Chapter Twenty-Four
PAXTON
*
"So what are you going to do?" Anna-Claire asked me as I polished off my second Cosmo, pushing the glass aside.
I shrugged. "I don't know. Crawl into a hole and die, I think."
"Come on, Paxton!" Anna-Claire punched me in the arm, made me turn to face her. "You've only been going out with this guy for what, a few weeks? You can't have fallen for him already, right?"
She saw my face, and her encouraging expression faded. "Oh, shit. You have fallen for him. How bad is it?"
I hesitated for a minute. I'd been feeding Anna-Claire tidbits about my developing relationship with Alex, but I hadn't given away his secret, his ability. I figured that it wasn't mine to share – but without explaining it to her, I'd have a hard time telling her why we had broken up.
Instead, I decided to just present it as if he was a bastard who'd wanted only to get in my pants. That cover story made sense, didn't it? After all, he'd left right after we spent our night together for the first time. But I only got half a dozen sentences into this story before Anna-Claire held up a hand to stop me.
"Paxton, you know what makes me so valuable to my company?" she asked, narrowing her eyes at me.
I shrugged. "Impeccable organizational skills?"
"No. Well, yes, but that's not the only part." She waved the compliment aside. "I've got a nose for bullshit, and I can tell when someone's holding something back from me." She leveled a finger at me. "And right now, you're keeping something big. So come on, tell me."
"I'm not sure if I can," I demurred.
"Really?" She reached out to scoop up my hand, pressing it in between both of hers. "Paxton, I'm your best friend. What sort of secret can't you share even with me? Especially after Alex stormed out on you! He doesn't seem like he deserves your loyalty any longer. While I've stood by your side for years and years, through thick and thin..."
"Oh, lay off the guilt trip," I sighed. "Fine, I'll tell you. But you have to promise that you won't interrupt until I finish, and you will keep an open mind. Okay?"
Anna-Claire raised an eyebrow, but nodded. "Deal. My lips are sealed until you tell me that I can talk again."
I took a deep breath, trying to figure out how to put this fantastical tale into something that would be halfway believable. I couldn't come up with anything, so I settled on just talking, trying to get out everything that I could, explain all my experiences. I watched with a sinking heart as Anna-Claire's eyebrows climbed higher and higher until they seemed about to disappear into her hairline, but she didn't interrupt me, letting me finish.
"Okay," I finally concluded. "I think that's about everything."
She blinked at me. One time, slowly closing and re-opening her eyes. She parted her lips, paused, pursed them for a moment, and then spoke.
"You're telling me," she began, "that Alex has the power to alter reality however he sees fit – except when it comes to you. This may be because he's a descendant of King Arthur. You're immune to this ability, and you take it away from him when you sleep with him."
"Yes."
"And he ran out on you this morning because he's scared of losing his power, and he's choosing it over you."
I shrugged. "I guess so."
"Wow." Anna-Claire straightened up, looking back forward at the bar in front of us, the rows of bottles stacked against the back mirror. "What an asshole," she declared, her voice filled with emphasis.
I shrugged. "Can you really blame him?" I asked miserably. "When he has to choose between having the power to literally do whatever he wants, or me. Doesn't seem like that tough of a choice, to be honest."
"Hey, stop beating yourself up like that!" Anna-Claire turned on me. "You are more than worth losing some stupid powers, which it sounds like he mostly squanders anyway! Why isn't he helping the world, doing all sorts of great deeds to fix poverty and end hunger and child cancer and stuff like that?"
I remembered asking Alex these same questions. He told me that he'd tried to fix things, but they always got worse in a different place. "Eventually, I just gave up on it all, because it felt like I was trying to plug holes in a boat made of Swiss cheese," he'd told me. "Every time I closed up one hole, two more would open. It seemed to just be making things worse. I was tearing my hair out with stress, feeling like it was all my fault whenever something bad happened. But even when I tried to fix it, something else just broke."
I relayed this to Anna-Claire, who brushed it off. "I don't buy it," she declared. "If he had that level of power, he could do more. Donate billions to charities, make sure that earthquakes and hurricanes don't hit cities, all sorts of stuff like that. He doesn't deserve you, that much is clear."
"Okay." I looked down at my empty drink, not feeling any better. The bartender stopped by and replaced the empty glass with a full one, but that didn't lift my spirits, either.
After another minute or two, Anna-Claire sighed once more. "Come on, there's something else you aren't telling me," she said. "Just spit it out, would you?"
"I don't know if it's real-"
She cut me off by pressing one finger against my lips. Grabbing me by the legs, she rotated me on my stool so that she could peer into my eyes – and then grimaced, apparently at what she saw reflected within. "Oh shit. You've really fallen in love with him, haven't you?"
"No. Maybe."
"That's a yes if I've ever heard one." She rolled her eyes. "But why, Paxton? He's a self-centered jerk."
"I don't dispute that." I lifted my eyes up to meet hers. "But he's more, too! He's sweet and caring once he opens up, and he's a lot more fragile than he seems. He really thinks about everything, even his powers, and he sometimes stays awake just beating himself up because he thinks that he could have done more to help someone. And when he looks at me..." I trailed off. How could I describe it?
When he looked at me, he seemed to see me as the only woman in the world. I caught him looking over at me sometimes, when I was poring over a book or focused on something else, and his green eyes would light up with warmth and affection. That warmth radiated out, bathing me and making me smile back at him, feeling his caring reach out to wrap around me, shielding me from the rest of the world like armor.
I didn't have the words to explain it to Anna-Claire. "Aren't you going to get in trouble for leaving work to come take me out to the bar?" I asked her, trying to shift the conversation away from my own woes of failed love.
She shrugged. "I've got plenty of sick days and vacation days – and I've also got dirt on, like, half the executive team. They won't try and get me in trouble, not knowing all the skeletons I could uncover from their closets." She smiled at me. "Sometimes it pays off to be the bitch at work."
"You're not a bitch," I told her loyally. "You're a good friend."
"Thanks." She reached out to drape one arm around my shoulders, pulling me in against her for a hug. "Now, finish your drink. You need to be sober enough to still have some sort of aim."
"Aim? Why?"
"Because we're going to stop by the grocery store, pick up a couple dozen eggs, and then go throw them at Alex's apartment," she said, smirking. "Teach him to dump a woman as great as you!"
"He lives on the penthouse," I pointed out. "I don't think we'll be able to hit that with eggs."
"Damn." Anna-Claire thought for a second. "We could go wrap his car up in shrink-wrap plastic. I hear that's a bitch to get off."
"No, that's okay." As much as I admired her determination to make Alex suffer, that wasn't really what I wanted. "I don't hate him, Anna-Claire. I know why he made the decision he did... I think."
A little part of me didn't understand, it was true. That little part of me, the eternal optimist, had held out hope right up until the end that he'd choose me, that he felt the same sort of warmth towards me that I experienced whenever I looked at him. If he felt anything like love towards me, more than just simple lust, maybe wouldn't have left. Maybe... just maybe, he would have considered giving up his powers for me.
But he hadn't chosen to do so, and egging his apartment or shrink-wrapping his car wouldn't do anything to change that. All I could do now was try to put him behind me.
After another drink, my head started to spin, and I begged off any more. "I think I'm just going to go home and go to sleep," I said, when Anna-Claire tried to convince me that the best way to get over Alex leaving me was to go out and flirt with some others. Inside my head, I suspected that rejection was not actually going to help me as much as she believed. "But thank you – you helped. And you'll keep Alex's secret to yourself, right?"
"I'm still not sure that I believe it," Anna-Claire admitted, "but if you do, then I guess I have to accept it as well. And yes, I'll keep it to myself." She laughed, a little more enthusiastically than usual, stepping back and nearly slipping off the curb outside the bar. "After all, it's not like anyone else will believe me if I tell them!"
She did have a point. I tried to imagine hearing about Alex's magical abilities without having the benefit of witnessing a live demonstration. I said goodbye to her, caught a cab back home, and tumbled into my bed.
Binky, my stuffed octopus, sat balanced on top of the headboard, where I'd left him. I grabbed him down, squeezed him tightly against my body as I lay on top of the tangled sheets. I still couldn't believe that I had him back, after so many years of him being lost forever. I turned him and held him up, pretending to stare into his plush eyes.
"What do I do now?" I asked it, not expecting a response.
There wasn't one coming, but I twitched him back and forth, making the stuffed little tentacles bounce against each other, and felt a little bit better. I gave Binky one last squeeze and then carefully replaced him back up on top of my bed's headboard, balanced where he could look down on me as I slept.
I closed my eyes, tried to take a nap, but sleep didn't seem interested in carrying me away. Instead, I dragged myself up after a few minutes, returned to my living room outside in the main area of the apartment.
There were still more photocopied pages there, pages that I hadn't yet read through. I felt tempted to sweep them all off the table, throw them in the trash. It wasn't as if Alex cared to hear the results any longer.
But I didn't. Perhaps it was because I'd invested such effort in them, or maybe it was because they were still a link, however tenuous, to the man. Instead, I dropped down into my seat at my little kitchen table, picked up one of the papers and blinked to try and clear the last lingering effects of drunkenness from my head.
I kept reading, working my way through the pages, struggling with the old script and archaic words. Bit by bit, I lost myself in the history and the words of the authors, forgetting about my own concerns, about Alex.