Persona-lity Novel | Part 4, Chapter 32: The Mug

The mug hit the floor before she even knew she'd thrown it.

Elena looked at the pieces and didn't move. The tea spread between the shards in a slow dark pool and she watched it the way you watch something that doesn't concern you. Her hands were still shaking. The shaking had been there since the news ran the first time and it hadn't stopped and she didn't know what to do with hands that wouldn't stay still so she just let them shake.

"Raul."

He was at the kitchen table. Laptop closed. He hadn't moved in a long time.

"Raul." Her voice came out wrong. Too thin. "Where is he."

He didn't answer. She already knew he didn't have an answer. She crossed the room anyway.

"He was fine," she said. "He was fine until—"

She stopped. She started again.

"You kept playing those videos." The words were coming out of her in a direction she hadn't chosen. She could hear herself and she couldn't stop it, the way you can't stop a sentence once the first word is out. "You sat here with your headphones and your Feldup videos and your Créteil memories and you made him — you made him go somewhere I couldn't follow. You made him nostalgic for something he couldn't go back to and then—"

"Elena—"

"Don't." She grabbed the front of his hoodie. Her knuckles were white. She was close enough to see the exhaustion in his face, the particular flatness of someone who has been holding things for too long, and she didn't stop. "You were supposed to be the anchor. That was the arrangement. I paint, he fights, you keep us from drifting. That was the whole thing."

Raul didn't move.

"You were supposed to watch him," she said. Her voice cracked on the last word and she hated it for cracking. "You were right there. You were always right there. How did you not—"

"I know."

"Don't say I know like that. Don't do that. Fight me." She shook him once, hard, and his head moved and he let it. He just looked at her. "Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me it's not your fault. Tell me something."

"I can't tell you you're wrong," he said. Quietly. The way he said everything — like the volume cost something. "I was right there. I watched it. I watched the timing go off at sparring and I watched him come home and I watched him go to the pharmacy and I—" He stopped. "I knew and I didn't name it. I thought if I named it it would become real."

"It was already real!"

"I know."

She let go of him. She stepped back. She needed to break something else and there was nothing left in reach and that was the worst part — the anger with nowhere to go, the pressure with no release valve, her hands still shaking.

The slashed canvas of Broken Sky was behind her. She'd done that earlier. She didn't remember doing it. The palette knife was somewhere on the floor.

"Say something useful," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. "Say anything useful. Tell me what we do now. Tell me there's something to do."

Raul looked at her for a long moment.

Then he stood up.

He moved slowly, the way he did everything — no urgency, no announcement — and he stepped into her space and put his arms around her and pulled her in.

She went rigid immediately. Every muscle in her body said no, said fight, said this isn't what we're doing right now. She had her hands braced against his chest and she could have pushed him off easily and she didn't.

His heartbeat was right there against her ear. Steady. Too steady. Annoyingly steady.

The palette knife was somewhere on the floor. The tea was still spreading between the broken pieces of the mug. The news would run again in an hour. None of that changed.

But Raul was warm. He was just — warm. The kind of warm that wasn't about comfort or strategy, just the plain fact of a body that was still here, still solid, still present in the specific way he had always been present — without announcement, without asking to be thanked for it.

The rigidity in her shoulders went slowly. She didn't decide to let it go. It just went.

Her forehead dropped against his shoulder.

"He's really gone," she said. Into the fabric of his hoodie. Not a question.

Raul's arms tightened slightly. He didn't say anything for a moment. Outside the window Chicago went on.

"He's gone," he said.

She didn't cry. The crying wasn't available yet — it was behind something, behind all the broken things, behind the anger that had been doing the work of grief for days. She just stood there and breathed and let him hold her weight.

After a while Raul said, very quietly:

"The pizza's getting cold."

Elena laughed. It came out wrong, too sudden, almost a sob. She didn't pull away.

"I know," she said.

Neither of them moved toward the kitchen.

✻ ✻ ✻

Later she would think about what he'd said — I thought if I named it it would become real — and she would understand it completely, which was the worst part. She had been doing the same thing. They had both been standing next to something and looking slightly to the left of it, the way you don't look directly at something bright, and by the time they looked directly at it there was nothing left to see.

She didn't apologize that night. She didn't know how to apologize for things that came from grief, for the words that flew out of her when the pressure got too high — she had been doing that her whole life and she had never figured out the right words for after. But she moved to the kitchen eventually and stood next to Raul while he reheated the pizza without comment, and when he handed her a plate she took it, and that was the language they had, and it was enough.

The cabinet above the glasses stayed open.

The news ran again at eleven.

They watched it with the sound off.