Page 33 of Satisfied By the Slime
I pull the quilt up to my chin with my free hand and let my eyes close again.
The numbers are still there behind my lids: four hundred twelve units, twenty-seven days, eighteen dollars in checking until the first Verdance payment clears.
They tick through my mind like the ceiling fan clicks through its rotation, steady and mechanical and impossible to fully silence.
But the couch is warm.
The quilt smells like Gram’s house—cedar and lanolin and the particular dust of the desert that never fully leaves anything, no matter how many times you wash it.
And the body beside me hums with a slow, tidal rhythm that presses against my ribs and sayshere, here, herewith every pulse.
I wonder what Gram would think.
Thank God she’s up north right now.
She winters here, tending her alpacas and selling felted animals at the Saturday market alongside my soaps.
Which means eventually I’ll have to face her.
Eventually she’ll take one keen-eyed look at me and know something’sdifferent, because Gram has always been able to read me like I’m printed in large type.
But she doesn’t usually arrive until later in the year.
I have time.
Time to figure out what this is.
Time to find the words for it, or at least words that don’t sound insane when spoken aloud to a woman who tried to imbue me with scripture and common sense.
I’ll figure this out.
And hopefully figuring this out doesn’t mean having to choose between Oz and my quiet, uneventful life.
I fall asleep between one breath and the next, my hand still resting against his surface, his glow dimming to match the dark.
Chapter 8
Supply Run
Maisie
Morning light finds me theway it always does: too early, too bright, and aimed directly at my left eye through the gap in the curtains I keep meaning to fix.
I blink against it.
The quilt is tangled around my legs.
And I feel unusually comfortable.
The couch cushion beside meis warm.
I turn my head, and Oz is there.
He’s flattened himself into a low and broad shape across the cushion. His glow has dimmed almost to nothing, and the pulse I fell asleep to has slowed to something glacial, one beat every few seconds.
Asleep. Or whatever slimes do instead of sleeping.
I ease myself upright, and my lower back twinges once, then settles.
