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“The picture on my phone. I’ve kept it in mind. Is he married?”
Should I tell her? What good could come of telling her that she was the Grand Sorcerer and the wife of a wealthy gargoyle? “He was married, but she’s not there anymore.”
She nodded. “Divorced, probably because he’s a workaholic. He looks like a workaholic. It’s just that I was thinking about asking him out.”
I stared at her and felt a little queasy. “Where?”
“Sushi, probably. If he doesn’t like sushi, I’ll know that it was a one-night fling that couldn’t ever have been anything else, but it’s natural for me to be curious about the man who is my daughter’s father.”
“I guess that if you want to get to know him, I could arrange a dinner or something awkward.”
She shrugged. “Never mind. It was a silly idea.”
I grabbed her hand. “It’s not silly, it’s just sudden. I mean, you should meet before you ask him out, or you’ll just seem entirely superficial, wowed by his handsome face without knowing anything else about him.”
“He’s punctual. He has his lawyer notify me any time there’s a change in your schedule. To be perfectly honest, I don’t mind seeming superficial.” She grinned at me and I laughed. “I just wanted to know if you’d mind me basically humiliating myself over a handsome guy. You know that it doesn’t bother me, and if it does, I’ll forget about it soon enough, but you are kind of sensitive about it.”
I frowned while I tried to work through my feelings. I didn’t want her to be the Grand Sorcerer, but maybe there was some way to heal her mind. I had to want that, or I’d be a terrible, selfish person. “Sure. Ask him out.”
She gave me another hug, and then my phone buzzed with my bodyguard laden ride to take me to my training with Percy. I left the healery, climbing into the back of the car, but when it pulled up outside Gray College, I gripped the door handle and couldn’t open it. I couldn’t see him, not today, not after last night’s whole thing. I felt sick, my stomach churning, head throbbing, and I just wanted to go crawl into bed somewhere, or even better, turn to stone on the top of the world where the feelings couldn’t beat at me.
“Take me to my dad’s house, okay?”
Rita nodded and then we were pulling back out into traffic. The drive was faster than usual. On a Saturday morning, apparently there wasn’t a ton of traffic to the suburban estates like on the afternoon weekdays.
I didn’t want to see my dad. I just wanted to climb on a roof where I could turn to stone in peace, or at least not turn to stone in peace. I would have gone to the city water tower’s roof, but that wasn’t a daytime thing, and it felt like ‘our’ tower, which is the last message I wanted to send, that I wanted him to meet me there or something.
When we got to the gates, the guards let me in with a nod, but we weren’t the only people there. There were tons of cars parked along the drive, like my dad was having a party. Good times.
We pulled into an empty space a good brisk walk from the house, and Rita turned to look at me over the seat. “Do you want us to drop you off at the front door?”
I got out without responding. I was here, where he had tons of security, so I didn’t have to feel bad about ditching them. I jogged to the house, over the grass and through the garden. I came out in a group of laughing people dressed in semi-formal wear, two of which I recognized from Gray College.
I tried backing away before they noticed me, but they all focused on me at the same moment, like a group of creepy raptors. I edged around them, but the guy, Scott, the one from the pizza place, moved forward to block my path. “You’re here.”
Was I supposed to answer something that stupid? “I would rather be somewhere else. If you would be so good as to move, I’d be ever so grateful.”
The girl I recognized from Gray College was very beautiful, blonde, golden, the kind of girl that looked burnished until she shone. “Where’s Percival?”
I looked around, then smiled at her. “I don’t know. If I see him, I’ll tell him that you were looking for him.”
She frowned, but I was finished with this, and walked forward, determined to walk through the guy if he didn’t get out of my way. He stepped aside and gestured me on like he was being chivalrous or something. Big fat ha.
The rest of my route to the house I was more careful, edging around several other groups of beautiful people dressed exceptionally well, but with a slight edge of nonchalance about their appearance, like they just happened to feel like wearing a tie or heels that day.
When I got to the house, I didn’t waste time going inside, not when I could climb the trellis and then make my way higher and higher until I got to the roofline. My face was still bruised from falling out of Percy’s window, and that was only two flights up, so I was careful as I levered myself over the roof’s ledge four flights up. A fall would more than sting.
I rolled over the ledge and lay there, staring up into the blue sky and feeling too many things. Beneath the waves of anger was a growing worry about Percy’s bug wounds, as well as his mental health. What had possessed him to just let the bugs devour him? His freak-out response alone should be enough to kill the bugs, but he just endured it way past normal levels.
I rolled over and carefully crawled higher on the roof, away from the edge. When I was sitting comfortably on a shallow slope, I pulled up my knees and watched the cars coming up the drive, the people wandering around like bugs while I tried to turn to stone. My phone buzzed, and I pulled it out to find a text from my mom.
I’m going to do it. If you invite him to dinner tonight, we’ll eat pizza in the courtyard so it won’t feel serious, and I can ask him about sushi. Does that sound okay?
I sighed because I needed more issues to deal with.
Sure. I’ll see if he’s busy.
He was clearly busy hosting a daytime party, so at least I’d have a chance to put one bit of torture off until later.
