18. Ris

Ris

She'd known something was wrong the day he never responded to her afternoon text.

It had been one of those annoying days, when annoying people came to her with their annoying problems, invariably problems of their own making, as if she could pull out a magic wand and make their annoying incompetence magically disappear. She had messaged him, set her phone down, and then was instantly swept up in an hour and a half's worth of other people's nonsense. When she returned to her desk at last, Ris flipped the phone over, blinking in confusion.

Her message had been unread.

In the full year since they'd met, Ris was certain she could count on a single hand the amount of days that had passed when they hadn't spent the afternoon keeping each other entertained. She frowned, but realized that he was likely just as caught up with other people's bullshit as she had been.

Dinner tonight?

You have band rehearsal, right?

We can go somewhere after?

Maybe that chicken has been lying the entire time we've known each other. And now I'm supposed to just do . . . what, exactly? Pretend he's dead? How do I do that? Do I have some sad, cautionary story I can tell about drunk driving or untreated depression? Am I supposed to take a can of coffee grounds and pretend that's him? Talk to it every day for catharsis? How am I supposed to feel, knowing that I was just a little cardboard cutout in his fake life? That I never actually mattered? How am I supposed to trust a single word Elshona ever says to me again? What am I supposed to do with any of that?"

Ris realized she didn't have much experience with grief. Her parents and extended family were still alive and would be for years. She went back home a few times a year to visit, still took a trip with her parents every year to the seashore, and would visit with the same familiar faces she'd known growing up from the edge of the Elvish community. There was no one else in her life she knew well enough to have registered their absence, if they had passed on. Not in a way that affected her. She didn't know what it was to nurse an ailing relative, had never had to say goodbye prematurely to school friends or teachers or neighbors. And this is why elves stick together.

"I don't know," she said honestly. "I don't know what anyone is supposed to do with this, Ains, any of it. But I don't think you're right. Not about all of it."

His head swung around, mouth twisting into a sneer. Ris could see the rebuttal forming on his lips, but she held up her hand and quickly went on.

"Of course you meant something, Ainsley. I don't know why you would think that. I don't know why you would think anyone who's ever met you would say you don't matter."

He rolled his eyes, head dropping back against the cushions. "Nanaya –"

"Do you know what Tate told me? Last year, after we went to the pig face party? You went to the bathroom, and he told me you would scrape your way into my heart and there was no getting rid of you after that. That there was no way to keep you out once you had decided you wanted in. Do you think he wasn't talking about himself? Of course you mattered, Ainsley."

"We were all just pawns, using us in this bullshit pretend game of—"

"Aren't you the one who told me you bullied him into being your friend in the first place?" she challenged. "That doesn't sound like someone who was using you. To me, that sounds like someone who recognized the way you sparkle. I don't know, I'm not close enough to this, not the way the rest of you are. But the whole thing seems to me like he was trying to mitigate the damage."

With everyone except Silva. She wasn't lying to Ainsley. He had told her himself the way he had basically twisted Tate's arm into being his friend, but Silva . . . Silva he should have left alone. He's a piece of shit for that, and if he ever pokes his head back through the veil, I'm going to hit him with a fucking bat. She knew well enough to keep thoughts of Silva to herself.

"I don't know what to say about Elshona. I don't think she meant to keep you in the dark about things. You yourself said the first rule of Tate is don't ask questions you don't want the answer to, right? You wouldn't have said that if you didn't suspect something hinky. Well, she already read to the end, and you were right. The book sucks."

He snorted and she took the opportunity to scooch a bit closer.

"Yeah, well . . . I think he did a bang up job of mitigating the damage for the businesses. Well done. I don't have family, Nanaya. Not the way most orcs do. It's just me and my mom. I had nine million ‘friends,' and two people I could actually count on. What do I have now?"

Me, she wanted to scream. Don't you have me?

"I don't think I can stay here anymore. It's like everywhere I look, there's just another reminder that nothing in my life has been real for the past however the fuck long."

She blinked rapidly, panic suddenly crowding her chest. "W-what do you mean? What are you going to do?" Her voice was little more than a whisper, her nails biting into the meat of her palm in anticipation of what he might say.

"I'll move back to Bridgeton. They're gearing up to ask me to do that anyway. I may as well start packing. Tell them I want the promotion and a raise and put this place behind me. That's what you're supposed to be able to do, apparently, right? Just walk away and put things behind you?"

She didn't know enough about grief, hadn't experienced it enough on her own, but she knew he was grieving and wasn't handling it well. This withdrawal into himself wasn't healthy, but she would do better to hold her tongue, present that idea under gentler circumstances.

"Again, I'm not close enough to all of this, Ains, but I'm sorry that you're hurt. It hurts me knowing that you're hurting. I just want us to be back to —"

"What us?" His eyes were sad when he looked at her again, and she remembered that agonized look that had taken up residence on his face in those weeks after their visit to his mother's apartment. "What us, Ris? You go out of your way to constantly remind me that this isn't anything serious. You don't want anything serious. Phew, thank the stars we're not actually serious! Okay, I get the message. So us just feels like one more thing in my life that isn't real. So I don't really know what us is."

If he would've driven his fist into her ribs, she wouldn't have felt as breathless as she did at that moment. Her mouth dropped open, her eyes widened, her lungs having completely forgotten their function in her chest. What us?

"What do you mean ‘what us?'" Her voice was small, with none of her trademark brashness, her bravado failing her. Ris felt another grain of sand slip away, these silly arguments, the silly things that would be meaningless in two years, ten years, twenty. "I thought we both agreed that this was —" she broke off, eyes burning with tears. "I don't understand, Ainsley. We've always been on the same page. What changed?"

He seemed at as much of a loss as she was herself, shrugging halfheartedly, staring across the room. "I have. I have, I guess. I'm sorry. You're right. You were upfront about what you wanted, right from the beginning. But whatever this is . . . I don't think this is enough for me anymore."

The tears overflowed. She couldn't have imagined that night, sitting in the dark with him on the patio of Tate's little bistro more than a year ago, that someday her heart would be breaking from something he told her.

"I'm going to start looking for a place in the city this week," he went on, his voice a touch more defiant and steady. "We're all month-to-month here anyway. I'll have to use a moving company, since I don't have a best friend to help schlep boxes with his broken back this time around."

He turned, meeting her eyes, and Ris felt frozen, like a small animal trapped in his warm brown headlights, unable to so much as blink. "You can come with me, Ris. If you want this to be something real. Otherwise, this is where we need to call it. I'm sorry if this isn't what you want, but I need something in my life to feel real. My diorama days are over."