The ceramic is warm, and through it I can feel the faint vibration of liquid cooling.
I bring it to where my mouth approximates and let the coffee pass through my surface membrane.
The flavor arrives everywhere at once.
Bitter, rich, slightly burnt, with an undertone of mineral from her tap water.
It’s the best thing I have ever tasted, because she made it especially for me.
“Good?” she asks, and there’s a tentative quality in the question that has nothing to do with coffee.
“Very good.”
She wraps both hands around her own mug and sits on the stool by her worktable. The exhale she lets out sounds like it’s been waiting inside her ribcage for a week.
“Okay, Oz. Cards on the table.”
She takes a sip.
“You’re a slime.”
“Yes.”
“A sentient, conscious slime who mailed himself to my studio in a crate.”
“Also yes.”
“And you can feel things about my body just from touching me for two seconds.”
“Your body is very loud,” I say, and immediately wish I’d phrased it differently.
But she snorts into her coffee and the sound sends gold threading through my chest so fast it probably looks like a light show.
“Loud,” she repeats. “Yeah, that sounds about right. My body’s loud. So what did it tell you?”
I could give her the clinical version.
The litany of tension patterns and cortisol spikes and compensatory misalignments.
But she lives inside that body every day; she knows what it’s saying.
She’s asking whether I heard it.
“That you’ve been alone with it for a long time,” I say. “And that it’s been asking for help you haven’t let yourself accept.”
The mug stops halfway to her lips.
She holds very still.
I watch the flush climb the back of her neck again, slower this time, spreading to herears.
For a long moment the only sound is the coffee maker clicking as it finishes its cycle and the fluorescent tubes buzzing their flat, indifferent song.
“You got all that from two seconds,” she says quietly.
“Slimes have powerful senses.”
“Apparently.”
