“So it’s getting worse,” she said.
“No,” Ian replied immediately and sighed. “Except that it sort of is. But he said the tea and the lotion will help.”
“For how long, though? Nothing lasts forever. And he’s what, going to supply me out of the goodness of his heart?”
Ian looked uncomfortable. “I asked him about that. I told him that I’d pay whatever he wanted.”
“Why?” Cleo interjected. “Why would you say that?”
Ian’s face closed. “Because… I would.”
Cleo loosed a breathless laugh; her chest felt tight. “But why would you say that? We’re not… Goddess, Ian, we’re just fucking. We’re not… it’s not like it means anything.”
“It means something to me,” he said evenly. “I bet we’d have something, if you just let us.”
“I’m a bad bet.”
“It’s my decision to make, though, isn’t it? You don’t get to decide this for me.”
The bands around Cleo’s chest squeezed tighter. “I’m not deciding for you. I’m deciding for myself. We fucked because it might help the curse. It didn’t help. It made things worse. I’m not going to see what happens now that the curse is worse.”
“Are you scared?” It wasn’t a taunt. Just a question, simply asked.
“Of course I’m scared. I’d be an idiot to not be scared. But this isn’t the time for me to… what, start a relationship?” Cleo was incredulous. This isn’t what he thought was happening, right? The bands around her heart compressed again, and she realized, this wasn’t just emotional pain. She grimaced and her hands pressed her ribcage.
“Look,” she whispered, “even talking about this hurts. Physically hurts. Just… go away, Ian. Let me figure this out.”
“I can help,” he started, but she cut him off.
“No, you really can’t. Just go. I need you to leave, and not come back.” She ruthlessly squashed the tears that threatened to spill. If she cried in front of him he’d never leave. He’d try to fix it, to make it better for her.
Ian stood, and again, she couldn’t help but notice how he filled the space. “My ex-wife divorced me because she said I was worthless to her,” he bit out. “You’re telling me the same thing. I can’t believe this, Cleo. I really can’t.”
Cleo made herself say to Ian, “Believe it.”
He made a disgusted noise and left the kitchen. His heavy footsteps filled the house, and when he shut the door, he did it very quietly.
Cleo was finally alone in her house, but it was nothing like she’d wanted.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Cleo floated through the next few days. She slept a lot. She delivered produce to her chefs. She walked through her woods. This time, however, the hummed song of the greenspace failed to comfort her. She felt curiously apart from it, like the connection she’d had with her woods was a fond memory that happened a long time past.
She didn’t see Ian, but she heard him in his shed. He must’ve been working furiously, because the whine of the saw cut through the air morning and night. Cleo tried to stop thinking about the hurt in his eyes when he left and mostly succeeded. Sort of. Occasionally.
Agnes and Grant stopped by three days after… everything, but Cleo didn’t think they arrived together. They had the vague air of delighted surprise when they walked through Cleo’s house. She was in the back, checking the settings on her auto-watering system. She’d kept slathering on Dante’s lotion and drinking gallons of tea, but she didn’t trust it anymore. The ritual hadn’t worked, who was to say when (not if, but when) this would stop working? Cleo kept her responses cool to the point of rudeness and they both left with hurt, uneasy expressions. Cleo wanted to apologize; it was on the tip of her tongue. But her tongue was connected to the rest of her, and thus, couldn’t be trusted. It was better this way, she told herself. The distance she cultivated before was better. At least then they could stay in her life.
Siobhan was gone for long stretches during the day. Cleo had texted her to get her car back when she needed to make deliveries to her chefs, and Siobhan never responded. The car would be there when Cleo had requested it, so apparently her sister got her texts. This was just another point of tenuous connection that Cleo had to defray: they had their two weeks before the ritual of chatting and dinners, and now they’d reverted to absence and silence. Siobhan had definitely stopped drinking the tea. Cleo suspected that Siobhan was talking to Dante, but that was pure conjecture. Cleo just didn’t know, and didn’t ask.
Cleo wanted to say she was too numb to hurt but that was a lie. It hurt. But she shoved it aside and under all the other little wounds she’d accumulated over the years. She’d get used to it. She always did.
Cleo spent most of her days outside now, ignoring the sounds from Ian’s workshop, pulling weeds in the garden surrounding her yard, or wandering deep in the woods. She felt floaty and disconnected, and she wanted to ask Dante if it was the result of the change in the curse or in the combination of the tea and the cream. Maybe she was so magically doped up that it muted her affinity.
She wasn’t sleeping at night, and it made her thoughts thick, slow, and hard to process. Cleo hated feeling dumb, but there was nothing for it. She alternated between freezing at night, breathing through the pain, and shifting to find a comfortable position. ‘Comfortable’ position, Cleo wanted to laugh. There was nothing comfortable about these days lately.
She definitely needed this cream, though. If she went too long between doses, she’d feel a weird, peculiar twist, like her skin was warping and sinking. It tugged on something in her mind, too, and she swung
