Page 28 of For the Love of the Quest

“Your turn.” She held the pipe out to Edith, who took it as if it were going to grow teeth and bite her.

“What do I do?”

Thomasin swallowed. “Just breathe it in. Not too much the first time, though. Try to hold your breath afterward for as long as you can. It’ll feel weird, but you’ll get used to it.”

Edith brought the pipe to her lips but paused. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“Never.” Thomasin smiled and felt quite honored to be here for Edith’s very first foray into the beautiful world of mind-altering substances.

She closed her delicate lips around the pipe and breathed what was possibly the most shallow breath ever recorded in human history. Then exhaled near immediately after. “Did I do it?” Edith said eagerly.

Thomasin bit back her laugh. “You need to actually inhale the smoke. It won’t do anything if it doesn’t go further than your mouth.”

Edith nodded fervently and tried again. This time, she took a slightly longer pull and held her breath, her entire body going still, as if one wrong move could mess it up. Her eyes, locked in on Thomasin, watered, and her cheeks turned red before she finally sputtered out a puff of smoke. A coughing fit bent her over, and she held her hand to her chest as she tried to catch her breath.

“You okay?” Thomasin asked, taking the pipe that Edith held back out to her.

“Did I do it right that time?” she croaked between coughs.

Thomasin took a long drag. “You’re a prodigy.”

“I don’t feel anything.” Her face fell, shoulders slumping.

“Give it a second,” Thomasin promised. She could practically see Edith buzzing with anticipation and anxiety. Thomasin stretched out a leg and bumped her knee against Edith’s thigh. “Relax. You don’t want to get in your head.” She let her knee stay where it was, resting next to Edith’s leg. The other woman didn’t seem to mind.

Edith looked down, fidgeting with the frayed edges of the bedspread. “I don’t know how to not be in my head.”

“The hash is a good first step, I can promise you that.”

“I still don’t really—” She cut off in the middle of her sentence when she lifted her head and swayed slightly, bringing her hands up to press against her temples. Edith met Thomasin’s eyes, looking up at her through her thick lashes. Very solemnly, she said, “I think I am officially under the influence.”

Thomasin finally let herself burst out laughing.

Chapter Thirteen

They were sprawled across the bed, Edith’s feet propped up on the headboard and Thomasin’s hanging off the end. Their heads lay in the center of the bed, only inches apart from each other as they both stared up at the ceiling, entranced by the spiderweb pattern of cracks and rot.

Thomasin’s hair kept tickling Edith’s face. She giggled, batting the curls away. Edith’s own hair was loose around her shoulders. She reached across and started crisscrossing her blonde strands with Thomasin’s dark brown curls. The interlocking pattern of light and dark fascinated her. Her facing one way, Thomasin the other, the way they met in the middle. It reminded Edith of the yin-yang symbol she’d read about in one of her books. She couldn’t quite remember what it meant, though. She kept having thoughts, but when she’d try to follow the path of her thinking, she’d get lost. It was a happy kind of lost, though. It just meant she could jump right into the next thought. She was gloriously tethered to the moment.

The knot she’d tied with her and Thomasin’s hair undid itself. This made her frown for some reason. She felt Thomasin’s head lollagainst her shoulder. The other woman was watching her with heavy-lidded eyes. Her forefinger poked Edith’s lower lip.

“You’re sad?”

Edith laughed. “Your eyes are really bloodshot.”

“You’re one to talk.”

Pulling one of Thomasin’s curls closer to her face, she said, “You have really soft hair.”

Thomasin reached above her own head and stroked her hand across Edith’s hair like one might pet a cat. “You’re one to talk,” she repeated, which made them both fall into an inescapable fit of giggles.

“I wish my hair was curly like yours, though.” Edith pulled a curl and watched it snap back into a spiral.

“No, you don’t. Mine’s always a mess.”

“You just need to brush it more.”

Edith felt Thomasin’s head shake against her shoulder. “I never know what to do with all that girly stuff.”