Raze (Riven 3)

What the fuck was I doing? Who made dioramas? Children. Children who thought that real life could be frozen in time and looked at from all perspectives. Children who didn’t understand that nothing ever stops, it rushes past and erases itself as it goes. Erases you if you don’t have something to hold onto.

I pushed out of my chair, disgusted. I called Dane, but it rang through to voicemail.

“Hey,” I said. “Um, I’m at your place. I kinda…had a not-great day. Wanted to see you. Uh. Should I wait for you? I mean, if you’re coming home soon—coming to your place, I mean. Or, um, I guess I’ll wait for a little? Uh, I hope you’re having a good day. Maybe I’ll see you in a bit. Okay, um, bye.”

I groaned at that pitiful message and threw my phone onto the couch, then collapsed after it.

I figured I’d give him a chance to call back, and put on an episode of Secaucus Psychic. The episode ended, then another, but Dane still hadn’t returned my call.

It felt sadder to be here without him than to leave. Maybe I would just go home, put on my pajamas, and crawl into bed so I could sulk where no one could see me. Sofia had said I could move into her room while she was on tour, so I could do that.

I dug out my phone and typed Please, I need you, but I deleted the text without sending it.

I stuck around for another few minutes, hoping I’d hear Dane’s footsteps in the hall, but they never came. I thought of leaving him a note, but I didn’t know what I’d say. Finally, deflated, I made my weary way home.

Chapter 11

Huey

I was utterly exhausted—nauseated and muddled. Morgan had called in a bad way after meeting up with their sisters to discuss their mother’s care after she’d been admitted to the hospital again, and I’d gone to them. It was disheartening to watch the way a crisis could erode all the progress they’d made, but that was the way it went.

Put pressure on something knitting itself back together and watch it pull itself apart.

I went with them to a meeting and afterward, Vicki introduced me to someone she thought I might be able to sponsor. He was just a kid—maybe twenty-one or twenty-two—with a familiar manic energy. He had dark hair and dark eyes, and he looked up at me in a way that reminded me so much of Felix that it made my stomach turn over.

That fucking kid looked up at me and something tried to claw its way out of my chest. My mind had raced down a hundred avenues of his struggle and his hope and his pain and all of them brought me to the same place: after years of perfecting the art of detachment, I didn’t think I could wade into another ocean of struggle without drowning.

I bolted outside and walked for hours. I walked until my feet ached and my bad knee throbbed, seeking permissible oblivion.

Felix left me a voicemail asking if he should wait for me and in his voice I could hear need. I could imagine him wrapping his arms around me, pressing his cheek to my neck.

I could go to him. Give him whatever he needed, then lay myself at his feet and sink into his sweetness.

But I couldn’t stand the thought of lying to him, and I couldn’t tell him the truth.

That something was wrong with me. Again. Something was breaking me apart from the inside out, crawling into my strongest places and leaving them a tender, blooming landscape of…

Fear.

Fear that whatever was happening would leave me a ruin. Fear that I couldn’t possibly be strong enough to be Felix’s man when the supports I’d built were cracking, one by one. How could I ever hope to be enough for him?

Around midnight I finally dragged myself home, and there it was on the counter. A glass from the bar that smelled like gin.

I knew what probably happened: Felix would have come in through the bar, Johi would’ve offered him a drink, and he would’ve carried it upstairs with him. He wouldn’t have thought anything of it, because I owned a bar. I was around alcohol all the time, and alcohol had never been too much of a problem for me.

He couldn’t know that I never let any drugs or alcohol in my space, period, because I’d never told him. And I was sure he’d meant to wash the glass and take it downstairs, because Felix was considerate like that.

Even though I knew it had been an innocent accident, it felt like my space had been polluted, my safe haven defiled in my absence. Without a second thought, I grabbed the glass, threw open the bathroom window, and pitched it into the alley below. I heard the plonk and a shatter, the offended yowl of some alley-dwelling creature, and I slammed the window shut.