Pride and Pancakes

by Ellen Mint

  Not helping. Forget it. That wasn’t me anyway. It was…it was his Hyde. When the smell of bleach and copper wafted from the dark recesses of his psyche, Tristan forced himself deep into a phone game. One of his old work buddies had asked him to help beta-test it, but that had been before the resurrection of his music career. By the time Tristan finally got around to cracking open Sheep Wars, it was already available on mobile.

  Though, the hardened rams in eye patches piloting various space ships and fighting off alien farmers certainly helped distract him. He’d have to give Gemma points for its addictiveness whenever he saw her again. Tristan was happy to fall into the world of battle-sheep, even forking over some of his ramen-noodle-marked savings for more play time, but a pressing need arose.

  After rising from the surprisingly comfortable couch, he approached the bathroom door. Fist raised, he was about to knock, when he pressed his ear to the wood. There wasn’t crying—not that he expected any from her stone soul. Still, best to check when a woman hides away in a bathroom.

  No sounds save the slow click and clack of a keyboard bounced around the echoing room. What is she doing? He paled at the thought of her hammering away at the hit piece, her talons sharpening at every adverb to slice him to ribbons. All the while he sat just a room away, pushing buttons on his phone to launch torpedoes at invading chickens.

  Straightening up, Tristan pounded his fist thrice upon the door. “How long do you intend to stay in there?” he shouted.

  He anticipated that she’d snap at him, perhaps not answer at all, but she called out, “Why? Has it stopped snowing?”

  “No, but I need to take a piss.” He rolled the words out slowly, imagining her icy cheeks lighting up pink. “And I’d prefer to not do it in the kitchen sink.”

  Scrambling sounds echoed from inside the bathroom, Ms. Cho struggling to gather up her mass of things. He leaned closer, his ear almost pressed to the door, when the wood flew back. Caught. A gulp thudded down his throat into his gut—Tristan was ensnared by not only guilt but the shock of her body standing an inch from his.

  She too seemed gobsmacked, her petal-pink lips falling slack. “Well…”

  “Well, what?” gurgled from Tristan’s mouth. He tried to focus on her, but he kept staring at the little mole perched upon her cheek. It wasn’t hairy or oddly misshapen, didn’t seem diseased. If anything, it was a cute mole, like one a designer would add out of fear of its creation being too perfect to be believed.

  Her flat eyebrow arched to a mountain-like peak. “Do you have to pee or not?”

  Tristan mentally pinched himself for his idiotic thoughts. “Yes, I do. If you don’t mind.”

  She’d clearly slammed her laptop closed on the mountain of notebooks. Were those all about him? No way she’d got more than a page out of him in the bedroom, but…there was a lot in his history. Never mind. Shoving past the woman, Tristan escaped into the open bathroom.

  After alleviating his pressing bladder and washing his hands, he stared daggers at the man in the mirror. Some of the photographer’s makeup remained, though it was thinner than what he’d suffered as a teenager. Pimples, which had once plagued his forehead and nose, had required the pancake slather. Now, it could all be magicked away with a little computer graphics.

  They probably wouldn’t do much about the wrinkles cresting along the sides of his eyes or at the tips of his mouth. Maybe lighten up his eye bags earned from too many long nights in front of a screen, then early mornings beside his guitar. But the wrinkles, the proof that only the good died young, those they’d keep. It was a fitting toggle on his return from the metaphorical grave.

  Wiping his hands on his shirt, because the cabin didn’t come with a towel, Tristan left the bathroom. He expected to have Ms. Cho barrel past him and return to her vigil on the toilet, but she was glued to the front window. Only her back was evident to him, her pin-straight ebony hair reaching to her elbows as she crossed her arms.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked on instinct. It wasn’t until the words left his mouth that he realized she was hugging herself for comfort instead of in wrath.

  “I thought it’d have stopped by now,” she whispered to herself. Tristan watched her reflection bouncing off the window, its ghostly form overlaid with the tumble of white snow. It was easier to take than her hard glare watching him both warily and sharply.

  Wiping his hands once more across his chest, he walked closer to the window. It was wide, nearly the size of a set of french doors. But even as he stopped an arm’s length from her, he could feel her heat competing against the cold draft sputtering between the glass and frame.

  “Provided it doesn’t last through the night, we should be fine,” he surmised, staring across the disappearing landscape. It was hard to tell where the smaller shrubs and saplings had been. Any more and…

  What are the chances of it being a true blizzard?

  “The night?” she whispered as if she’d thought they could just pack up and leave once the snow had stopped falling. Nice idea, but no.

  “I’m afraid you’re trapped with me until the morning. Then they’ll send some trucks out to plow the road. Maybe you can even hitch a ride in one if you charm them,” Tristan threw out. One part of him wanted to sink a barb in, but another buried and forgotten part wanted to soothe her. At least keep her calm until daybreak.

  Eyes narrowed to a pinprick, Ms. Cho snapped her head at him as if she was going to peck. Okay, he’d played that game too long. “And how do you know all this?”

  “I’ve seen far worse storms growing up. They wouldn’t even call school for this in Bemidji.”

  Her wary stance softened as if in surprise. “That’s in Minnesota?”

  “Yes.” He tried to form it as a statement but the rabid curiosity rising in her face caused him to wilt.

  Snickering, she cupped her palm to her chin. “I got something personal out of you after all.”

  Tristan scoffed while the room pushed in tighter around him. “That’s hardly uncommon knowledge. I’d mentioned before that…regardless, what do a person’s origins mean in the grand scheme of things?”

  “Where are you living now?”

  That reporter edge he’d foolishly forgotten about snapped back into place. While she didn’t pull a pen out from behind her ear and crack open a notebook tugged from her breast pocket, she did tap her foot impatiently, as if he owed her an answer.

  “Elsewhere,” he breathed. The air spurted from between his lips in a silent whistle.

  The face he’d thought of as soft and feminine elongated into that of a ferocious lioness stalking through the grass. He’d stupidly revealed himself to be a gazelle with a limp without realizing it. “Same state, or did you retain residence in California?”

  A shudder rumbled through his soul, his gaze shutting tight as he thought back to that small, once-shared house. “I’m in the Twin Cities, since you cannot stop prying,” he answered, doing everything to keep her away from digging into his California days.

  “Interesting,” she said as if she could will the fact so. “Most would have said either Saint Paul or Minneapolis.”

  It caught him off guard that she knew their names. Using the Twin Cities excuse for people on the East Coast tended to get him a shrug, or question of ‘What’s the barbecue like?’ Swallowing, Tristan scrabbled a chipped nail against his earlobe. “Should it surprise me that I don’t share much in common with the average sort?”

  The tone was so flippant and snotty even he winced, but Ms. Cho appeared unflappable. She hadn’t abandoned her vigil over the snowstorm, but she was clearly working through a new angle in her brain. It pained him to find that he preferred the rabid reporter hounding him to the pretty but empty shell staring at nothing.

  “What of you?” he asked, startling her from dissecting his life in two thousand words or less. “Where are you from?”

  “What do you care?”

  What do you care?

  Tristan tried to laugh it off even
as his inner mind echoed her sentiment. “It only seems fair. You ask me, so I ask you.”

  “Nowhere in particular,” was her guarded answer, instantly piquing his lagging curiosity.

  Snorting, he leaned back against the couch, his backside gracing the backrest. It gifted her room to escape should she wish, but to his surprise, Ms. Cho stood directly before him. Her legs were staggered the way a superhero’s would be in battle, but she wasn’t fleeing to the bathroom refuge either.

  “Everyone’s from somewhere,” Tristan voiced his thoughts.

  She regarded him cautiously, her tongue flitting with her thinner top lip. “I was born in San Francisco but grew up everywhere. For the most part.”

  Army brat? Family of circus acrobats? Perhaps they were in the mafia or witness protection? Tristan’s mind played through the possibilities, each one growing more outlandish as his curiosity inflated. Who was this woman he was being forced to spend a snowy night trapped in a cabin with?

  “You said something earlier.” Beth spoke, causing him to look up from below his heavy brow. “About how you felt as if you were dressed to perform at the prom, but not as someone sent to it.”

  Tristan grimaced as if it was yet another misstep in his foolish attempt to appear normal. “I doubt it would surprise your readers or your editor to learn that the child star did not in fact…”

  “No,” she interrupted, a hand cutting through his venomous vitriol. “I know that. I only noticed because I’ve…I skipped that part of American culture as well.”

  “What?” He folded his arms tighter to his chest, leaning so far back against the couch he might fall over. “Prom?”

  “High school.” Her cryptic answer clanged like a bell in his head. Tristan watched the strange woman stare out of the window. They couldn’t be more different. He was in the creative side of the world, she the destructive. He came from the frozen Midwest, she the balmy coast of the West. He’d already reached his zenith and grown jaded in the industry he couldn’t quite quit. She seemed to be scrambling to make it anywhere in hers.

  Yet, there was that one thread. Neither knew what it was to have lockers, and overstuffed backpacks, to throw limp tater-tots in cafeterias, or awkwardly hold someone’s sweaty hand while dancing in a gym. He wasn’t sure which surprised him more—to have found a common link or to care that he had.

  She finished staring overlong out of the window, a resigned sigh rattling in her lungs. “I suppose there’s no point in watching. It won’t stop just because I stare.” Stumbling from her wary stupor courtesy of the weather, she began her march back to the bathroom.

  “Ah,” Tristan called, leaping to his feet. “Ms. Cho?”

  Her steps paused.

  “You may use the couch if you’d like.” He pointed to the furniture in question as if she was too stupid to know what one was. Tactful as always, Harty. “I need to stretch my legs and find it’s easier to recline in the”—he tried to not glare at the antler monstrosity—“armchair.”

  It wasn’t warmth that radiated from her, but the black ice melted a few layers down. She nodded. “Thank you.” Before he could rescind his offer, her work plummeted to one cushion while she claimed the other.

  Tristan nodded, despite her not looking at him. Tugging out his phone, he tried to drum up any manner of distraction, but his mind wouldn’t stop toying with that common thread. It wondered how much more could unravel if he tugged harder.

  * * * *

  That’s fantastic.

  Beth grumbled into her hands, occasionally peering at the single response from her editor regarding her entrapment. He seemed to be of the opinion that it was a great opportunity for her to get to know the real Tristan Harty. Had anyone ever considered that there wasn’t much to report upon him because there wasn’t anything below the surface?

  Pompous, belligerent coating atop a haughty, antagonistic filling. She’d be surprised if he had any friends outside of those he paid. After graciously allowing her use of the couch, he took to wandering aimlessly through the creaking cabin. Every pass of his thin body on the periphery of her vision startled Beth.

  She retyped the same sentence six times, deleted it, then restarted with threats to rip her hair out. At one point, he finally grew weary of playing his own one-man game of ping-pong behind her and walked outside. She breathed a sigh of relief, only to have him rush back in with snow piled atop his waning chestnut hair.

  Shivering and stomping his feet at the foolish move, Tristan stood before the door, trying to shake off the snow. It reminded her of dogs running in from the Russian cold and leaping straight for the rug by the fire. She only chuckled at the memory, but it drew his ire in an instant. With his nose in a twist, Tristan plummeted to the armchair.

  So that was what Beth faced as the storm rattled outside and night ticked to an uncomfortable ten o’clock. He stared askance at the side of her face, his phone occasionally emerging to entertain him, but just as often not. While she…she stared at the blank page, struggling to find the courage to put him back to the screws.

  “Your song?” she whispered more in thought to herself, but Tristan perked up.

  “Which one? There’ve been…” He paused as if to count, but shook it off. “Quite a few,” he humble-bragged with a smug grin on his face.

  “My Half,” Beth announced, watching the scowl slither into place. “Why do you discount it so quickly? It was your number one hit, the first single off your freshman album…”

  “I fully well know my own discography,” Tristan hissed, his body snapping to the edge of the chair. But he didn’t leap to his feet and run away. Not that he’d get far in this storm. Pulling in a cleansing breath as if he had to remind himself he was trapped here with a foolish mortal, he sighed. “It’s not the song I hate but the interpretation.”

  “Interpretation?” Beth snickered. “It’s your standard boy meets girl, boy loses girl star-crossed love song.”

  Tristan’s right half was lit by the dancing red and orange flames as he stared her down. The fire crackled and popped to fill the silence of him glaring at her. She wished she could read whatever was drifting through his mind, but he kept hiding in the shadows. Only a sliver of emotion broke through, exhaustion at having to deal with the ‘normals’ clear, but there was something else. If this wasn’t Tristan Harty, she’d swear it was pain.

  He broke their eye contact to stare at the fire instead. Scraping at his fallen hair as if it should be longer, he said, “That’s what everyone thinks.”

  With that, he shut off communication again. Yes, this is just fantastic. She’d met people without tongues who could communicate better than him. He moved as if the mere existence of humanity was a blight upon him and suffering another person in the room a test of his resolve.

  While the brooding ex-singer glared into the fire, an idea flitted through Beth’s brain. She didn’t have anything locally stored, but a quick internet search found one of those YouTube videos teenage girls made with static shots of black-and-white photos. Watching the moody blue from the edge of her periphery, Beth pushed Play.

  Twinkling piano music began enveloping the slumbering cabin in its notes. It wasn’t until a guitar joined in that Tristan sat bolt upright.

  “You are not…” he started, when the lyrics began.

  The voice sounded young, fresh and vibrant, without a world-weary crack to the syllables. Still, even knowing who it belonged to, there was a depth there in the confident bass. He never strayed too high in his compositions, but he stuck every note like a gymnast at the Olympics.

  “Me to you, you to me. Stare in the mirror, what do they see? You to me, and me to you. Never imagined that one could be two…”

  Tristan sank deeper into his collar, as if he truly didn’t want to relive his greatest hit. Was that it? A reminder that he’d already reached his peak and it was only downhill from there? No, that wasn’t accurate. While this song was easily his most memorable, he’d had other hits even into his twenties and col
laborations with bigger artists. There was something else.

  Some reason why he dismissed it out of hand, but still clung to the words. As the bridge washed to the chorus, he closed his eyes. He didn’t mouth along, but his cheeks fell hollow and his lips slack, as if he was waiting for the trauma to end.

  “Me to you, and… Rain of glass, forever between we. Once there was us, now only me.”

  The last of the words in the song drifted away upon the final piano refrain held into a fade. All the while, Tristan kept his fingers locked tight together as if in prayer.

  She’d been moved to tears attending concerts in both massive arenas and private dining rooms, but Beth had never felt such a trembling rise through her body from a single song. How often had she heard this song on the radio in the past two decades? Discovered it, danced to it, dismissed it? Never before had she felt stricken like an icicle was plunged through her heart until watching the man who’d created it struggle to keep his sheen in place.

  With a rattling finger, she shut off the playlist as it cycled for another Tristan Harty song. “Are you…” She coughed. “Will you tell me what it means?”

  Her voice had lost all its command. This one pleaded and cajoled for the once ice-man melted before the fire to explain. He seemed to hear it, though whether he’d respect her for it was hard to guess.

  “I…I can’t,” Tristan said. He swept the heel of his palm up over his cheeks, blanketing away the icy blues. He watched his own movement as if unaware his body could do such a thing. In an instant, he sat up, rod-straight. “I doubt you could comprehend it anyway.”

  A sneer raised her lips and Beth let the growl loose. Perhaps he heard it and snickered, or perhaps his own smug satisfaction clogged his ears. Either way, she dove back into her work. The work she could complete without needing him. Slapping her blinders on, she paid no heed to the other person in the cabin.

  He could be laid out on the floor bleeding to death for all she cared. Swiping back and forth between different documents, Beth hate-wrote nearly two thousand words before a crick in her spine caused her to break. No one was sitting in the chair.