Magic. I straightened, breathed in, and felt a hesitant calm wash over me.
Do you believe in magic?
Maybe.
I blinked a few times, and stepped through the open archway into the living room, leaving Davina a few feet behind in the hallway. I watched the bat fly in circles, bouncing off the occasional wall with a hard clink, leaving puffs of plaster behind with every collision. The harsh buzz-buzz-buzz sound of a phone that's been left off the hook grew stronger as it circled over me, and faded as it moved to the other side of the living room. I glanced down at my hands, still hot and tingly, just like with the trash-can-lid dog, and I came to a sudden, calm realization.
I'd just turned my phone into a bat.
I looked behind me at Davina and pointed. "I did that."
"Yes," she said, her voice soft as if talking to a small child. "You did." She patted my shoulder. "Don't worry. It probably won't last too long. You got some good juice there, but it's still early days. We got awhile to go yet before you start to mean some business."
As if soothed by her voice, the bat slowed a bit. Then, suddenly, its wings pulled in and it jolted into complete stillness.
Then my phone landed, with a lifeless plop, on my couch.
"Oh, that's a shame," Davina said. "Such a pretty bat phone."
There was a tap-tap-tap on my living room window and we both started, but then I released a breath and said, "Oh, hell." I walked over and pushed the window up. "Hey, Peach."
Peach pulled her broomstick back into her house. She wrapped her fleece bathrobe around her and said stiffly, "What's going on in there? I thought I heard screaming."
"There was a bat in the house." I glanced at the broken phone on the floor. "It's gone now." I looked back at Peach, looking for some kind of regret in her expression; there was none. "Sorry to bother you."
"It's no problem."
There was a long silence, and then I said, "Okay, then," and reached for the window to close it, just as Peach leaned even farther out her window and waved pointedly in Davina's direction. "Hey, Davina!"
Davina moved in next to me and waved back. "Nice to see you again, Peach."
Peach turned her smile on me, but it didn't reach her eyes. "I figured you wouldn't mind, Liv, I gave your aunt my key when I saw her out there earlier this afternoon."
I nudged Davina with my shoulder and whispered, "Aunt?"
Davina shrugged. "By marriage."
"I couldn't very well let her sit outside on your porch all day in this heat," Peach went on, her eyes shimmering with hurt. "And what a surprise to find out you have an aunt none of us knew anything about."
I sighed. "Peach, it's ... complicated."
"You don't have to explain anything to me," she said. "I'm just your neighbor."
And then she shut her window and went back inside.
I shut my window and turned to Davina, who was looking through it at Peach's house.
"Nice girl," Davina said. "She told me you two were like family. I think that's nice."
I held up my hand to get her to be quiet, and amazingly enough, she shut up. In my head, I set the tension with Peach aside; I would deal with that later. For now, I had a dead bat phone to think about. I blinked a few times, indulging myself in a distanced, packed-in-cotton feeling. Something was very, very wrong, and my rational mind (brain tumor!) was beginning to go to war with my gut (magic!) and it was giving me a headache.
"I'm gonna go get my drink." I turned on my heel toward the kitchen.
"Good idea," Davina said, and followed me.
I walked into the kitchen, grabbed the scotch she'd poured for me, and downed the rest where I stood.
"Oh, that's - you're drinking that fast, baby." Davina shook her head back and forth, tsking like a metronome. "That is not a good idea."
I handed her my empty glass. "Another."
Davina crossed her arms. "No."
I walked past her, grabbed the bottle of scotch off the counter, whipped the cap off, took a slug, and sputtered for a minute or two as the liquid actively resisted my attempts to swallow it.
"Oh, you're gonna regret that," Davina said under her breath.
I angled my head to look at her. "Am I going to die? Are you, like, an angel of death or something? Coming to get me? And the brain tumor that's killing me is giving me hallucinations? Because that makes sense. Kinda."
Davina took a moment to form her response. "You know what this is. Deep down, you know. But I'll tell you, you keep drinking like that, and you're gonna wish you were dead in the morning."
I took another swig. Wasn't so bad this time. My shoulders were starting to relax, and the sharp edges around the memories of the aluminum dog and the bat phone seemed to dull. A little.
"Not a brain tumor," I said. "So, I'm crazy, then?"
"No," she said, the very soul of patience. "You're magic."
I ignored her. "Hallucinations seem like they'd be chemical, though, right? I mean, maybe there's some kind of antipsychotic pill I can take - "
"It's all real," Davina said softly, and I centered my focus on her. She really was beautiful, and she seemed like a basically nice person, gym sock of death notwithstanding.
"Definitely a brain tumor," I said quietly.
Davina raised a brow. "What?"
"You're not real. You can't be - ow!"
I whipped my arm away from her, rubbing the spot on my bicep where she'd pinched me. Hard.
"I'm real," she said.
"And mean." I rubbed my arm some more. "That's gonna leave a mark."
"Good. It'll stand as proof that I'm real, and we won't be wasting any more time on this foolishness. You need to get with the program fast, because we do not have time for a mental breakdown right now. Give me that bottle." She reached her hand out for the bottle, but I pulled it back by my shoulder, out of her reach. She huffed in frustration and dropped her hand. "Stop playing games; you obviously cannot drink worth a damn."
I hugged the scotch to my chest. "My brain tumor, my bottle."
And then I thought about my mother and her brain tumor. Her death, which had been extended and heartbreaking and terrifying. And even though I knew - or suspected, anyway - that I didn't really have a brain tumor, that what I was going through was not quite that mundane or straightforward, my stomach flipped inside, anyway, because the imagining of your own impending death brings with it both terror and a dose of clarity.
"I've got something I have to do." I put the bottle down on the counter and started toward the kitchen door.
"Baby?"
I walked out of the kitchen. Davina didn't say anything, but I heard her light footsteps trailing me through the hallway, out the front door ...
... and toward Tobias's apartment.
Five minutes later, just as I was turning the corner onto Rosewood Lane, Davina caught up to me.
"Olivia?" she said, huffing as she hurried to match her pace with mine. "Where are we going, exactly?"
I turned the corner onto Rosewood. "It's not far."
"What's not far?"
We walked the three blocks down Rosewood Lane in silence until I got to Tobias's apartment building on the corner of Main Street. It was a huge Victorian, painted lavender with pale yellow trim and divided into four apartments, one for each level, including the attic. Seven people living in roughly the same amount of space I occupied all by myself.
"What's here?" Davina asked. I darted up the porch steps, found the button labeled SHOOP, and lay on it.
"Who paints a house purple?" she asked, and I shot her a look. She met my glance, her eyes widened, and she said, "I mean, pink is completely within the realm of acceptable house colors, but purple..."
Tobias came down the inside steps to open the front door. He was wearing a white T-shirt and gray sweats and even in my compromised state, I felt twin surges of happiness and dread. For his part, he seemed really happy to see me there, which twisted that mixed-signal knife even more. He waved at me through the glass, then opened the door.
"Hey." He leaned against the doorjamb and looked down at me, his smile wide and genuine. "What's up?"
"I turned a phone into a bat."
His face registered something and he sniffed. "Liv? You didn't accidentally fall in a vat of scotch again, did you?"
"Not accidentally." I stepped aside and grabbed Davina's arm, pulling her up next to me. "Do you see this woman?"
Tobias's eyes landed on Davina, and cooled a bit. "Oh, yeah. Chocolate Belgian waffles, right?"
"That's me." Davina's voice was flat and unamused.
"Okay, so you see her?" I asked. "She's all ... real, and everything?"
"I see her." Tobias focused on me, the distant expression in his face morphing into concern. "You okay?"
"Could still be a tumor," I muttered.
"It's not a tumor," Davina said.
"Well, of course you'd say that," I said.
Tobias kept his eyes on Davina for a moment longer, then turned to me, putting his hands on both my shoulders. "Liv? You okay?"
"No," I said. "I turned a phone into a bat."
"We've had a few drinks." Davina reached her hand out to him. "I'm Davina Granville. Liv's aunt."
Tobias held my eye for a moment before reaching out to take her hand. "Nice to meet you. Tobias Shoop."
"Davina's the Women's Ultimate Frisbee Champion, University of Louisiana, 1981." I busted out into giggles. That seemed really funny to me all of a sudden.
"Yeah. You're cut off." Tobias put his hand on my elbow and pulled me inside, then held the door open for Davina and jerked his head toward his apartment in invitation. "Come on. I'll make you guys some coffee."
"I think I'm gonna go on home," Davina said. "I've got some things to take care of. She should be okay with you, for tonight. You'll keep her safe?"
Tobias hesitated for a second, then said, "Yeah."
"I'll see you tomorrow, Liv," Davina said, then disappeared into the dusk.
Tobias shut the door, double-checked that it was locked and turned to look at me, his eyes sharp and sober. "Liv?"
"I'm sorry," I said. "About the other day. The thing with Stacy, and ... you know." I rolled my eyes. "Just everything before that. I don't want us to be mad at each other anymore."
He hesitated for a bit, watching me. I stayed frozen, barely breathing, waiting for him to just say something, damnit. But after all that hesitation, he just said, "Come on upstairs and I'll make you some coffee."
He stepped back in the foyer to let me by, and I led the way up the stairwell to his apartment. I'd been there a few times, although usually we hung out at my place because it was bigger. It was one long open room, with finished walls all the way up to the top where they met in a steep angle, and dark-stained support beams spanning across overhead. Four window seats sat in the cutout windows on each side of the length, and bookcases filled every bit of wall space between them. At the north end was a wall that separated his bedroom and bathroom from the big kitchenette, living room, and dining area. All told, maybe eight hundred square feet. The perfect amount of space for one person. Or two.
He grabbed a blanket off the back of his couch and wrapped it around my shoulders, then sat me down. The couch was really ugly, some kind of plain brown corduroy thing, but it was so soft and welcoming that I sank into it, sighing. Then he went to the kitchenette. I stared out the window at the streetlights while the coffee brewed, and it seemed like just seconds later when he was holding out a mug to me. Possibly, I may have nodded off for a minute.
I took the mug and held it under my nose, breathing in the comforting scent. Tobias sat across from me on the old shipping trunk he used for a coffee table, rested his elbows on his knees, and looked at me.
We sat in silence for a while, and he said, "I don't think I've ever seen you drunk before."
I snorted and looked up. "It's been that kind of a week."
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes on me. "I want you to tell me what's going on."
I let my eyes drop to the floor. "Nothing's going on." Except that I might be crazy. Or possibly dying.
Or worse.
"You know you can tell me, right?" he said. "Whatever's happening to you, no matter how crazy it sounds. I'll believe you."
I thought about that for a bit. Reversing the situation, would I believe him if he told me that his fairy godmother had shown up and given him magical powers that made him turn household objects into living critters?
No. But then, I wasn't as good a person as he was. Still ...
"Nothing's going on," I repeated, meeting his eye steadily.
He went quiet for a moment, then stood up. "Come on."
I looked up at him. "We're going somewhere?"
He jerked his head toward his kitchenette. "I'm gonna feed you before you puke eighty-proof all over my couch."
I glanced back at the couch as he grabbed my arm and pulled me up. "Yeah, I don't think anything's going to make that couch worse."
He led me to the kitchen island counter, where I sat on a stool. He moved around the kitchen, grabbing flour and eggs and oranges and something from the spice rack, and it looked like dancing, his movements were so smooth. I had watched him cook at work, and he was always in command, moving fast and lithe, but at home, he cooked like it was fun. He smiled and teased me and it felt like it had always been, the two of us comfortable in our little bubble where we were always us and nothing would ever change.
"Okay," he said as he drizzled the hot syrup over the tops of the two plates of waffles, "these are cinnamon orange Belgians with an amaretto pecan caramel sauce. It's my own recipe, so if you hate it, lie."
He placed the plate in front of me, and I looked up at him.
"Waffles? Really?"
He put a fork in my hand. "The best you've ever had, yeah."
I raised the fork, and could see Tobias watching me with a big smile out of the corner of my eye. I cut off a bite, put it on the fork, and then hesitated.
"Something wrong?" Tobias asked.
"No." I lowered the fork down an inch, then another. The warring voices inside my head said, You've already had eighteen hundred calories today, and that was before the liquor, and the other said, oh my god they smell so gooooooood ...
"What's the matter?" he asked.
I white-knuckled the fork. "I've given up waffles. Well, most food, really, but specifically waffles."
"You love waffles."
"I know."
"This doesn't make any sense."
"It's just that I was already at my calorie limit for the day before I had the liquor, and I want to go to Europe in my skinny jeans."
"What the hell are skinny jeans?"
"They're the jeans that you buy that are too small so that someday you can wear them and feel awesome."
He put his fork down and stared at me, openmouthed. "There are so many things wrong with that sentence. I don't even know where to start."
"It's okay. This is advanced self-loathing. You'd have to be a woman to understand it at this level."
He pinched a bit of the denim above my knee. "What's wrong with these jeans?"
His touch sent tingles up my thigh, and I pulled my knee back a bit. "They fit."
"Jesus Christ." He snatched my plate away from me and started cutting into my waffles with his fork.
"I don't want to be super-skinny, I just think if I lost - "
"Doesn't even matter what I say here, does it?"
" - twenty pounds or so ... What? Why are you looking at me like that?"
"This is my standard expression when I'm staring into an abyss."
"Don't blame me. I'm just a product of my misogynistic environment."
He stabbed a bite of waffles expertly with the fork. "Fucking hell."
"I don't - " But I couldn't finish what I was saying, because he shoved the bite in. The first thing I noticed was the warmth, followed by the sweetness of the caramelized pecans, then I chewed and the waffles crunched a bit before giving way to the pastry inside, fluffy and light and wonderful and accepting. I unwittingly made a vaguely sexual sound, then put my hand to my mouth. "Pardon me. Little foodgasm there."
He grinned, then dug back into his waffles before looking at me again, the smile replaced by a look of revelation. "Is that why you don't eat at work anymore? You're on a diet?"
I cut off another small bite with the side of my fork. "You noticed that I stopped eating at work?"
He nodded, then lowered his eyes. "I thought it was because you were too pissed off at me to eat my food."
There was a long moment of quiet, and I could feel the comfy confines of our bubble beginning to stretch.
So I popped it.
"I love you."
He raised his gaze to meet mine. He didn't look surprised, or freaked out, or anything, really, which meant he already knew. Which was fine.
"That's what's causing all the problems between us," I went on. "It's why I keep getting upset. It's why I decided to go to Europe. It's why the Stacy Easter thing tweaked me so bad. And tonight, when I was thinking about the brain tumor, I just realized how much it doesn't matter."
Tobias's face darkened with concern. "You have a brain tumor?"
I sighed. "No. But for a few moments tonight, I thought ... maybe. Maybe it's a brain tumor, maybe I'm going to die. And when I thought I was dying, I thought of you. I wanted to come right over here and spend what time I had left with you. And you know, whether I'm dying or getting on a plane, whether you love me back or not, I'm still leaving, and I want us to have time to say good-bye. The drama doesn't matter, and I don't care about it. I just want to be able to say good-bye, and I want to leave feeling like I did it right."
I stepped off the stool and gathered my plate and his, bringing them to the sink. I had just turned on the water when he grabbed my arm.
"Don't even think about arguing with me," I said. "You cooked, I clean. Them's the rules."
He whirled me around so fast, I hardly knew what was happening until the kiss was already underway. At first, his lips were soft and insistent upon mine, but then it caught fire, his tongue making magic against mine as his arms pulled me tight against him. My hands clawed at his back and he lifted me to sit on the counter, my legs open as he pressed against me, clutching at my shirt, balling the fabric in his fist as his other hand cradled the back of my head. It was the kind of kiss that makes your heart pound so hard you're dizzy when it's over, and when he finally pulled back from me, it took a moment for me to catch my breath. He put his hands on the counter on either side of me, holding himself up as he rested his forehead on my shoulder. Then he pushed himself back from me and I could tell by the expression on his face that I was probably going to want to hit him in a moment.
"What is it with you?" I said. "I swear to god, if you tell me you're married or a secret agent or something, I'm gonna brain you with that frying pan."
He raised his eyes to meet mine. "If I told you there was a good reason why this is a bad idea, would you just trust me and not ask why?"
"You mean, if you said that, but didn't tell me the good reason?"
His eyes met mine, and the look in them was pleading. "Can you please trust me? Can we do the dishes and go watch a movie and table this for just a little while longer?"
I nibbled my lip, and thought about it for a long moment. Could I trust him that whatever his reason for the extreme mixed signals was good and right? Trust him, even though he either couldn't or didn't want to tell me, despite the fact that neither of those realities was a good sign? Trust him, even though if Peach or Millie or Stacy came to me and said the man they loved was behaving like this, I'd tell them to beat him with something that gave a very satisfying thunk sound with every hit, and leave him conscious only so that he'd know it when they dumped his ass? Could I do that?
I guessed I could. For a little while, at least.
I hopped off the counter and said, "You dry." He smiled back in stark relief and we did the dishes, then watched the movie until I fell asleep chastely on his shoulder. I only woke up a little when he carried me into his room and laid me on his bed, and went back to the couch. I curled up into his bed and swallowed my disappointment that he hadn't joined me until, finally, I fell asleep again.