Page 21 of Live, Laugh, Lurk
I’d known this was coming. She’d talked about her old city regularly for as long as I’d known her. She’d made it clear that she wasn’t staying here long term. I’d known it, but I hadn’t believed it. I’d hoped I’d have longer to woo her, had been in denial that this day would ever actually come. Hearing her speak the words felt like a blow to the chest.
“Oh,” I said, my voice cracking despite my attempt to control my emotions. “Well, that’s… that’s great. Right?” I made myself say the words, easily hearing the lie in them anyway. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
I forced a smile even though it felt terrible. I didn’t feel like smiling. I felt like my heart was splintering into a million pieces. My sternum must have been splitting in two. My chest cavity wasbreaking open, ready to spill my internal contents all over the floor at her feet. I had been happily going about my life with it revolving around my work and my research, my beloved apple trees easily existing as the center of my universe. Solandis would occasionally drag me out for a night with our mutual friends or I’d spend a day with her daughter, whom I adored. Sometimes I played cards with Sidney’s vampire husband and his nocturnal co-workers. My life was fine. Until Lilith plunged into it with her alluring scent and her bright smiles, more illuminating than any lamplight. How would I attend our yoga classes without her sunny laughter as she fumbled a pose and collapsed on her mat? How would I come home in the morning and not have her comforting scent drifting up through the registers? How would I go on without her compassion and her stories, her intelligence and her wit? Without her whimpers and moans as she took me inside her body?
I couldn’t.
My life stretched out before me, dim and drab and lonely and entirely unappealing. But I forced a smile, because it’s what she wanted.
My alarm spiked higher as her face crumpled distressingly and she burst into tears, clutching her plant pot to her chest more tightly in my doorway.
“I don’t think it is,” she cried, and my heart hammered in my chest.
“What? What—what?” I stammered. My eyes were wide as I reached for her automatically, pulling her into my apartment and shutting the door behind her, taking her pot in one hand and guiding her to my couch with another. I sat down with the little pot on my lap and pulled her into the seat next to me, wrapping several arms around her and holding her against my side. “Talk to me,” I soothed, my mind racing.
“I don’t want to go home,” she sobbed, her tears leaking into my mane. I should have been disturbed, but I wasn’t. Her bodily fluids never bothered me the way everything else did.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. This was what she wanted. I knew it was.
“I hated this town. Hated it here. But I didn’t know anyone! Nothing was the same, and I felt so alone. All I could think about was biding my time until I could go back to my old life. But I don’t want to leave you.”
I nodded and held her closer. I didn’t want her to leave me either, but I couldn’t make this harder for her. Letting her talk through her feelings was the best thing I could do right now.
“I don’t want to leave this,” she sniffled, scrubbing under her eyes. “What do you want?” she asked, her gaze sharpening on mine.
I swallowed thickly, trying to decide how to answer. “I want you to be happy,” I said slowly, willing it to be true. I did want her to be happy, but not really, not if it meant her leaving.
“Do you want me to move home?” she asked bluntly.
“No.” My answer was automatic, the tiny word out in the open before my brain could even process that I’d spoken. But once it was, the floodgates were broken. “No. I want you to stay here and move in with me. I don’t ever want to be without you. I don’t want you to move home. I… I want this to be your home.”
Silence reigned as she took in my answer. She chewed on her lip for long enough that I feared she might damage it, and I reached up to tug it gently from her teeth. Lilith blew out a heavy breath and then nodded. “I need you to take care of my plant.”
I stared at her, unable to piece together what she was saying.
“While I go home and get my condo ready to sell,” she clarified. “Will you be capable of feeding those grubs to Patrick? I know you hate bugs,” she said with a hiccup from too many tears.
I carefully set the pot on the floor and then tackled Lilith onto the couch, pinning her beneath me as I kissed her over and over again. I would feed Patrick a thousand horrible bugs for this woman. She was going tolivewith me.
Epilogue
Alistair
“What are we goingto do with Patrick while Miela is here on Saturday?”
“I could always take him back to the orchard,” I offer. He won’t be able to get back inside my apartment—I actually bother to lock my windows, unlike Lilith. Patrick is living here of my own goodwill, and because I think—secretly—he makes my darling happy. She might huff and puff about him getting into her apartment repeatedly, but that’s just because she never caught on to the fact that the toadstools were the ones doing it. I think she considers him some kind of strange pet now.
“No, that’s okay,” she says quickly, confirming my suspicions, and glances past me toward my bedroom.Ourbedroom. “We can just move the pot into the bedroom and shut the door while she’s here, to spare him from more toddler harassment.” Miela’s aggressive affection for unsuspecting wildlife is genetically coded into her very being, as far as I can tell. She’s a potent mix of her mother’s sylvan affinity for small living things, as well asher mischievousness and sass, with a solid dose of her father’s orcish tenacity and temper. She couldn’t be more perfect.
“What time is Hyrak bringing her?” Lilith asks.
“Before his shift starts at noon,” I tell her as I unpack her drink from the sack I’m holding. “I just told the barista to make you your regular.”
“Oh, thank you! Hey, what’s the deal with you and Hyrak, anyway? Things seemed a little tense that one night at the bar. Is he jealous of your friendship with Solandis?”
“He is an orc,” I answer with a shrug. Orcs are well known for their ferocious jealousy of their mates. Hyrak isn’t a full-blooded orc, and thankfully, his instincts seem to fall on the milder side. I’ve known some rather bestial orcs, but I have to admit his frontal cortex is a little more developed than usual. “Don’t worry,” I assure her. “We have an understanding.”
“What’s that?” she asks, taking a sip of her smoothie. “Oh, that’s delicious. He made it perfectly,” she murmurs, her pleasure over even this small thing thrilling me to my core. “Do you mean, like, that you’re Solandis’s best friend and Hyrak is her lover and you should support each other? That’s really mature—”
