Silver Nitrate(116)

“Sure.”

“We should go home.”

“Okay.”

“Back to your apartment. It would be wiser if I stuck around tonight,” Tristán said.

After they’d rushed out of the burning building they’d headed to her place and slept late. Many hours later, Tristán had gone back home, but he had returned alleging that even though he’d washed off a gigantic rune from his bedroom, and even though he’d tidied up, he didn’t like his apartment anymore and felt uncomfortable there. He associated it with too many bad things. They ordered Chinese, and over chop suey Tristán talked about finding a new place. Something bigger, perhaps. She let him take over the couch and figured he’d change his mind come morning.

“You stuck around yesterday, too.”

“Sure. On account of the fact that we were almost murdered Sunday night and I took three aspirins for my head. I needed to crash.”

“Fine. We’ll go to my apartment and order the first thing we can think of,” Montserrat said. “I didn’t want to head out for dinner, anyway.”

“Maybe I should stick around your apartment until Christmas. It makes no sense to be shuffling back and forth when we are going to have dinner together anyway.”

“Okay.”

“In fact, we should make it until New Year’s.” He shook his head. “Nope, nope: Epiphany.”

“Why don’t you forget about finding a new apartment and stay on my couch,” Montserrat replied mordantly.

“Why don’t I?”

She stopped walking and looked up at him. Tristán gave her a shrug and a big grin. He wasn’t wearing his stupid sunglasses that night, so she had a perfect view of his dark, mismatched eyes.

“You’re crazy,” she said, and began walking quickly, except with her bad leg and the fact that right that second the limb was still sore, she managed an extremely awkward shuffle rather than the dignified getaway she had hoped for. She remembered how Ewers had said he’d mend her leg and bristled at the memory of his taunt. But he was gone now, Ewers, with his mesmerizing tricks and spells, with his power that had once invaded her veins. Maybe they’d been idiots to turn their backs on that. If there were indeed dangers lurking in the shadows, as José López pointed out, it might have been better to keep a measure of magic, like Alma had done all those years before. But that would have been repeating the same story. She wanted a different ending.

“Momo, where are you going? Momo!”

“Away!” she yelled back.

“Let’s discuss this,” Tristán said, catching up with her in a few quick strides.

“It’s not the right time to talk about that.” Her voice sounded uncharacteristically sharp.

“When would it be a good time? Should we wait until another sorcerer tries to come back from the dead? Maybe a French one this time?”

“You’re an idiot,” she answered archly.

Tristán’s grin had been wiped off his face. They gazed at each other gravely. “Why?” she asked.

“You’d save on the rent. We probably shouldn’t inflict ourselves on other people.” When she didn’t laugh, he sighed. “Well, I don’t know…or…”

He’d jotted down a dozen good reasons why that morning when he gazed at her across the dining room table while they had breakfast, but he’d only written them in his mind and now they escaped him. He was as nervous as a kid who got his first callback after an audition and didn’t want to ruin his delivery, but he could not remember a single line in the script he’d written for himself.

“You had a near-death experience and your brain is fried,” Montserrat replied simply.

“Momo, it’s not that!”

“Oh, I hate you,” she whispered, walking again, her long coat whipping past him, her heavy boots crushing a stray can of soda, and then she turned around, furious. “You couldn’t have asked this twenty, even five years ago? When we were young?”

“What’s the big deal with being older? Getting close to forty is not a death sentence,” he said.

“It’s old enough to be set in your ways and to know better. When we were kids, maybe I would have, maybe I did—”

“Jump into the grain, play on the tracks? Make stupid choices involving me?” he asked.

It might have been fun to take a chance on each other back then, when they were kids. It would certainly have saved them from a few doses of heartache. But he figured a performer only gets better after doing several shows, and maybe it was the same with affection. It’s honed, not found. She spoke before he could explain himself.

“Bones heal a lot better when you’re eighteen. You get to be our age, then you must be careful,” she said, her voice strained, thinking of how they both had a lousy record when it came to human hearts. “We’re not children to be playing house.”

He huffed, bruised by her refusal. He hadn’t expected her to swoon, but this felt like a military siege; he’d have to fight tooth and nail for her. But it only emboldened him, made him realize he’d have to dig deep, and he wouldn’t be able to do things in halves.

“Call me immature then, because it sounds reasonable to me,” he said, spreading his arms. “It’s twenty years of foreplay, Momo. Do you want to wait a few more decades until I can’t masticate my own food? ’Cause I’ll love you until then and feed you pureed prunes, but it would be a shame to start living together at eighty-nine and die of a heart attack the first time we have sex.”