Nothing But Blackened Teeth(3)

“I didn’t insist anything.” I heard my voice constrict, the registers narrow so much, every syllable caught and was crushed together into a slurry. “I just thought—”

“You nearly cost me everything,” Talia said, still staccato in her rage.

“I had both your best interests at heart.”

“Are you sure?” Her expression shaded with pity. I glanced at the boys. “Or were you hoping to get Faiz back?”

We had dated—if you could call it that. Eight weeks, no chemistry, not even a kiss, and had we been older, our confidence less flimsy, less dependent on the perceived temperature of our reputations, we’d have known to end it sooner. Something came out of that, at least: a friendship. Guilt-bruised, gestated in the shambles of a stillborn romance. But a friendship nonetheless.

The light deepened in the house, blued where it broke into the corridors.

“I’m fucking sure of it. And Jesus, I don’t want your man,” I told her with as much detachment as I could scrounge, not wanting to sell Faiz short. Not after all this. “It’s been years since we were together and I don’t know what more you want from me. I’ve apologized. I’ve tried to make it up to you.”

Talia let a corner of her lips wither. “You could have stayed home.”

“Yeah, well.”

The sentence emptied into a surprised flutter of noises as the two guys—men, barely, and by definition rather than practice, their egos still too molten—came tumbling back from the periphery. Phillip had Faiz laughingly mounted on a shoulder, a half fireman carry with the latter’s elbow stabbed into the divot of Phillip’s collarbone. Faiz, he at first looked like he might have been grinning through the debacle, but the way his skin pulled upward from his teeth: that said different. It was a grimace, bared teeth restrained by a membrane of decorum.

“Put my husband down!” Talia fluted, reaching for her groom-to-be.

“I can handle it.” A snarling comeback without an anchor, in fact. Phillip could have kept Faiz suspended forever, but he relented as Talia curved a shoulder against him, arms raised like a supplicant. He set Faiz down and took a languid step back, thumbs hooked through his belt buckles, his grin still easy-as-you-please.

“Jackass,” said Faiz, dusting the indignity from himself.

“So tell me about this place, Phillip,” said Talia, voice billowing in volume, filling the room, the house and its dark. “Tell me this isn’t secretly Matsue Castle. Because I’ll kill myself if it is. I heard they buried a dancing girl in the walls and the castle shakes if anyone even thinks about dancing near it.”

The manor seemed to breathe in, drinking her promise. I could tell we all noticed it, all at once, but instead of hightailing it, we bent our heads like this was a baptism.

“The house might hold you to that,” I blurted before I could stop myself, and the sheer wrongness of the statement, the weird puppyish earnestness in its jump from my throat, made me cringe. A long year spent making acquaintances with the demons inside you, each new day a fresh covenant. It does things to you. More specifically, it undoes things inside you. To have to barter for the bravery to go outside, pick up the phone, spend ten minutes assured in the upward trajectory of your recovery: that the appointments are enough, that you can be enough, that one day, this will be enough to make things okay again. All those things change you.

Still, no one looked askance. If anything, the words lit something in their expression, the last light of the day etching their faces in rough shadows. Talia held my gaze, her eyes cold black water.

“Luckily,” Phillip, and stretched like a dog, long and lazy, completely unselfconscious. Scratched behind his ear, a smile crooking his lips. “This isn’t Matsue Castle.”

Faiz patted Talia’s arm. “Nah, not even Phillip could rent out a place like that.”

Phillip tried on abashment, complete with an honest-to-god aw-shucks toe scuffing, but it didn’t work. At this point, he’d been homecoming king, class valedictorian, debate captain, chess wunderkind, every type of impressive a boy could hope to be, king of kings in a palace of princes. Even when they try, guys like him can’t do self-effacing.

But they can be good sports.

“This is better.” I rolled my luggage up against a pillar, slouched carefully against the wood. Despite everything, I was warming to their enthusiasm, partially because it was so much easier to just go along with it, less lonely too. Media’s all about the gospel of the lone wolf, but the truth is we’re all just sheep.

“But what is this exactly?” said Faiz, ever meticulous when love was a mandrel in his deliberations. His fingers bangled Talia’s wrist and his smile creased from worry.

“Well.” Phillip gutted the word, unstrung it over twenty seconds. “My guy wouldn’t give me a name. He said he didn’t want anything on record in case—”

“Could have just told you over the phone,” said Faiz.

Phillip tapped the side of a finger to his temple. “Didn’t want it to be a ‘he said, they said’ thing either. He was a stickler for the rules.”

“I guess it is cultural,” said Faiz, full of knowing. His mother was Japanese, small-framed and smileless. “Makes sense.”

“We have a permit for this, though. Right?” said Talia, a wobble in her gilded prep-school inflections.