Quibble runs after Wilder. He knows everyone can hear the thunking of his feet whamming down the stairs and he doesn’t care.
When someone enters his life, he is convinced they will perish. That ever-present but unnamed feeling drives his actions until he manages to convince it to give up the wheel. When it comes to Artemis, for instance, he has learned with enough time and enough showing up that he need not be in perpetual mourning. With Mary Margaret, he is warier. He knows that she is tough but he sometimes doesn’t know quite what to do with how delicate she is in his perception, so he is just quiet. Steady as he can be without ever verbalizing that he is afraid she is going to die. With his witch family, he has got this.
As with most things related to attachment, doing a romantic relationship puts it on hard mode.
He feels the familiar thunk-hiss in his gut when Wilder storms out the door. The one that says, Welp, that bitch is dead now, I guess. Glibness and all, because that is how Quibble prepares for imminent death: trivializes it. And he walks out the door anyhow, because that is how much therapy Quibble has had.
Wilder walks a tight circle around Mia’s truck. They want to kick the truck, but they know if they kick the truck, it will hurt and they will be proving Artemis’s point. Childish.
“She had no reason to talk to you like that,” Quibble begins.
Wilder snorts. “Yes, she did.”
“No, she absolutely did no—”
“Yes,” Wilder says, firm. “She did. I am squandering it. I am fucking around.”
Quibble’s feelings are immediately hurt. “Are you really? Are you really just fucking around?”
Wilder looks to the ground. “Come on, Quibble,” they say without looking up. “I didn’t mean it like that.” They take a breath. “But yeah, I’m afraid I am. I want to be done. I want to avoid all this.” They gesture to the house and the grounds. “And—I don’t know. I’m using you, for sure. To skip steps. To make this feel finished when it’s not.” This isn’t entirely true. But it will get Quibble to leave them alone so they can rot in their own guilt-fester privately. Because above all, they are so fucking embarrassed.
“Fine,” Quibble says. He turns to storm off in the direction of the creek and bumps smack into Mia, who is holding two mid-morning beers and also coming after Wilder.
Mia grabs his arm and says, “No, don’t go that way.”
“Why?” he asks.
“Just don’t,” Mia replies, and then walks toward the truck, where Wilder has plopped.
“Okay,” he whispers to himself. It is a grumble of a whisper; he loves hearing it. He talks to himself, low and slow, frequently, just to feel the bass of it in his body, in his chest. He feels (it must be said) really fucking sorry for himself. He walks in the opposite direction, away from the creek and toward the distant mountains, hairy with evergreens and still, at the tops, dusty with snow even as Quibble can hear the trickle of running melt in the valley.
He realizes with a pang that he’s heading toward the “what’s out there” field. Where he swore he could see fireflies float, beckon. In the cold, hard light of day, he examines his own desire and finds he still wants to go. To find out.
He emerges from a copse of sweet-smelling pines onto a field in full bloom. Wildflowers. Purples, yellows, whites, the frills of tiny petals and botany bells, all against a cloudless sky. He gasps. His instinct is to grab his phone, take a photo, look up whether it is okay to walk among the colors. But when he reaches for his pocket, he remembers.
He feels feelings in two different directions. The first direction: a profound sadness at the impact of the Hex, that he is so disconnected. That he can’t capture it in a photo, something to remember this unmitigated joy. The second direction: elation. This moment, the moment of small floral faces winking up at him, the stumble-upon-ness of it, will forever go unspoiled by technology. It is this second direction that is confusing—because what are we doing in this world, he wonders, if it takes a Hex to open the road, to unmelt the path to this pure, unadulterated feeling of joy?
The field of flowers is waist-high and he prays the ticks aren’t out yet because he cannot help but step into the high grass. It is like walking into water without the wet. He skims his hands over the plants, occasionally bending to smell each individual bloom, to see if they are different. He finds a rock, an island in the painted field, and sits, blinking at the morning light, the softly swaying stems in the occasional breeze. He needs to show Wilder this place. This rock. He needs to kiss them on it, to touch the small of their back, squeeze their shoulders, lick their lips. The fecundity of it all is not helping with the onset of his very horny season.
Thinking about Wilder presses tears at the back of his throat. He hadn’t thought they were just fucking around. The building of something between them felt important. Yes, maybe not as important as saving the world. But Quibble can’t save the world, can he? Quibble can’t do shit. So this—this was his important thing. And to Wilder, he guesses it was just a thing.
He does everything the therapist told him to do, but he hasn’t seen her in so long and the skills have eroded. He reminds himself that he does not actually know what Wilder meant in that heightened state, that he can’t assume their feelings. He says all those things to himself knowing they are fake things. That he will, inevitably, be visited by the worst-case scenario. He is not done with Wilder, but Wilder is done with him. Absent anything else to do, he returns to the wildflowers.
This time, instead of walking into the grass, he crawls. He wants the feeling of being enveloped, of everything growing tall above his head. He lies on his back. He looks at the sky. He breathes deeply, feels the places his body connects with the ground. The back of his head, his shoulders, his hips, his ass, his heels through his shoes. He presses his back into the dirt; he wants to feel supported. It is in this press that he feels strongly in two different directions once again. A field of nuance, he’s found. Or rather he is always nuance, always fighting with himself; this is a field of naming. Of articulation. Of unconscious made conscious. First direction: the heaviness of rejection, the sadness of discovering this place alone, the nagging thought of mortality, of eventually being buried in this ground and seeing nothing, none of this, the realization that he doesn’t know if his own demise is something the Hex is capable of hastening. Second direction: the lightness of presence, his body and mind a stone skipping over the grass-water, the push into the ground propelling him into the candy-blue sky, elation all over again, the joy of knowing exactly where his body is in space and understanding that he cannot be lost if he is lying right here.
He gets hard. But this time, instead of a manic rush to bleed the energy from his body, he sits in it. He runs his hands over his chest. And as his own fingers brush his nipples, they join his dick in throbbing, straining, standing. Something his surgeon said would never happen again, not after he got his tits chopped off, and yet. Bodies are magic. He is roaring against the cool air and all he wants to do is touch himself. And it occurs to him: why shouldn’t he? No one else is here in this stillness but him. He is perfectly himself, turned on by himself. He can taste, feel, smell the bounds of his own essence, as though he is deep in spell-work: the sound of soft flannel brushing against arm hair, the smell of financial security and his father’s cologne, the taste of mild, persistent despair.
He feels more connected than he generally feels—usually fucking himself feels more like running an errand. Today, it is tinged with—what is it? Not obsession with Wilder, nor lust for them, nor passion, compassion, no. Nothing about Wilder at all. It is edged with love. With love for himself.
As he comes, hard but long, held by a field of wildflowers, he has his most confusing emotion of all. Gratitude. Grateful to the Hex for giving him this perfect moment, undistracted, with his own body, beating like a heart in the earth.
“Are you with me?” he asks—me.
Yes, I Breathe back.
Ah, so. Not alone with his own body, after all. Yet also alone. Alone together.
“Good,” he says.