by Sarah
Bloom
IF I DON'T KNOW WHO I AM,
HOW DO I KNOW I'M NOT A GOD?
written by
SARAH
Bloom
If I don’t know who I am, how do I know I’m not a god?
Copyright © 2019 by Sarah
All rights reserved.
Please feel free to share this story.
Please do not take any of the language or expressions herein, and claim them as your own.
First Printing, August 2019, US
ISBN 9780463658888
Published by Smashwords, Inc.
Cover Design: Sarah
Editing: Karin Kempert
Interior Formatting: Sarah
There’s an untouchable intimacy between people who meet at the bottom of this life and decide to hold hands instead of climbing back up.
A somatic memory that never goes away, even when one of you does.
A link, that weighs more somehow in absence than it ever did in presence.
Rabbit misses you, and she doesn’t care what that says about her.
She wanted me to tell you.
That you were her friend, and she’s glad you got out.
Soak up the sun.
Maybe she’ll feel it too.
For the boy with sinking ship eyes.
You could live forever if you want to.
BLOOM
ONE
“Has yours kicked in yet?”
“How do I know when it’s kicked in?”
“Let me see your eyes.”
As two girls on my left lean close enough to kiss, I look anywhere else.
Overpacked and underventilated, the entire House of Yes reverberates deep jungle-grime beats. Flashing LEDs meant to turn the ceiling intergalactic make everything beneath it shine neon purple while glow in the dark confetti sticks to everyone.
Including me.
Out of Hart’s apartment, I’m part of the party in the back of the club because it’s Marvin’s birthday, and no one’s seen me in weeks. I’m dancing with somebody’s friend of a friend because she thinks I’m cute, and that’s what you do, and she’s cool, I guess.
The thing is, none of it is effortless.
A handful of mushrooms got me here and helps me be around it all - the pills, the blow, the doubled-up cups - but nothing feels good. My nerves are knotted rubber bands and my head’s a spinning mess of everything I could be doing but don’t anymore.
“Fuck, Cassie, how much did you take?”
“Two. We were supposed to take two, right?”
“Not at once!”
Dry for almost two months, I blink tight under a hundred disco balls, and swallow craving spiked with no longer belonging.
The feeling I keep hiding from comes on strong anyway.
The pressure of everything I used to love, closing in on me.
Walls made of mirrors. Black lights and sub-bass. Even the bare arms around my neck and lace-draped hips moving with mine feel like a burden. The balance I’ve gained is shaky at best. All losing it takes is one misstep, and it doesn’t even have to be my own.
“Hey, watch where you’re going -”
“What the fuck, man -”
“My dress -”
When someone trips and spills dirty Sprite, it soaks more than just soft curves. It gets all over my hands. It’s all I can smell, and the friends I have left don’t get it.
They’re not still trying to wake up from a two-year codeine coma.
“Bro, where are you going?”
“Come on, don’t leave.”
“You’ll never get back in.”
Outside, a noisy line wraps around the left side of the club, so I head right. Night air microdoses relief, but my chest doesn’t relax. I rub Schedule II sugar off on my jeans, but my hands stay sticky, and craving hits me with heavy chills.
Crossing Wyckoff Avenue, I pull the silver tin from my back pocket. I walk until there’s a bench so I can sit down, wait for the bus, and go back to Hart’s apartment.
Alone.
Sparking a joint from the tin, I inhale deep while somewhere down the block, a cloud of bats takes off. Hundreds of them fill the scarlet-tinged sky, leaving blurry tracers in their wake. I watch until they fade, then drop my eyes to cracked blacktop and spot a splash of violet on new white hi-tops that makes my heart pound. My veins twist tight, and I close my eyes, trying to breathe through it, but all I can think is how much easier it would be to get back in than to stay out here. To find Marvin and tell him to pour me a cup. How much better I’d feel back under black lights, pulse drowned in an 808, licking what I need off a girl who wants me.
“This seat taken?”
The sudden presence of someone else startles me, but my back is so tense I hardly flinch. I just sit there, exhaling haze while a stranger holds his hands up.
“Easy, killer.” He’s got rings on almost every finger, and light vapor shines like a halo around loose black curls. He smirks dismissively. “May I?”
Hiding palpitations, pins, and needles behind straightening up, I make sharp eye contact and some room on the bench, but the stranger doesn’t waver. He sits down, and the velvet varsity jacket he’s wearing pulls my attention. Glimmering gold folds disappear and reappear along the sleeves, begging to be chased down and felt in full. They throb gently with my breathing, in time with the Tesla parked across the street, the concrete itself, and the wildstyle wrapped warehouses lining the block.
The caps I took to get off the couch and out of the house, just kicked in.
“I’m sorry,” I hear myself say between my heart and harder beats, coming from around the corner. “Do I know you?”
Rubbing my eyes with the heels of my hands, I catch a breath of cough syrup, and my skin tingles and crawls, aching with knowing how quick one sip would stop all of it.
Overhead, two bats swoop and soar in a wide circle. I lower my hands, and find the joint I lit to calm down has gone out. I’m rolling fast and longing hard, and my sense of time is drawing a blank.
Dark eyes, dark jeans, dark boots - everything dark but his red-light-lit skin and flashy jacket, smirks again.
But it’s a more sincere smile this time, and twice as tempting as the fabric.
Antique gold signets glint when he sparks a flame, showing me letters I’ve never seen as I bring the joint back to my lips and tilt toward him. Breathing in deep, out slow, I watch my smoke cover his fingers as the fire vanishes, and my stomach plummets.
There’s no lighter in his hands. No match. Nothing at all as he leans in.
“Wanna get out of here?”
TWO
“Stop fluttering so much. You’re getting it everywhere.”
“I have to get it everywhere. Otherwise I’ll be splotchy.”
“Okay, but you’re getting it on me.”
“Good, there’s enough for us both. Get in.”
I sit up to make room in the tub, but my best friend shakes her head.
“I don’t know why you think this is going to be any different from the moonflower powder or the unicorn tears or the … ” She trails off without an ounce of hope, but pours another cup of milk that smells like coconut and jasmine down my back anyway.
“I traded my taaffeite circlet for it,” I counter, cupping some of Pegasus’ potion in my palms and staring into it. “It better work.”
Sinking under, I come back up and massage the milk over my face, my neck, my arms, all over my rosy opal-toned skin. The washroom we share with our entire flicker is quiet for a few minutes, but impatience hisses and swears loudly inside me as I rub my calves.
My knees. My thighs. Waiting for them to turn pale. Watching them stay the same.
“How long is it supposed to take?” Padget asks, leaning against the porcelain rim. Skeptical. Bored.
I criss-cross my legs so they’re completely submerged and there’s room for her.
“I don’t know. The sooner the better. Come on.”
“You wouldn’t have to hide your shimmer if you just picked someone.”
I cup my palms again and splash my face, scrubbing what I hope is magic into my cheeks.
“Fawn, my dress -” Jumping up, the only other chromafae that still has her blush scowls at spattered lace and sighs hard.
I feel badly I wasted even a drop, and worse that I messed up her slip, but as the seconds stretch between us, all I feel is frustrated.
“Why did you say that?” I ask, staring down at the bath.
“Because you got mystery milk all over me.”
“No, the other thing.” I feel my eyebrows narrow and my lips tighten. My whole face tenses so much, it takes effort just to speak. “About picking someone.”
A few more seconds go by. The washroom is spacious, enough to hold rows and rows of tubs. The ceiling towers above us, and there’s a wall of open windows, nighttime air flowing freely in and out. It’s huge in here, but it feels like a cage right now. Overcrowded by nerves. Deafening with unanswer.
When I finally look over at my friend, who’s avoiding looking at me, she’s fidgeting with the hem of her dress, smoothing it out and chewing her bottom lip while I wait and wait.
“Padget?” I finally snap.
She throws her arms up, groaning, entirely exasperated all at once. She pulls her hair back, then over one shoulder before tossing it back again.
“I’m going to the pairing ceremony tomorrow, okay?” Her voice is harshly defensive, but it goes down like a knife in my back.
Whatever it takes to process what she just said, I don’t have it.
“Look, I’m not ready to mate either.” She holds one hand to her pearl-pink chest. “You know I’m not.”
For a second, I can’t do anything but stare at her while everything around us blurs. Then the shock of what she’s saying wears abruptly off.
“Then why are you going?” I hear myself ask around sharp hurt I feel everywhere now.
“Because.” She says it like a full and complete argument, then changes her mind when I dip back down into the tub. “That stupid bath isn’t going to help you. The only way you’re not going to look available is if you aren’t. You don’t get to just opt out of pairing. If you don’t choose -”
“I have chosen,” I say flatly, slipping deeper into the milk until it’s up to my chin.
“Not choosing isn’t a choice,” Padge spouts, snatching a towel and dabbing hastily at her dress.
“It’s my choice.”
“Well, it’s not mine. If you want to bloom at random and be stuck with some stranger forever, or get shipped off so some cave hag can pick apart your petals like tea leaves and bind you to a stag you’ve never met -”
“They don’t do that anymore.”
“Donna Mother brought it up twice today.”
“Donna Mother is full of it.” I close my eyes and beg for my shimmer to fade. For my best friend not to betray me. For everything to be different.
The quick whisper of her towel hitting the marble floor fills my ears. When I open my eyes, Padget’s walking away.
I sit up so straight and fast, milk spills over the edge of the tub.
“Traitor,” I shoot. “Bind yourself up for the rest of your life if you want to, but I’m not staying in this medieval village forever.”
The friend I thought I’d have until the end turns around, glossy, galaxy-filled eyes hardened and glowering at me. “What are you going to do then? Run away? Seriously?”
“That was the plan. That was our plan.”
“Come on, Fawn. That was never going to work and you know it.” It hits like salt, spit where she stabbed me, and she looks like she knows it. “Not choosing isn’t going to stop you from blooming. It’s going to happen whether you choose or not.”
Soft tears slip down incensed cheeks before she swats them from her jutting chin, and I drop my eyes to find my own skin, still giving me away.
Virgin.
Unvowed.
Vulnerable.
“Just ... Think about it,” Padge murmurs, nothing but doleful hope in her voice now. “We don’t have to choose tomorrow. We could go together and just look. I know you like to look.”
I close my eyes and lean back, sinking into the milk bath until it swallows me so wholly, I barely hear the door close.
THREE
Shuffling backwards, I find balance against a wall and hold onto Magnus while he makes the room tilt for me.
But not just the room.
As he drags his mouth down my neck, the whole world goes with him, and I let my head fall back, closing my eyes while the rest of my body rises.
“Keep breathing.” Charcoal dark and softly rough, his voice slips beneath my skin, igniting me from underneath it while cool hands slide down my sides, between my jacket and my shirt.
I grin as I part my lips for a breath.
I don’t know where we are or how we got here, but as tongue and teeth track down the place below my ear that gets me so hard my knees dip, I dig my fingers into plush varsity velvet and hold on.
The clink and tug of my belt from its buckle makes me blink, but when I open my eyes, there’s two of everything and it’s all spinning. Cut by vertical blinds, stark stripes of pitch black night and peach pink light ripple and swell through the living room around us, giving me glimpses of a bolted arched door, an empty one armed love seat, and my silver tin, open on the floor. Little white joints spilled across shiny cherry wood.
Half undone between a stairway and the stranger with the flame, I remember sharing my smoke with him on the bench. I remember his flask of gin. How easily we ended up in another club. Then another. How good it felt to be with someone who has no idea how fucking lost I am.
How good it still feels.
“Keep breathing,” Magnus echoes, slick lips sliding along my jaw until my lids fall back down.
I do it. I breathe in deep, and my bearings falter, but everything dark is right there, planting one of his feet between mine. Holding me up. Letting me ride the highest I’ve ever tripped while his hands find my fly and unravel gravity.
I don’t need balance anymore.
I don’t even want it.
Something stronger has found me and his mouth is on my neck again, pushing me higher, dauntless palms slipping under my shirt, up my stomach as the rest of him goes down.
Down.
I’m not sure if he tells me to keep breathing again or if it’s an echo. My neck feels wet, and a scent like sea-soaked pennies sinks into my chest when I inhale. His lips are on my hips, dipping lower as I fall back against the wall, but he draws me forward, into a rush of heat and heartbeats and dizziness so deep, I grab onto his shoulders to keep from drowning.