up and around Edie’s body, and before she knew it she wascrushingher. She had to fist one of her hands to keep it from palming the nape of Edie’s neck and pulling her face closer.
“Oof.” Edie squeezed back. “Easy, tiger.”
Cosima accepted this correction but could not make herself let go. “Sorry.”
Edie pulled her arms away and leaned back, holding on to Cosima’s forearms, which were nearly around Edie’s neck. Her face was inches away, her eyes too many different shades of green to name.
“I’m sorry. I know you must be using your giant brain to try to figure out how to fix your situation, or to feel more responsible about it than you should.” Edie’s voice was low, almost whispering, probably because her face was so close. Cosima’s body had gone simultaneously syrupy with desire and stony with restraint and hot with feelings.
“I am responsible, as it happens.” She sounded like she’d screamed all night at a concert and tried to talk the next day. Or screamed all night doing something else.
