It's
the first thing Avett decides to point out when he sees her. He'd asked
to come over to her house out in Louisa, and she'd agreed. She's got no
idea why she agreed because there's absolutely fucking nothing to do in
Louisa at all. It's a place for Humans. A place where Humans go to live
in houses that look like houses from Earth to do nothing until they die
of old age. Lili hates it here, but free housing is free housing.
Case
in point, they're sitting on the couch of her living room doing
nothing. Lili rakes a hand through her hair. She'd asked for a shoulder
cut, and the hairdresser had given her a weird, uneven bob that she
fixed up herself earlier this morning.
"Yeah," she says.
He scratches the back of his neck. "It looks good on you."
He
says that for a lot of things. Everything she's worn, it's always been
'good on her.' Like a weird, insecure high schooler, she finds herself
wondering if he actually means it. He'd said it when she wore her
Rilakkuma hoodie on their first date. He'd said it when she wore her
funny Gudetama shirt on their second. Once she managed to discreetly
wear her pyjamas out in public for the hell of it, and he'd said she
looked good. Granted, she'd done an excellent job of hiding it, but her
point still stands—what a weird thing to get insecure over.
This
doesn't change the fact that they're just sitting on her couch for no
reason at all. Even Avett's started browsing his phone. She wonders what
he's here for.
And then she realises, in no uncertain terms, what he's here for.
A
blush creeps up her face. Her mouth goes dry; her chest starts
squeezing. His fingernails have been trimmed down to the skin. Does he
always trim his nails, or did he just do them yesterday on whim? How does he
plan on doing it? On bringing it up?
"Um, Lili." Avett switches off his phone and glances back at Lili. There's something in his eyes that she can't quite place.
She stiffens. "Yeah?"
He
drifts off to the side. He's looking at a book that's been placed on
the fireplace. At the homemade calendar above it. At the little photo
block she'd printed at the stationary warehouse for fun the other week.
He says, "I remember trying to use your camera when we first met. It didn't really work out—but I'd like to try it again."
It
feels like a weight has been both simultaneously dropped onto her
shoulders and taken off her chest. She peels herself from the couch and
steps into the corridor, motioning for Avett to follow. Once she's
there, she takes a key and unlocks the door to the right.
Before she opens it all the way, she says, "There's a lot of mess in this room. Be careful making your way around things, okay?"
His tail raises behind him and wavers in the air. "I don't trip," he says. "It's not in my genes."
"You do. On the first day we met, you tripped into the carriage."
He
swats Lili on the arm with his tail lightly. It's occurred to her that
she's never touched his tail before, let alone anyone's tail. She finds
that it is soft yet firm, like a paintbrush made for watercolours.
Fighting
back a blush, she opens the door… and winces. It really is a mess in
here. Boxes of photo albums topple over each other. Some balance neatly
over the kit lenses she’s collected over the years; others splay their
innards against the floor. One such photo shows the Taj Mahal with one
of its ivory pillars sliced straight down the middle. She quickly makes
her way over to it and picks it up.
Avett just gapes at the room. “Woah.”
Tiptoeing
over the rest of the room, she makes her way towards a table. A large,
bulky camera sits on top of a pile of neatly stacked photo albums. She
grabs it by its lens and hands it over to Avett by the strap. When he
doesn’t immediately put the strap over his neck, she does it for him.
His closeness makes her jitter.
His hands fit perfectly over the handgrip and dials. She’s all too eager to step back.
“How do I turn it on?” he asks.
Lili slides her finger over the topmost dial and flicks it down. The display lights to life.
She
watches him explore the intricacies of the DSLR, his fingers finding
the soft rotundity of the shutter button, his hands wrapping around the
barrel of her lens like he could hold the light of the endless stars in
his palms alone.
His voice brings her back. “So how do I do it again?”
Lili keeps her hands behind her back. “Push it to auto.”
A grin. “No, how do I really use it?”
“Uh.”
“I’m
a mechanic, Lili.” He takes the other dial in his forefinger and thumb
and clicks it one segment over to ‘M.’ “I learn fast. It’s my job.”
He
goes over to the window and sits down, his back leaning against the
glass. Lili follows him. They pass the camera between their laps.
“That’s
ISO,” she starts. “It changes how bright your image is, but higher
numbers mean more grain. Since there’s a lot of natural light in this
room, I’m keeping it to four-hundred. Here’s shutter speed. Don’t let it
go under a hundredth of a second, or you’ll end up with motion blur.”
“What about this one?” he asks—his thumb brushes over the button for aperture. Lili swallows.
“It’s…
kind of hard to explain.” Her shoulder bumps against his as she leans
over. “The smaller the aperture, the more light you’ll let in, but the
background goes blurry if you do.”
Suddenly, Avett jerks away
from her. He skims the pad of his forefinger against the main dial, aims
the camera at Lili, half-presses the shutter button and takes his
photo.
He turns the camera around. It’s a photo of her. He's
taken it at a low aperture so that the boxes of photo albums around her
are blurred into blobby lights. “Like that?” he asks.
“Yeah.” She nods. She’s not used to seeing herself on her own camera. “Try taking one with a higher aperture, maybe.”
He
toys with the dials until he’s happy with the settings and retakes the
photo. A frown graces his features when he sees the image.
Again.
He flicks the dials and brings the camera up to his eye. She hears the
sound of the shutter again. He’s still not pleased with the results.
He’s inching forward, covering the distance between them with his knees.
“You have to line the white arrow around in the centre,” she
blurts out. It’s no good. She doesn’t recognise her own voice at all.
It’s no good at all.
“It is in the centre,” he retorts.
She
doesn’t ask why he’s taking so many. She doesn’t ask why he’s
practically leaning over her, her DSLR in one hand, his other braced
against the white wall behind her. She doesn’t ask what he’s taking
photos of, or why he wants them all to be of Lili, because she’s already
well aware of his answer. And the answer, she realises, burns like
blunt force trauma to her ribs.
Avett asks a lot of questions,
naturally. He asks if he can take a photo of her eyes. Of her square,
callused hands. Of her uncut nails. It reminds her of how his own nails
have been trimmed down. He asks to take a photo of her bare stomach. A
photo of her thighs. Her inner thighs. The answer had been yes: a nod of
her head, a hardly-there whisper of affirmation. The answer is yes, to
everything and everything he’ll ever ask.
When he asks to kiss
her, she leans into it first. She hasn’t kissed him since the night
after the bar when she’d been shot in the head. He still tastes the
same—she marvels at this. As if he’d ever change so drastically and
suddenly within a month. The camera prods into her stomach, and so does
something else. He lifts it over his head. He lifts his shirt along with
it.
“Fuck,” he breathes. “I think I’m in love.”
His tail
brushes over her thigh—she grabs it, and again, she marvels at the
mundane sublimity of the way each filament gives way to her fingers.
When she reaches the spot where his fur dissipates into skin and spine,
he shudders—and places his palm along the hem of her pants.
Then
there are those questions again. Can I? His fingers dive below her
waist. Can I? Lili finds herself shivering from the heat of it all. Can
I? He kisses her to distract her from the pain, but Lili doesn’t care
about the pain at all, only that Avett is right beside her, and he's not
going to leave until she asks him to.
Her words of assurance
become dazed; they blur into something new, something she’s not familiar
with despite it being her own voice. They muffle into his mouth. Avett
just keeps calling her beautiful between breaths, keeps telling her how
well she’s doing, keeps asking those same questions over and over, but
she doesn’t catch any of it at all.
She turns her attention to the window. The sky looks like it could be on fire.
—
Lili
isn’t quite sure of when they’d moved to her bed, but she’s not
surprised to find Avett’s arm draped over her shoulders and over the
blanket. When she looks out of the window, she finds that the sky is
clear—and that the moon is still high above the world.
She turns her head slightly. Avett’s eyes are closed. His ears are drooping. He is breathing slowly and deeply.
Lili takes his arm and eases it away from her.
Taking
the hoodie that she’d thrown onto the bedpost earlier and a pair of
shorts, she hops out of bed and makes her way across her bedroom.
Avett’s clothes—a white shirt, his jeans, his weird boxers with love
hearts all over it—are all over the floor. So are hers.
In two
heartbeats, she’s opened and closed the door to her house. In three,
she’s standing in her backyard. The grass kisses her feet with their
jagged blades. The wind laps at her cropped hair. Her hand feels the
chill of her blaster’s handgrip. When she brings it up to the moon, she
sees the azure glow of the battery chamber.
She aims at the
ceramic plate she’d hung onto her tree a month ago. She misses. On the
second try, she shatters the china. The pieces fall to the ground and
hit the earth soundlessly.
She shoots at a garden gnome. Its red cone hat flies off, revealing the bone-white hollow underneath.
Then
stands there, just stands there forever, revelling in her destruction.
Feeling neither black nor white nor grey but on the cusp of being real.
She brings the blaster up to her head. She shuts her eyes—the barrel
bites into her forehead. The chamber is loaded.
Lili stands
there for a while, not knowing what to do. So she relishes the sensation
of death. When she wills herself into slow, deep breaths, she can
pretend that it’s just her, her heartbeat, the blaster, and the narrow
slip of the afterlife. Like it always should have been.
Everything revolves around this one shot.
She could do it. It could happen. That’s the best part.
Her
finger shakes against the trigger. She feels her ether instinctively
rush to her head, but she clamps down on it like she's holding back a
scream. It actually physically hurts her to do so. She finds it all so
ironic that her body is all too ready to inherently reject the ultimate
thrill, but she doesn’t mind. The abject loss of control is par for the
course. It’s when she doesn’t feel like she’s in command of her own body
anymore in the face of death that she feels well and truly alive.
Only
ten more seconds. She’ll allow herself ten more seconds, then she’ll
take the barrel away from her head and forget about all of this and go
back to sleep.
But then her heart nearly stills when she hears
the scream of someone she knows all too well. She’s about to lower her
blaster when he wraps his hands around hers instead. He’s so warm behind
her. He’s choking back sobs. He’s crying.
She drops the blaster.
“Why would you do this?” he whimpers against her neck. His chest shudders against the small of her back.
Suddenly,
she realises that the situation that she’s in looks absolutely
horrible, but the answer she’ll have to give him soon probably isn’t any
better. She feels limp in his touch.
“I like it,” she decides on saying.
“I don’t get it,” he says.
She repeats, “I like the thrill of dying.”
“I don’t get it,” he says again.
“There are…” She struggles to find the words. “…not a lot of things that I like more than the excitement of escaping death.”
He holds her tighter. Then tighter still.
“I
don’t get it,” he says. He says it over and over until his soft voice
becomes an echo in her head. She doesn’t understand it either. But she
doesn’t tell him that.
Instead, she says, “I think I might be going back to Earth.”
He stops. “Back to Earth…?”
“Yeah."
She cranes her head back and looks at him right in the eyes. "They want
me back. I’ve been enlisted in an S-ranking ship. I’m not quite there
yet, but they say that I’ll grow into it.”
“You didn’t tell me?”
“Sorry. It’s all happening in two weeks. They just told me.”
“At 3 AM?”
“It’s not 3 AM back on Earth.”
“So… you’re just?”
“Yeah.” She nods. “Yeah.”
Tentatively
and slowly, he just kisses her again. It’s hardly chaste at all, but
Lili knows something is missing. And when Avett leads her back inside
and underneath the covers, she realises, exactly, what it is.
It’s her. She is missing.