Page 49 of Laced in Longing

I press the heels of my palms into my eyes until sparks flicker across the dark expanse in my vision, as I try one more time to be scared. I’m sitting alone in a dim apartment at whatever ungodly hour this is, freshly informed that the ghost wasn’t lying. He’s a god from another world who has been following me around for thousands of years. The appropriate reaction here is to lose it. Scream, maybe. Call somebody. Except there’s no one other than Dr. Voss, and even if there were, what would I say? Hi, so, remember how you asked me last week if I was hearing voices and I said no? Small update.

But the scared won’t come either, and it takes me a stupid amount of time sitting here on the freezing floor to understand why.

It’s because it fits.

Fuck, that’s the worst part. It just—it fits. It clicks into place like the last piece of a puzzle. He’s telling the truth: I really don’t belong here. My soul is some borrowed thing shoved into a body that was never meant to hold it and dragged through life after life after life, then—well. Then maybe there was never anything wrong with me.

The idea swirls around for a second.

Twenty-seven years thinking there must be something wrong with me. Decades of therapists giving me that soft, careful head-tilt right before they refer me out. Countless foster families trying really hard for the first three weeks before conjuring excuses to send me somewhere else. How many times have I stood in the middle of a crowded room feeling like an ugly duckling surrounded by beautiful, normal-looking ones? I’ve moved nine times in eight years, chasing the sensation of fitting somewhere, and I have never once found it. Not in any city, and certainly not in anybody’s bed.

This whole time it wasn’t that I’m broken. It’s that I’m in the wrong place. Like a book shelved in the wrong section of a library. Someone could look for that book for years and never find it; all the while it was right there the whole time, just—filed wrong.

I laugh, the sound wet, cracked, and a little hysterical, and I slap a hand over my mouth like there’s anyone around to hear me lose it. “Filed wrong,” I whisper into my palm. “Oh my god. I’m a misfiled library book.”

He tried to tell me this. The man has said as much so many times while preaching about how it’s hard to leave the familiar even when the familiar is killing you. Each time, I stood there nodding along in my head while simultaneously googling how to make a ghost leave forever on my phone behind my back. Because I decided he was a liar. Or a symptom. Anything but real and something I’d actually have to deal with.

Well. Dealing with it now, apparently. From the floor, in a pool of melted snow. How glamorous.

After an underwhelming shower, I throw on a big t-shirt; the soft gray one that’s gone thin at the collar. My bed calls to me, and I crawl into it with my hair dripping wet.

Lying here staring at the ceiling, my brain—my traitor of a brain—decides to ask the question I’ve been dodging.

What if I said yes?

I roll onto my side and pull the scratchy blanket up over my nose. It does little to warm me, but it’s more of a safety net at this point than anything.

Still, what if I did say yes?

I have to choose it, according to him. He can’t take me from this life, scoop me up and haul me off to his weird twilight garden world no matter how much he desires to, because there’s some rule about it. Some line even a stalking god apparently won’t cross. Which—I don’t know what to do with the fact that that reassures me. The possessive, coat-wearing, million-year-old man who called me his on a rooftop will not actually take a single thing I don’t hand him. It should be terrifying, having such control over someone like that. Instead, it loosens something in my chest, making me feel warm and stupid.

“You are so easy,” I mutter into the blanket. “One guy saves you from jumping and you fold like a lawn chair.”

I mean, would I even consider him nice? Dedicated, yes, but nice? That’s an answer I have yet to discover.

My face presses harder into the pillow.

It felt good to touch him. That’s the last coherent thought I let myself have before my eyes become too heavy. This small, warm, dangerous little truth that I’ve been ignoring. It felt good.

And maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

MAVEN/ASH

There is something unhinged about trying to kill yourself one day and dragging your ass to the metro the next morning like the whole thing was a mild inconvenience.

But here I am, card against the reader, before I slip through the turnstile into the tide of coats and steaming to-go cups. Because rent is real, even if I sometimes am not.

I don’t make it past the lobby before noticing what’s wrong.

Nobody sees me.

Now, I want to be clear—people not acknowledging me is my whole life. That’s every day ending in y. The polite-smile-for-three-weeks-then-slowly-back-away routine is one I could perform in my sleep.

But this is different…within ninety seconds of stepping off the elevator, Marc from accounts payable, who has said good morning to me every single day since I started, walks right past me toward the coffee station with his eyes sliding across my face like I’m invisible. No pause or little frown of do I know her? Nothing. His eyes just look through me.

I cannot decide whether to be offended or not. “Okay,” I whisper. “Weird.”