The Chaos of Stars

They match up. Almost perfectly.

Almost.

Almost perfect takes this room from awesome to amateur.

Little cracks of light seep through here and there from the now-blocked windows, and it makes the whole thing look cheap and thrown together.

“We’ll fix it,” Ry says.

“Yeah, it won’t be that hard. Right?” Tyler answers, her voice drifting on into almost a plea at the end.

“We can’t do it. We have to be done in twenty minutes for the moving guys and security to come install the pieces. Only Michelle and I can be here while they do that, and it will take them until tomorrow morning to set it all up and get everything wired for alarms.”

“So that gives us eight hours until the gala?” Ry asks. “We can do a lot in eight hours.”

“That’s assuming they get it done in time. And besides, I need those hours to fix whatever the movers screw up, to deal with anything that might need last-minute attention! All that time you bought us, Ry.” I shake my head, feeling sick to my stomach. It was going so well. “It was for emergencies. It gave me time to deal with emergencies.”

“Well, say hello to your emergency.” Tyler squints upward. “We could line it with black electrical tape or something?”

“You’ll be able to see it. If we caulk it and then—”

Ry shakes his head. “It’ll never dry in time to paint it.”

“What if we do the tape and then paint over it?” Tyler says, walking into the middle and swinging her arm in an arc over her head. “If w

e do a smooth line of black paint, you won’t be able to see the tape, right?”

I bite my lip. It’s not a permanent solution. If any of the walls get shifted, it could rip away and damage the paint underneath, causing an even bigger problem. And it’ll be a nightmare working in here tomorrow, because everything will be set up and we won’t have much room to maneuver, and we’ll have zero room for error with the paint.

“It doesn’t have to last forever.” Ry puts a hand on my bare shoulder and I close my eyes at the sensation of his skin on mine, momentarily lost in the heat and feel of him. Amun-Re, focus, Isadora. “It can be good enough for now, and if we have to fix it later, we fix it later.”

“I don’t like good-enough.”

“Good-enough can always be made better. Later. Right now we’re going to take good-enough and we’re going to be happy about it.”

I nod, not missing the fact that his hand is still on my shoulder. All day we’ve worked side by side, and he hasn’t pushed anything from last night. But his eyes seem bluer, and I can’t ignore that even disasters feel more manageable with him here, and when he’s next to me, my traitor body reacts in ways that I definitely did not give it permission to. I don’t know what to do with these feelings or where to put them or if I want them or why I should or why I shouldn’t.

It’s been a complicated day.

“Good-enough is good enough.” I take a deep breath. “I have to stay here to make sure they put everything where it’s supposed to be. You two be in charge of getting tape?”

“Me! Me! I want to be in charge of tape on my own.” Tyler bounces up and down on the balls of her feet, her shoulders twitching to a beat I can’t hear.

I smile. “Okay! And it’s a good idea, too. I never would have thought of it. You’re brilliant.”

“All my ideas are good, Isadora.” She looks pointedly at Ry’s hand and I want to shrug it off I’m so embarrassed, but then that would mean I actually noticed and cared that it was there, and . . .

I don’t know. I don’t know what to do, and it’s driving me crazy. Grinning, Tyler runs out past us, leaving us alone. In the room. Alone.

“I was thinking last night,” Ry says.

Yeah, I was, too. So much I thought my brain would pop. But I have no conclusions, and I don’t want to know what he was thinking about. But I really, really do. Chaos take me, I kind of hate him. “Oh?”

“You know the story of Persephone, right?”

Ooookay, not what I was thinking he’d be thinking about. It wasn’t Greek mythology keeping me awake. “Um, yeah.”

“I was thinking about framing, and how so much of what we think about our lives and our personal histories revolves around how we frame it. The lens we see it through, or the way we tell our own stories. We mythologize ourselves. So I was thinking about Persephone’s story, and how different it would be if you told it only from the perspective of Demeter versus only from the perspective of Hades. Same story, but it would probably be unrecognizable. Demeter’s would be about loss and devastation. Hades’s would be about love.”