The Divine Gambit Ch. 05

5. A Short Time Coming

We had an awkward time arriving home, with the cabbie giving me a confused double-take as I bent down to climb into his car. Considering the state of my clothes, it was thoroughly deserved. Hell, it would've been perfectly reasonable to say that I needed to get another ride. Evgenia whispered that she had asked Cynthia to grab literally anything for me to wear while they were shopping. Returning to the apartment, I found myself absolutely exhausted and allowed my eyes to shut while we rode in the cab. I fleetingly wondered if I should go buy some gold or something similar to have around the apartment. Antonin didn't think it was exactly what would help recover my energy, and I certainly hadn't had any after I used my power Friday night, but it couldn't hurt. Cynthia had asked that final situational question intentionally, assuming I would simply be unable to resist the allure of material wealth. The only issue was that I was just too haggard to feel any ambition. I was too overwhelmed by everything that had changed to go out again.

I collapsed into the bed in my room before realizing that we were back in the apartment, my face digging into the pillow as I collapsed on my chest. My drowsy mind was pleasantly surprised that the sheets smelled fresh, faint hints of floral scents wafting into my nose. Beth must've followed me to the bedroom because I faintly heard her stripping off her clothes alongside the bed. Shortly, she was lying on my back, her petite body barely distinguishable from a heavy blanket, and I drifted off to sleep to the sound of her soft breathing and the comforting warmth of our connection.

When I awakened, I was mildly disappointed to recognize that I was alone. Not that it was fair to hold Beth hostage, but the physical contact and solidarity of someone else going through this insanity was comforting. There were a pair of nondescript grey sweatpants and an oversized black hoodie tossed onto the bed beside me, and wonderful smells emanated from the hallway. My stomach grumbled in anticipation. As my mind slowly returned from the depths of sleep, I could see it was still very much daytime outside, although the sunlight was fading to orange. That was good, as it meant I had only slept for an hour or two. At least, I hoped it wasn't now morning with the sun rising instead. I wasn't sure which way the sun rose from in this apartment.

I gathered up the new clothes and realized that, of course, Cynthia hadn't had my actual size when she bought them. I wasn't even able to give it to her. So, I went swimming in my oversized sweatpants on my way to the kitchen, even the drawstring struggling to hold them around my waist. Beth must've heard me stirring because I could feel anxiety coming over our connection. It was accompanied by other, less intense flecks of adoration, anticipation, love, and lust.

I wandered into the living room and saw Beth and Cynthia in the kitchen while Sam and Evgenia sat at the table. I understood where Beth's anxiety was coming from — she was cooking for me and wanted it to be perfect because it was her first time doing this. She needn't be worried — her intentions were way more meaningful to me than the actual quality of the meal, after all — but she sought perfection regardless. She felt it was vital for her to have something besides her body to offer. Which I could understand, but the fact that she didn't have any knowledge of this world and was going through this process at the same time as me was just as much a contribution as Sam's experience was. Her being in the same position of ignorance was valuable to me. She didn't see it that way.

I joined Evgenia and Sam at the table as Cynthia and Beth worked on the finishing touches. Sam scowled at my presence, and even a blind fish would have recognized her anger directed at me. Confusingly, the scent she was exuding was almost as intense with guilt and despair as it was with vitriol. She was heartbroken about something, even if she wanted to be angry at me about it. I didn't say anything and just listened to Cynthia instructing Beth on how to handle the cooking she was doing. Evgenia noticed the icy atmosphere growing and was perfectly content, existing without inserting herself in it, avoiding bringing any attention to herself. She also seemed to shun any interaction with me, leading to an uncomfortable silence at the table, contrasting harshly with Beth and Cynthia's carefree chatter in the kitchen.

Eventually, Beth served us. With Cynthia's guidance and support, they made chicken parmesan with pasta and garlic bread. The food was delectable, and after I told Beth my opinion, she glowed with pride. The conversation was substantial once Beth and Cynthia joined us, injecting their vitality into the dead air, but the topic was absolutely vapid. We talked about what things they had purchased for the apartment, which scents and brands of personal hygiene products the girls preferred, and what they liked on me. Sam avoided acknowledging anything I said, doing her best to avoid speaking after I did. Confusingly, she had no contempt for Beth and offered several suggestions for shampoos she could use for my hair since I would probably buy the cheapest available otherwise.

Eventually, dinner came to an end. Sam was still trying to kill me with her eyes any time she looked at me but also wracking herself with guilt over fantasizing about my death. I thought we had been friends, and I had no idea what I had done to change that in the last twenty-four hours. The previous evening, she had thanked me for being invited to stay here, and now she seemed prepared to either leave or remove my presence forcefully. I had recognized that it was related to my burgeoning relationship with Beth, but simple jealousy or distaste at my actions that had caused the situation wouldn't come attached with guilt. I needed more information, and only one person had any.

"Sam, can we talk?" I asked quietly while Beth took the dishes to the sink to rinse.

She sighed performatively, acting put out and offended at being forced to interact with me, but said, "Fine."

"I guess, in my room? Would that be alright?"

"If it has to be."

This was building up to be a lovely, pleasant conversation. I walked to my room, pulled the chair out from the desk, and tossed the clothes that would no longer fit me off of it. Sam sat down in the chair, and I looked at her. She shot daggers at me, but her eyes looked sad and tired instead of simply hateful. She no longer had the energy to maintain the fires of her anger, although she was trying. Which was good because I was also feeling tired. And overwhelmed and confused.

"Hi."

"What do you want?" She shot back at me. She didn't finish the sentence with an 'asshole,' but it certainly would've fit right in with her tone, alongside a slap to my face.

"What's causing this, Sam? Why are you upset with me? I don't know what I did, and I can't do right by you until I do. Last night you seemed happy, and now you're clearly bothered."

She sat silently for a few moments, her eyes burning a hole in my head. Eventually, she took a deep breath and spoke, but it wasn't with the tone I had expected, "I don't know. I'm sorry, J. It's not really fair to you, but I'm so angry with you. There's no way you could've known, not really." The hate she had been forcing out earlier broke, and guilt became the predominant emotion I could recognize. Loss and grief were recognizable in the cauldron of feelings Sam was brewing.

Unfortunately, what she had given was an unhelpful non-answer. She was angry with me for unjustifiable reasons, and she wanted to be mad at me despite knowing it was unfair, but she hadn't answered my question and told me why. "Could you explain any more? What did I do?"

Sam looked away from me and closed her eyes. "You were kind of my only friend when we were kids. It was hard for me. I really liked you. But you were a norm, and I was a witch's daughter with a pitiful but technically existing spark of magic. Turning you down when you asked me was one of the hardest things I've done. Romeo and Juliet shit — They would've killed you and punished me if I told you the truth." I could see now that she was softly crying, light tears dripping down her face. Her hands white-knuckled as she gripped at her pants while she spoke.

"I considered giving it up a couple of times, to abandon this world and join yours fully. I knew too much and for too long. The cost and skill for them to remove my memories and hide my magic from me were out of mom's reach. After a couple of times that I told you to leave me alone, you stopped pursuing me like that. But you were still my best friend — probably my only friend. Kyle was friendly to me because you were, and everyone else left me alone. You were the only one who tried to connect with me.

"Eventually, we graduated, and I got away from you. I thought it would be easier if you weren't there, trying to connect with me and humanize me every day. It wasn't. I got so fed up with all the games the powers play, the political maneuvering and the socialization for status, and the bullshit posturing they do. It's so exhausting and fake and calculating, and it made me miss your company all the more. You didn't know I had magic and didn't care — you wanted to be my friend because you knew I needed one. Your purity and honesty were just so painfully obvious once I had left them behind, and I knew I had hurt you when I rejected you. Mom and I are empaths — we can feel emotions; Mom can almost read minds with how precise her reading is and how experienced she is doing it — and feeling you hurting when I kept pushing you away was the worst.

"So I got a job, following in my mother's footsteps. Using our powers to help people transition into our world, making sure they wouldn't have to feel alone and scared in a place they didn't understand. Then, Friday night, some asshole was blasting his power to the heavens in a frankly disgusting show of egotistical arrogance. He kept me up all night with his display, so with my little government badge and a stubborn head of steam fueled by a lack of sleep, I followed his country-sized bonfire of power to his surprisingly modest apartment, and I was going to give him a damn good piece of my mind.

"It turns out it wasn't an asshole pushing as much as he could. It was a magnificent boy who had no idea what he was doing while he was trying to help a terrified, lost girl. It was the boy who I spent my childhood wishing I could chase. He had a source now! Not just that, but he had an overpowering, overwhelming, intoxicating spark burning so, so brightly. Just being in the same room as he was made me feel like a giddy schoolgirl again, and I wanted to just ask him out to lunch there and then so we could get back to my place, lose our clothes, and then get married and have a happily ever after.

"I could pursue what I wanted to at last! This boy was back in my life, and I could tell him the truth and show him who I was without hiding between the lines separating our worlds. But then, not even a day later, another girl is in love with him head over heels. She doesn't have all my baggage, and she hasn't spent a decade lying to him about who she was or forcing him away from her. She's cute and fun and perky and energetic and determined."

The tears were pouring down her face now. Her makeup was running, and she looked miserable. Sam had drawn her knees up into her chest, and she was rocking back and forth on the chair. I was scared she would either tear her pants with how hard she was grasping them or perhaps fall off of the chair, but I wasn't going to interrupt her now. She desperately needed to uncork all of this pent-up emotion.

"And then I can hear them going at it that night. She's going off like a firecracker. This guy I've spent years dreaming about is getting her going hard. That should be me in there. He should be doing that to me. And then the guy broke down my door, terrified that he'd somehow hurt her — he needed my help to fix it. The pure terror coming off you was disorienting even for me; There's no way anyone would believe that you weren't in love with her, too. I was jealous of her for a moment, even though I thought she was really hurt. I wanted you to get that scared over my well-being. I was envious of a girl I thought was inexplicably unconscious. But she was okay. Well, she was terrified that you had left her, but you hadn't really, so it was fine.

"I had a horrible thought there, and it was completely irrational, and I know you're not even capable of it. But standing in your room, with the inconcealable aftermath of the two of you fucking there, jealous as all hell of listening to it, I thought that you were just rubbing my face in the thing I couldn't have. You were laughing at me, getting revenge for when I had pushed you away and been a bitch to you years ago. It made me so angry. I know it wasn't true. You didn't even know I was interested, and when you knocked on my door last night, you probably would've died for her if it could have helped. You didn't even mean to knock on my door.

"But now, instead of being here with the boy of my dreams as he learns how powerful and special he is to everyone instead of just to me, I'm forced to watch while you're an inch out of my reach. It's not your fault, but to have my hopes crushed like that right in front of my face and then paraded around in front of me — I'm just so angry and upset. And I was an absolute cunt to you today, and instead of being unpleasant back or even just avoiding me like anyone else would've been, you brought me aside and asked how you could help. Fuck you, James. Why can't you just do something wrong so I can be angry with you and not feel awful about it?"

She practically screamed the last sentence at me, her voice raw and hoarse and her eyes bloodshot and puffy from crying, before burying her head in her knees and sobbing unrestrainedly. That was a lot to take in.

I slipped off the bed and wrapped my arms around her. Initially, she tried to push me away, but when I didn't immediately acquiesce, she melted into me and fully let go. Her cries were violent and loud, and they shook her entire body. I picked her up and sat down further on the bed. I pulled her into my chest and let her cry.

"What the fuck is wrong with you, James? I told you I was acting like a cunt to you for no reason, and you're holding me while I cry. Fuck you." Sam stuttered out her words as she tried to catch her breath. I looked into her eyes, and the rich deep blue looked back at me. I could probably drown in them. Her words were harsh, but the venom wasn't reaching her face anymore. She didn't want to be angry any longer.

"Just let it out, Sam."

"Fuck you. Let go of me. I hate you." She did not attempt to escape my embrace, staying pressed against my chest as I held her. We stayed there quietly, her tearfully releasing a decade of lies and a single night of torture in my arms for another ten minutes. I rubbed her back, and she whimpered into me.

"Why can't you get angry at me for being irrational so I can get over this?"

"Because you still need a friend. And I need a friend who knows your world. And everything you said makes sense. None of us caused this; it's just an unfortunate set of circumstances. It's okay to be angry and upset when you think you have something, or at least the opportunity to pursue something, and then it disappears in front of you. I don't want to give you a reason to be angry at me, and I don't want to be upset with you. You're my friend, and you're hurting, but being angry isn't going to help. Giving you a reason to be mad wouldn't help you get over this. It would just make it worse."

Sam's speech mainly had returned to normal as she recovered somewhat. "I can't even be angry at her. I want to be, so badly. It would make this so much easier if I could just be mad at one of you. I want to feel like she took you from me."

Sam sighed, a terrible and tortured release of air so infused with emotion that it practically burned my skin. "I talked with her a bit today while you slept. She said the best night's sleep she's had in years was last night, and the quick nap with you earlier was probably the second best. In a new bed, in a new room, in a new city, with a guy she literally just met. She said it was the first time she felt safe enough to sleep deeply that she could remember. Making dinner with my mother was the first time she had a positive interaction with a parental figure in a long, long time. She's a terrified kid no more guilty than you are. How could I hate her? I want to hold and protect her — and you're doing that perfectly already."

I was slightly worried about how the information I had learned this afternoon would go down. "Yeah... Sam, I should tell you this. The archivist thinks I made her my familiar. Just, not like any other familiar — I guess my connection with Beth runs both ways. So, I'm hers as well? I don't know. He wasn't even sure what to make of it. Said he wouldn't have believed it if we weren't sitting in front of him."

"Of course you did. Why did you have to be a super-powerful, special, unique mythical legend? Why couldn't you just have had a tiny amount of illusion proficiency or something so then I could date you and have a normal family and give my mom grandkids to grow up in a little suburban house. You were already special to me, and now I can't have you because you're special for everyone."

"I'm sorry."

Sam tried to deflect my apology by intentionally misconstruing my somewhat imprecise words. "God, you're such a dweeb. I'm here complaining that your life is too special and promising, and you're apologizing."

"No, Sam. I'm apologizing because you're in pain. I'm sorry that my decisions hurt you, even if I didn't know they would when I made them. You are one of my friends, the only one I've got now, and I don't like to see you in pain. I wish I could help you get through this."

She kissed me. She turned her torso, wrapped her arms around my neck, and planted her lips on mine. She kissed me hard, pressing herself entirely against me, her breasts squeezed against my chest as she clung needily to me. It was a kiss I had been desperately imagining for a long time, and it was, frankly, glorious. Being pressed against the girl who I had daydreamed about forever, holding her in my arms while the heat of her desire spread in the contact between our lips was rapturous.

Then she separated, and she had terror in her eyes. She mumbled, "Oh, fuck. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, you must hate me. Oh god, I've fucked everything up again." She bolted out of the room without offering me a chance to respond. I heard another door shut firmly — she must've run to her room. For a fleeting moment, I had forgotten all of my concerns and the complications of my new life, lost in her impulsive action. I hadn't given Beth a second thought while Sam had locked her lips with mine.

I sat on my bed, trying to figure out what exactly that conversation had accomplished and what I could even do about what I had learned. I spent a minute wandering the uncertainty of my mind when I heard movement in the room. Beth came in and gently shut the door behind herself.

"Hey," she said softly, "Are you alright? Don't lie to me, though. I know you're not."

I gave her half a smile, all I could muster, and she sat beside me on the bed.

She continued, saying, "Alright, I can feel that you feel bad about something, and I saw Sam run out of here crying and looking awful. What have you done? Did you hurt her?" The accusation in Beth's questions wasn't quite matched by her tone, but it did tell me that she was feeling protective of Sam. I was surprised, but at this point, almost everything that happened was surprising.