Chapter Twenty-Eight - The Broken Blues

CRYING OUT, ROQ hefts a huge wheel of cheese off of the rack. "I did it—" he shrieks and slams it into the wall. "For you!" The cheese splinters inside of its shroud, the pieces landing together on the floor with a splat.

"Every fucking minute was for you!" He smashes his foot into the broken cheese. It'd be a dramatic end if the cheese didn't ooze up over his shoe and stick to the rivets and laces. Roq shakes his leg to get rid of the mess, but it won't work. "Get off!" He kicks so hard that his shoe goes flying. It clangs against a milk jug hiding inside the vault.

Red burns in his eyes. With his shoulders hunched and face in a sneer, he marches toward the jug. "What was the goddamn point?" Roq lashes out, his bare foot colliding with the metal can.

The ringing scrapes my ears. I cover them as the canister tips over. Milk glugs out over the floor. A reflection of a broken man glistens across the white puddle and tears start to fall. "Why did I bother?"

After giving the rolling can one more kick, Roq stomps for the ladder. All the while, I stand there, doing my best to not exist. His scream of agony echoes without end in my ears.

I need to get out of here. I have to be back at the hotel room with Mom. What if she wakes up?

My foot splashes the spilled milk in my escape. Without thinking, my hands grab a mop.

Clean it up. If you don't, they're going to burn this place down.

The gremlin shouts louder than ever. It keeps pulling on my ear, forcing me to listen to its every twisted thought.

Why don't you do it? Put them out of their misery. Grab a torch. Gasoline. Set the cheese on fire. End this. Save them from themselves.

"Shut up!" My plea is answered by my echo telling me to shut up too.

I just wanted three months in this impossible cheese paradise. Ninety nights with four men who at least acted like they liked me. Anything to get away from…

It's my fault. If I'd just listened to my mother and not come here, then they'd be happy. They'd still be friends. Or cheeses blissfully unaware of the world. I caused this. It's me.

"It's always me." The drain gurgles in response as I feed the milk into it. After the last of it drains, I wash off the mop, then clean the floor.

This can't last. I'm a danger to them. To everyone around me. I can't do anything right. Look what happens when I try to pretend otherwise. All I do is ruin lives.

It's been quiet up there for some time. I can probably slip out without anyone noticing. My hands reach for Brie's painting that I'd left on the sink. I freeze.

It's a version of me without the gremlin, without my mistakes, without my baggage, without my mother. A me I can never be. "I'm sorry," I whisper to what could have been and climb up the ladder with empty hands.

The lights are out in the store. This is as good a time as any for me to make my escape. I close the trap door as quietly as possible. The edge catches on my dress, smearing a black line down the skirt, but I can worry about that later. Holding my breath, I ease around the counter.

A shadow rests against the beam, his head tossed back and legs outstretched to block my escape. Bottles catch the meager light from outside casting a blood-red sheen over the floor.

"Aujourd"hui, que reste-t-il? à ce Dauphin si gentil?" Roq sings in a soft tenor. He tips back one of the bottles, rivers of wine dribbling from the sides of his lips. "De tout son beau royaume?"

Clasping the bottle of wine to his chest, he cries out to the night, "Tout s"écroule." Roq crumples his head in his hands. "Quoi que je fasse."

I linger in the dark, lost at what to do. If I slip around the other side, he might not see me. Though, in this state, he might not spot me if I climbed over him.

"Roq?" I whisper.

He drops the bottle into his lap and swings his head to me. "Violette?" My harsh American name transforms into a sweet French melody on his lips.

"I'm…sorry."

"What for?" He cocks his head and blue hair tumbles across his eyes.

"If I hadn't come back tonight then Cheddy wouldn't have heard you. Or Brie." I wince, gritting my teeth for his cold wrath.

Roq's lips pop, then he tosses his hand. "Bah. It wasn't your doing." He peers down the neck of the bottle, then lifts it to his eye like a telescope. Wine sloshes out of the hole and down his chest, but Roq doesn't react.

After staring at me from the literal bottom of a bottle, Roq tosses it away and reaches for another. "It was bound to happen eventually. Les ennemis ont tout pris, Ne lui laissant par mépris."

"You don't look so good," I say, crouching down. There are two empty bottles of wine beside him while he goes for a third.

"Ha. It doesn't matter what I do to this body. Come dusk, it will be as it was in that cave outside Tournemire. Never changing, never aging. A perfect vessel for a—" The cork pops out and wine tips down the side. "—broken mind. Santé!"

Just as he lifts the bottle, I place my hand over the top. Roq doesn't stop and smacks his lips into my skin. His groggy eyes seem to realize he's drinking me and not the wine and they lift. I wait for him to reel back, but those wide lips start to pucker and transform into a kiss on my hand.

"Désolé," Roq whispers, his warm lips brushing over my skin as he does. With a great heave, he sits up, plastering his back to the beam.

My legs can't take this awkward hunched strain, and I tumble to a seat with the wine bottle in my hands. "Are you going to be okay?"

"Of course. What could possibly harm a man such as me? Drink? Bah. I bathe in wine. Brigands come to tear me from my home? They'll only find a wheel of cheese come dawn."

I brace myself and ask, "What about the others?"

Roq's cocksure stance falters. The arm he's thrown over his face starts to droop. "Others. People like me. Scared, uncertain, embracing this impossible hand fate's woven for us because we have no choice." He blinks against the weak light of the door where Cheddy, Brie, and Cam fled. "Ha. I spent centuries alone. I can do it all again."

I don't believe him for a second. Especially the way his voice scratches as he declares he'll be fine. "Centuries? How? Why?"

"It is long past midnight. The dancing shoes are hung, the beds claimed, the glasses emptied. What else is there to do but pass tales of woe?" Roq picks up one of the bottles and slaps the bottom. "I was a shepherd."

"Really?"

"Is it so hard to believe?" he asks, his accent getting thicker or his slurring growing stronger. I can't tell the difference.

I stare up and down at the man who looks more like the giant eating the sheep than the shepherd assigned to protect them. "A little," I confess.

"Ha. You're not the first to say. Ber…" He licks his lips and watches himself bounce the bottle against his thigh. "Camembert found it hilarious. The idea of me in a smock and woven straw hat bellowing for my flock. It is more than a lifetime ago, but another man entirely."

"What happened?"

"I resented my lot in life. It's hardly a new concept. But there were few avenues to escape what I was born into. I stumbled upon it by accident, an old dinner forgotten in a cave after I had to give chase to an errant sheep. The cheese bore veins of blue and green through its milky white skin. I'd never seen anything like it and the taste."

"You ate a piece of cheese you left in a cave for a few days?"

"More like months. And yes. You'll eat anything when you're starving. I kept bringing cheese up to the cave. Some grew those same veins with my intervention, others spoiled on the spot. All I cared about was that cheese. My sheep's wool grew past their eyes, the fields of alfalfa rotted in the summer heat. Nothing mattered but perfecting the cheese."

Roq takes a deep breath and tents his fingers. He stares through the triangle in his lap. "I was always too demanding for my own good. To not get it right is as good as failing entirely. I went days without meals, spoke to no one, and every time I tried a piece of my work, it wasn't enough. I had to keep going or else…or I'd have wasted my youth."

That explains a lot about Roq. I felt a pang of sympathy for his obsession with perfection. I didn't have that problem, just voices reminding me of all the ways I couldn't be good enough, never mind perfect. "Is that what caused the curse?"

He shakes his head back and forth, then drops his cheek into his palm. "There was to be a feast in our lord's honor."

"Christmas?"

"Small lord. Piddly thing in the scheme of the world. I don't recall his name any longer. He demanded the best of everything. The ripest fruits, the largest nuts, the fattest hog, the fastest stag."

"The best cheese?" I ask.

"It should be so pungent it curled his shoes. I took the challenge to heart. Not for him, but to prove to myself I could. Oh, I deluded myself into thinking it would fetch me riches, a wife, land, maybe even a title." He waves his hand in a circle as if saying goodbye to all of those out-of-reach dreams. "But in my heart, I know I didn't care about any of it. I needed to do it. The world's best cheese."

For a moment, Roq smiles like he's holding an Emmy and Oscar in one. Then the edge of his lip twitches, his eyes fall, and he slumps back. "I worked myself to the bone, forwent sleep, ignored meals for days, did everything I could to accomplish my task. But nothing was good enough. I failed. Worse than that, I would have to accept my failure. A task I fear I struggle with even now."

He fights to breathe deeply, but his nails claw along the floor as if he's still fighting within. I pat his knee and scoot closer. "Is that how you created the curse? Willing it into being?"

"I dreamed, or perhaps I convinced myself I dreamed. I was so exhausted, maybe I imagined it all. A man of shadow, red eyes in a black cloak, stood before me. He was a talker like Cam. Fluffed up my ego until it was ready to burst. Claimed I was the greatest cheesemaker the world had ever seen."

"And you bought it?"

Roq laughs. "I called him a damned fool to his face. He found that funny. I suppose that should have been my first warning to not make deals with shadowy figures in caves. He promised me that with his help, I would create the perfect cheese. Its flavor would cause grown men to weep like they're gazing upon their newborn sons. I should have said no. I should have refused."

He keeps banging his head with each sentence. "I should have…" Roq pauses before another hit and looks at me. "What I wouldn't have given for an ounce of your humility in that moment."

My cheeks burn and I stare at the ground. I doubt a shadowy anything would offer me a deal. I'm good at nothing.

"I took it. Obviously, I'm here instead of old bones a spelunker finds at the back of a cave."

"What happened?"

"For a brief moment, it was as if I knew everything in this world and beyond. I understood the metamorphosis of life that turns milk into cheese at the subatomic level. Most terrifying of all, I knew how to control every molecule to accomplish it. When I woke the next morning, my mouth dry and head buzzing, the knowledge drained to little more than glimmers. But there it was, the perfect cheese. My salvation."

Roq laughs and tosses his head. "Also my damnation. The shadow man left me with one rule. He asked for nothing in return for his gift, except…"

"What?" I cry out, hanging on his every word.

He spins. The drunken haze over his eyes has shifted to a terrifying focus. "I was never to try the perfect cheese. Not a cube, not a morsel, not even a crumb. It wasn't for me to enjoy, only to create. You can probably guess what happened."

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Roq sighs. "After the first day, I woke confused and naked in the center of town. The feast was over. I missed it completely. It was quite a long time before I figured out what price I paid. I thought it was only mine to pay, until…"

"You ate the cheese you weren't supposed to," I say, struggling to make sense of this. "Oh shit, just like Cam. And Cheddy. And Brie!"

"That seems to be the only link between us all. I don't know how or why it chose them. I kept to my caves, spoke to no one for centuries. I thought I'd die alone and forgotten, but every night I return to who I was when I took that first bite. Well…aside from a few changes." Raking his fingers through his blue hair, he snorts. "Now you know the truth. All of you. I'm a liar. I'm a cheater. I thought myself better than everyone else who'd tried their hand at cheesemaking. I'm a self-centered monster who should be banished to the dark recesses of the caves from whence he came."

"No, you're not."

I'm just as shocked as Roq to find my hand resting on his shoulder and those words flying from my lips.

He glares at me but doesn't shy away from my touch. "You don't know me, girl."

"I know that you look out for them. You protect them as best as you can. That's not what a monster would do."

"They wouldn't be in this situation if not for me releasing this evil cheese into the world. I don't know how or if I can contain it. Cure it. Fix any of my mistakes. They're going to hate me forever."

The big, scary Roq crumples into his lap with his hands on his head. He moans over the thought of losing his friends, the only people he can count on. The pain knotting up his body kicks me in the heart.

I scoot so close, I'm almost sitting on him. Draping one arm behind his back, I reach for the hands cradling his face. "When I was eleven I had a babysitter. She was so bubbly and sweet that I thought she was a princess. She kept her beautiful black hair in a perfect ponytail. I loved it so much, I'd always tell her how pretty it was, and that I wanted one too."

Why am I telling him this? Why am I talking about it? I'm not supposed to talk about it. Mother's going to be so mad.

I clamp my nails to my arm to dig in, but Roq intercepts my hand. He winds his fingers with mine and pulls me from the never-healing wound. "Then what happened?"

"I grabbed a pair of scissors and cut it off. She spun around and screamed and screamed in horror while I held her hair. I knew it was wrong. I didn't want to, but I had to."

He's going to hate me just like she does, just like all of my classmates when they found out. Just like everyone in this world. Even before they meet me they hate me.

"Why?"

Why did I do it?

Don't say anything, you worthless trash. He'll freak out. Run away. Get eaten by pigeons. It'll be all your fault.

"There are these thoughts. They blast in my head night and day screaming things at me. Cut off her hair. Cut it off now."

Lock the door five times. If you don't, the house will burn down. Everyone will die because of you.

"I know they're in my head, that the gremlin isn't real. I can fight them, I do, but it gets so exhausting day in and day out. Sometimes it's easier to just…let them win." Tears tumble down my cheeks. I try to shake them off, but they only fall faster. "I'm a coward. A failure."

Pain throbs up my chest like my ribcage snaps and bones collapse around my heart. I bend over to protect my worthless organ, to hide it, knowing that as much as I wish it were otherwise, it's trash. "No one can love me."

"That's not true."

Roq tugs me up from my crumple. Without pause, he wraps his arms around me. I pin to his side in a strange hug as he burns through every one of my protective layers. "Brie is beyond enamored with you. He speaks of you with a vigor I've never seen for anyone or anything else."

"He doesn't know me."

"Or perhaps you don't understand how vast your heart is. You gave him his passion. I didn't even know about the paints or I'd have… I didn't think to ask, but you did."

"That doesn't mean anything." So I asked him one question and he answered it. That doesn't fix me.

"What of Chedward then?"

I laugh. "He loves everyone."

"True. He is such an open book I find pages scattered everywhere he goes." Roq shakes his head and a small chuckle rumbles up his chest.

"But he knows," I whisper to myself. "He…caught on to me locking the door. Asked me about it."

"And…?"

"And he told me he understood. But he was just being nice."

Roq quirks his head. "Why can't love be nice?"

"I don't know. It's just what people say. I guess. Cam, then."

"Camembert." There's no hiding a flush of anger, regret, and love as Roq says his name. "He is a liar by trade and a heartbreaker by passion. But he's tried neither with you. If anything, you've turned him into a warrior of truth. Thank you so much for that."

I wince at my actions causing this blowup, but I shake my head. "Do you really think it was just me?"

"I suppose not. He was right, this was a long time coming. God, I hate it when he's right. Smug ass." Roq's accent flits out with that, causing me to giggle.

Without thought, I spin the bottle around and around. Cam can't love me. Or Brie, or even Cheddy. Not really. They need me to survive. That's not love. But they missed me, and I missed them more than I thought possible. "Then there's you."

"Aye, then there's me." Roq lays back against the beam, but he doesn't let me go. If anything, he holds me tighter as his eyes close.

"It's okay. I understand if you're mad at me."

"Mad?" He looks perplexed, his mouth agape. Roq's brow crinkles, and he sighs. "I suppose I've been doing all I can to keep you an arm's distance. Knowing that we'll have to part and never see you again… It will break their hearts, and I thought if I stayed away, mine would be spared."

Guilt pounds in my chest. I don't want to break anyone. Then I play back his words. "You thought?"

He laughs and draws a single, long finger down my cheek. "I told you." Roq cups under my jaw, eyes shining in the darkness and I sit taller. As he leans closer, he whispers, "I'm a failure."

His lips touch mine and I'm adrift in a solitary boat rocking on an ocean of tears. Then he parts his mouth and his heat ensnares me. The boat falls through the sky until I land on a bed of a thousand blankets. They curl around me, just like Roq's arms, holding me safe and telling me that I'm safe. That I'm wanted.

That I'm lo—

"Wait." It tears my heart to break the kiss. I place my shaking hand on his chest and turn away. "You can't want this. I'm…broken."

He draws his hand through my hair, causing the pink tips to sway. I was so excited when I dyed my hair thinking I finally found my place, only for my mother to call me a sugary whore. I wanted to chop them off, but she said I had to grow it out as punishment so I'd never forget what I did. Instead of recoiling, Roq combs through the pink ends and curls them around his fingers.

"You are Violette. A woman of ferocious tenacity even in the face of the…weird and unknown. A generous spirit and fairer heart, with eyes of a wild thunderstorm over the fields of southern France. And your lips…" He brushes my hair so it tickles against my mouth and I nearly laugh. "I'm afraid I will have to leave the rest of the poetry to Cam. I'm awful at it. You are not broken."

"I have invasive thoughts. I do stupid things I know are stupid just to appease them for a few hours."

"Dented then," Roq says. "A little bruise in the clay that tells the hand this mug was made with passion and love."

"I feel more like a mug without a handle. It's too much work to drink from."

"For some, sure. There is no accounting for taste, after all. Not all can see the beauty in what's before them." Cupping my face in his hands, he brushes his thumbs under my cheekbones as if he's tracing those dents. "You're worth the occasional scalded finger, Miss Reely."

I smile at the sentiment. Even if he's planted a tiny seed, it has to fight off the weeds of experience to bloom into anything beautiful. There are far bigger problems than my self-esteem to contend with. "Roq… I wish I could stay here, but—"

"I know." He traces my face once more, then lets me go. "I know."

"It'll be dawn soon," I whisper, peering out to the darkened street. "We should find them, save them before…"

He drops me, his hands falling open-palmed to his lap. "I thought it would work. If a perfect cheese created this mess then a second one would free us."

I place my hand in his, then I take his fingers. "Perhaps it still could," I say. "But first…" Grunting, and with all my strength, I help Roq rise to his feet. He wobbles and slams a hand to the counter to remain steady.

I lock my arm around his waist, and he holds my shoulder. "I need to get my friends back," Roq declares. "They may be more willing to listen if you accompany me. Would you come with?"

My mother will be waking soon. If she finds her room empty, I'll never hear the end of it. She might lock me in a tower so I never see the light of day.

I smile up at Roq with my whole heart. "Gladly."