Episode 199: Esmairi Freaks Ari Out (Ariadne)

Of course Weston had a mom. He was alive, wasn’t he?

Ari looked at her and tried to see any of Weston’s plainspoken directness, but all she saw was coldness. Regality in a different way from how Ari’s mom did it. Ari’s mom saw herself as a servant.

This lady seemed like she just thought she was better than everyone. Aloof.

It made Ari wary. There were kinds of aloof people, in her opinion, and some of them were secretly really nice. Others weren’t.

“Tell me about yourself, Ari,” the lady said.

Herself?

Oh, no. People never asked her this. It was her own self, not theirs. She didn’t have to share that. “Me?” she asked. “I’m just a girl. I’m almost twelve, I have school in the fall.” Not herself. Maybe school stuff, Weston stuff. She was his mom, she probably wanted to know more about him anyway. “Weston’s really nice. I’m glad he’s transferring. Are you the one he travels so much with?”

The lady’s voice got all vague and sad. “I haven’t seen him in a very long time,” she said. “Do you like him?”

“Mostly.” Ari liked everyone. They were all so different and new and interesting. It was a way to travel without leaving home, when she explored a person.

Weston was a way to really travel, though.

“Sometimes,” she admitted to the lady, “I can’t tell if he’s joking or not. Can I show you where the food is? We have all kinds of things. Where did you travel from?”

“The Aorimaan Isles,” she said, like they weren’t the most interesting and exotic place Ari could imagine. A couple of years ago, Ach and Uncles Nell and Konrad, and her mom had all gone on a mercy mission there to offer the tattoo her mom and Uncle Zero had developed.

Another trip she was left out of, because she was too young. Like age mattered in thirst for knowledge about the world.

“You know,” Weston’s mom said, “you’re very special to him.”

“He’ll make other friends once school starts,” she promised. Even the outcast kids kind of had their own group, except Sawyer, but Sawyer kind of chose his isolation she thought. “Is he nervous? He doesn’t seem nervous.”

“He’s very nervous,” his mom said. “The sort of nervous that makes your body feel like it’s trapped in the endless heat of summer.”

Well, it was the Dells, so they kind of were trapped in the endless heat of summer. Ari almost laughed, but she didn’t because this woman needed something else from her. Ari just hadn’t figured out what yet.

“I’ll do more for him,” she promised, in case the mom was worried. “He shouldn’t be that stressed. It’s a really good school and there’s this one teacher who just always knows how to deal with the bully kids.”

The woman laughed.

Ari straightened her shoulders. Apparently she wasn’t worried about Weston being bullied. Ari tried to think of what else…was Weston a troublemaker, maybe? He didn’t seem like it, and her dad trusted him…

“I believe he’s more worried about what you think of him, not about others,” the woman explained. She had a smile that adults got when they were talking about relationships which just made Ari want to gag.

Just because a boy and a girl went to a waterfall together…

“Me?” she asked, with a tone that politely said that couldn’t possibly be possible.

“He likes you,” the woman told her. She took a sip of her pomegranate tea and looked at Ari calmly, like she hadn’t just embarrassed her son.

Maybe Weston should be worried at school because of the damage his mom was going to do.

She thought about the curve of his arm, the way his body moved from fingertip to forearm to muscled biceps and shoulder and neck, throwing rocks down the falls.

Ugh, she was blushing.

“Oh,” she stammered. She looked around, grappling for something distracting. “Would you like some pineapple? We have the red and yellow kinds.”

“Red,” the woman said. She speared a couple of pieces on the tines of the serving fork and flopped them onto her plate. “You should know some things, important things. First, that he is almost always joking unless it makes you feel good.”

This time Ari blushed for Weston. His mom was terrible at following social mores. Didn’t she know not to share his secrets?

“Good to know,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to say. “What about lamb? Do you want some lamb?”

“Yes,” she said. “Did you help prepare any of this?”

It was like an interview, maybe. Was Ari good enough for her son to be liking her. That made sense, combined with the aloof. Ari could work with this. “In a way,” she said. “I work in the gardens year round, so I helped prepare the scenery. I wasn’t as useful with the decorations because I was keeping my sister busy. She forgets, sometimes.”

Ari clamped her mouth shut. Amoret was the best sister she could ever ask for. They just had different priorities, like how Ari liked things just so and Amoret liked things broken, smashed, dead. A strand of fairy garden lights, to Ari, was a strand of targets, to Amoret.

“Your twin?” the woman asked.

“Yes.” Ari smiled. Talking about Amoret was much easier than talking about herself. “She’s more athletic and has different skills, that aren’t about decorating.”

“Perhaps Weston will help you decorate next time,” his mom offered.

She silently promised herself to never tell anyone, especially not Weston, how forward his mom was being. He would be mortified. She was mortified for him.

“Maybe,” she hedged. “How come you haven’t seen him in so long?” Maybe this woman didn’t actually know Weston, or maybe Weston didn’t want her around. “Did you give him to his dads to raise? That’s really nice of you.”

It would be really nice, but this woman didn’t seem like the type who would see a lonely couple and offer to have a baby for them to raise. She was more the type to be offended they were in a same sex marriage to begin with.

“A few thousand years ago,” the woman said after a moment, “we were separated. The timing was never right to see him again.”

Right. The twelve-year-old boy was actually thousands of years old.

No wonder he hadn’t hung around to talk to his mom. It wasn’t very nice of him to leave her for Ari to deal with, but Ari wasn’t sure she blamed him.

“He’s twelve,” she pointed out.

“He is, in body,” the woman agreed. Like it wasn’t insane to be saying that.

Ari ate for a minute or two, trying to figure out what else to say to the woman. Eventually, she settled on, “Well, you found him now. You won’t make him switch schools?”

She laughed. “As long as you promise to marry him.”

Ari took an enormous bite of tacky bread and watched the water in her glass shake every time anyone walked past.

Someone walked up to the table and sat: Weston, looking just like she remembered only now it was way more awkward thanks to his mom. “How’s the food?” he asked.

“Delicious,” his mom told him. She stopped eating and looked at him. Just looked, like she really hadn’t seen him in thousands of years.

“You’ve stayed on the Isles this whole time?” Weston asked her. He picked food off her plate, relaxed.

“Most of the time,” she said. She ate too, while she talked, and Ari felt like an intruder. “You have siblings; they’re in various places.”

“Not Paisca?” Weston asked her.

“No, not Paisca,” she answered, concerned. She looked at him, almost like she wanted to hug him, but then she didn’t.

“Good,” he said.

Ari was dying of curiosity. She tried to figure out what would be rude and what was okay, and decided that her question wouldn’t cause problems. “What’s wrong with Paisca?” she asked.

“There’s an illness there,” Weston said, like it was a fact. His voice got softer, less like a croaking frog and more like a little boy. “Even you could catch it.”

“Don’t tell Amoret,” she joked. “She’ll go just to prove you wrong.”

He didn’t laugh. Neither did his mom. Ari wondered why not. She drew the line here, though; asking what was wrong with Paisca was one thing; following up on their silence would be prying.

“Do you want to get dessert?” Weston asked.

Time for Ari to go. This was the perfect opportunity.

“I’ll see you tonight?” his mom said.

No no no no, it was Ari’s turn to get out of here, Weston’s mom’s turn to have dessert.

“Unless I have a bedtime,” Weston said, like it was funny, and apparently it was because his mom laughed and hugged him.

“I missed you, Weston,” she said.

Ari wondered what that was about, too. Something weird was going on.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what. She sipped her water and watched Weston’s mom merge into the crowd leaving the garden.

“Did she try to kill you?” Weston asked, edgy. Then in his softer voice that wasn’t all changey and adulty, he asked if she was okay.

“Yeah,” she said, “I’m just thinking about stuff.” Like all the stuff his mom said that would embarrass him if he knew. “Did you really help Konrad with my brother?”

“Not much,” he said, “but a little.”

That was so cool. Konrad never asked Ari for advice. No one did. She was just herself.

“Is your mom sick?” she asked, to try to figure out what was going on.

“No…” he said. He was so wary about his mom. With good reason.

Ari sighed. “She said something weird.”

He looked at her, really looked at her, his eyes searching her face for something. She just kept her face calm and managed not to blush or act weird or anything.

“Have you heard the stories about your mom, and how she’s the sea queen too, but she doesn’t remember it and she was a kid in the Lower Dell too?”

“Yeah.” Everyone knew those stories.

He took a bite of food off of her plate this time, almost like a challenge. She sat on her hands.

“And,” he said, “you know how Konrad looks younger now?”

Oh. So he really was a thousand or several thousand. It must be so weird to be twelve after that. “Okay,” she said. “I get it.”

“I have luck magic,” he explained. “There’s a really important reason I did it. I chose it.”

Oh no. He ate food off her plate. He had biceps that distracted her. His mom joked about her marrying him. Bentley had luck magic and he’d become four for Shea.

“Like Bentley and Shea,” she said.

Ari and Weston. Weston and Ariadne. They kind of sounded like a set. Ari and Wes.

“Yeah,” he said. He ate more of her food, so she slid the whole plate in front of him. She was done eating anyway. And it felt important, like saying she was willing to think about maybe someday thinking about the fact that he thought they’d be married someday.

“But it’s a choice,” he insisted, “even if it feels important to me.”

No wonder her dad trusted him. He wasn’t Weston, some kid starting school soon. He was Weston. Konrad’s son. Bentley’s grandpa. Ancienter than the trees, ancienter than the desert in the Lower Dell, founder of the kingdom of Nivern.

And he wanted her.

She should have kept the food so she could buy time before she talked again.

But she had so much curiosity. “Who’d you talk into it?” she asked him.

“Both of them. All of them,” he modified.

Her dad would’ve gone for it. He’d already said yes once about Shea, when she was way younger than Ari was. Ari was already almost an adult. Her mom would have had an easy time too, now that she had luck magic.

Ari pictured the other two, the new ones: Giana’s wide-eyed curiosity at something that would seem strange and interesting to her; Greg’s surprise and amusement at the idea.

“That must have been intimidating,” she summarized.

He waved his arm. “Nah, easy. I blamed Bentley.”

Bentley, his grandson.

This was going to take some getting used to.

“You can say no, whenever,” Weston promised.

“Well, I’m not going to be old enough to know for a long time,” she told him. That sounded nice and mature and not like a crazy hopeful twelve-year-old girl. “So we can just be friends…?”

“I don’t want anything else yet anyway,” he said. “You should be an adult. It’s weird.”

Oh wow. Weird, because he was Bentley’s grandpa, which meant he’d had kids, which meant he’d had…

“I bet,” she said really quickly, to hide her blush. “That would be like finding out I’m supposed to marry Silas,” because he definitely did not have nice biceps or good conversation. “Will you still take me to Teca tomorrow?” she didn’t want to miss out on travel because his mom intervened and told her too much.

“Yup,” he said. “And I convinced them to let me take you anywhere, anytime.”

She smiled, relieved. If they could travel, they could date and pretend that wasn’t what they were doing, and then someday they could get married at that waterfall and then…

“Can…” she took a deep breath because she needed to sort out how this worked, and not get ahead of herself on things. Marriage, relationships, they were about balance. If he was taking her traveling, she needed to do something for him. “I mean, what do you get out of this? Is there something nice I can do for you? Like the traveling, but something that’s for you?”

He used the bread to wipe up the last of the sauce on her plate. When he’d chewed and swallowed, he said, “What about the journal stuff? I want to make you something with it. I can’t do it without pictures and your account of everything.”

Her journal. It was where she wrote her most private thoughts. She’d need two journals now…one just for Weston thoughts, one for everything else so she could include him. “You promise not to make fun of me?” she asked him.

“I promise,” he offered instead, “if I make fun of you it’s because I liked it.”

What had his mom said? He’s almost always joking.

“Okay,” she agreed. She held her hand out to shake. “Travels and Journals.”

He shook her hand. His was cooler than hers, because he didn’t have fire magic. He wouldn’t have a bond either. Just luck.

“And friends,” he said. “Maybe the luck just wanted us to be best friends. I’m a good advisor.”

She laughed. She couldn’t help it, because she knew she’d noticed his arms, his sculpted curves, before she knew about any of this stuff. “Yeah, right,” she said.

He grinned. “If you don’t believe me it’s cause you like me,” he accused. He raised his eyebrows, a laugh a second away from his lips.

She blushed.

He laughed, like she knew he would. “Told ya. Let’s get dessert.”

She looked over at the dessert table. It was almost empty. “There’s only one brownie left,” she challenged, and she raced toward it.

She could hear him behind her, running after.

Someday, she was going to turn around and catch him.

<- Episode 198 | Episode 200 ->