Perigee [bxb] | Bad Moon Book II

5; {Tisper}: doom-and-gloom

"I don't know what I expected from you, really," Tisper groused, Felix's arm like a dead snake around her neck, his weight dragging her down on the right side. He was rugged and edged, but there was still a graceful way about Felix. Something that made Tisper think of a villain in a crime thriller. A man who couldn't possibly be up to any good—but all the same, one that knew what he was doing. It was all lies. Felix wasn't graceful at all.

"Sorry to disappoint, princess," he said, each word a slow drag to the next, "but if ye' knew what was good for you, ye'd be drunk too."

"And what's that mean?" Tisper asked. Felix's sudden swaying turned her off-kilter and she staggered to hold up his weight.

He said something after that, but Felix's accent was so much thicker when he was drunk that Tisper couldn't understand it at all. She sighed and watched him in silence as they walked.

She'd noticed it in the wrangler on the way here. The strange, sharp shape of his profile. It was like he was from a different time, a fantasy place where on any night like this, he'd be charging into battle with a sword and a shield. Nicked in cuts and war scars, not wolf bites.

"You promised to help me with my aim," she told him. "You said if I got Jay here for you, you'd show me how to shoot straight on an archery bow." She'd slacked behind on her practice in the passing months. With the bow that Deva had given her, she could still strike a target dead center. But it was different with her archery set. Sometimes she aimed too high, sometimes too low. She wanted to be able to shoot with anything. She needed that versatility.

"So let's," Felix declared, his voice suddenly much louder than it needed to be. "Let's have a go." Tisper shushed him frantically as he brought his arms out in front of him and gestured in the air, like he was aiming a bow and reeling back the string "Fshwoop." He said, releasing.

"Quiet!" she hissed, wrenching his arm back down around her neck. "It's late, you're drunk. We'll fshwoop tomorrow."

"Aye, y'haven't seen me drunk. I'm sober as a fuckin' judge."

Again, Tisper tried to quiet him with a hush, heaving his large body toward the end of the hall.

"Cummins," she said as they neared the room that matched his card-key number. "Is that really your last name?"

"Why not," he replied with a cavernous laugh that made Tisper search his face for reason. When finally they stopped at his hotel room, she unwrapped his arm from her neck and swiped his card through the reader. "Okay," she said, "just who are you, Felix Cummins?"

Felix took the card from her fingers and slunk back against the door. "If God were to sneeze, what would you say?"

"What?"

"Can't say God bless you. That's just redundant."

Tisper gave him the strangest look she could manage. "What the hell are you talking about?" When Felix just looked at her in that drunken, knowing way, she shook her head. "You know what, I don't care—"

"Ahhh," Felix said. "See, there always seem to be two answers that question. I don't know and I don't care. If ye' believed in God, you'd have said 'I don't know'."

"What's the point of this?"

"Point is I learn one more thing about you and ye' still know nothing of me. It's the way I like it," he said. "Way it's always been. I like how its always been."

"So I'm not allowed to know anything about you?" Tisper asked. "Why? Because it'll ruin your whole, mysterious sidekick semblance?"

"No. Because it always ends one of two ways." He pressed his back to the door until it pushed partway open. "'I don't know' and 'I don't care'." Then Felix drifted backward inside, and his door shut with a finality.

Tisper stared at the number plaque for a stuttering moment, trying to work her head around what exactly he meant. When she decided she'd never understand drunk Felix anymore than she understood the sober one, she puffed out a tired sigh and dragged herself down the hall with an ache in her neck and a soreness in her spine. Lately, it felt like every moment of her life had been dedicated to someone else. She spent weeks after Julia's death, gathering Jaylin's things from the house. Photo books and Julia's antiques, the old yarn blankets she'd knitted together with one too many gaps in the threads, the home videos of baby Jaylin, catching crickets in the backyard.

Jaylin didn't step foot in the house after Julia's funeral. He didn't care about the things. He took his clothes back to his dorm room on campus and he let everything else die with her. Tisper refused to.

She knew better. She knew that, though Jaylin didn't care for photobooks or mementos right now, he would come to need them in time. He'd care about everything he left behind and he'd cherish it once the pain dimmed just a bit. Hell, she'd even paid for a storage unit to keep all of those things until they'd found him a new place after the school year was over.

But school ended and Jaylin stopped answering her phone calls. He must have been crashing on couches for weeks before she'd finally brought Felix along to wrangle him in. He hadn't given her so much as a thank you. Not that she needed one. She just needed to know he was okay. She hoped by now, he'd be a little okay, but he just seemed to be getting worse.

"He takes to you," a voice said from the end of the hall. Quentin looked a whole different man in that suit, his tie loose around his neck, his cello case propped on his back. "Alex called him my sidekick one time and I thought I was going to have to peel Felix away with a crowbar."

Just the sight of him was a deep breath of air for Tisper, after a long, long time without any. "You say that, but he's told me to fuck off a record breaking six times tonight. I'm not sure like is an emotion he can grapple with."

"That's just Felix," Quentin said. "How he shows he cares."

As tired as she was, Tisper laughed at that. It was a relief to see Quentin's smile. A reassuring pat on the back when everything around her had felt so doom-and-gloom. "Is this what you've been doing all this time?" she asked, finally close enough now to see the little scar on his lip. "Playing the cello?"

"Among other things."

She smiled sheepishly at him. "Jay couldn't stop staring. It's the first time he really seemed himself in months. When he heard your music. Maybe you can play him a song. Melt that icy heart of his."

Quentin slipped his thumb through the strap around his shoulder and smirked at her. One of those not-so-sure smiles of his. "Music fixes a lot of things. But it can't fix this." There was something else in his face when he said it. A flash of deep insecurity. The same kind of worry she'd been feeling. The fear that Jaylin wouldn't come back.

But how could he not come back to Quentin? They were talking nearly every day before Julia died. Even when Jaylin would stay the night at her apartment, he'd sneak off to the stoop to take Quentin's call, or to call himself if he couldn't wait for the phone to ring. She didn't know what they'd talked about, but she's watched his grin through her kitchen window. She'd heard his muffled laugh and seen the pinks on his cheeks when he came back in. It all felt like a dream now—so painfully surreal that she wondered sometimes if Jaylin was ever really like that at all.

"I wish it could," she said. "I know he needs time. I just miss him."

Quentin gave her that smile again, the one that didn't feel like a smile at all. "Get some rest for tomorrow. Qamar likes her meetings long and painful." But there was still a shadow of something uncertain that eclipsed Quentin's face. She caught the umbra of it as he turned to his room, five doors down from her own.

"Quentin, wait," she called out and Quentin paused there, his hand on the doorknob. "Something's not right, I can tell. What is it?"

Quentin gave her a glance over his shoulder and cracked the door open. "I can't sense him anymore," he said, the light from inside of the room striping his face. "I can't feel his heartbeat."

"Why not?" Tisper asked. "What does that mean?"

Quentin shrugged his shoulders and gave the door a push. "I don't know."

And once he disappeared inside, Tisper felt every bit of that doom-and-gloom swell up, like smoke in her heart.