Flint seems to consider my question, carefully, as he refills his wine. “It was,” he says, hesitantly. “It was indeed. But that was a long time ago. I think I’d much prefer a different life these days.” His eyes are on his pizza now, refusing to look at me.
“What are you looking for now?” I wonder. “I would think being a renowned warrior would be like, peak performance for you, right? Isn’t that sort of the end all, be all?”
“Yes,” he agrees. “It would be, for some. Even for most. I, however, find myself drawn to a different kind of life.”
“What kinda life do you want, Flint?”
He’s quiet for a long time.
“What sort of life doyouwant for yourself, Casie?” he counters.
I let out a huff of breath. He’s got me there. Well, let’s blame the wine.
“I want a life where I make a difference. It doesn’thave to be a big difference,” I state. “I don’t need to cure cancer or find the cure to the common cold or anything. I just… I want my words, my characters… the people that only exist between me and those twenty-six letters… I want them to matter. I want someone one-hundred, two-hundred years from now to pick up something I’ve penned, slaved over… spent days selecting just the right adjective… I want it tomatter.” I finish, lamely. “I want my stories to matter. I want to be remembered.”
Flint softly mutters, “They matter more than you could imagine.”
“What?” I say, sure I’ve heard him wrong.
Rather than answering or repeating himself, Flint shakes his head, seeming to come back to himself.
“You never answered me. What kinda life do you want?”
He seems to think. “I want a peaceful life. A quiet life.” He glances around the space again. “Like what you have, I think. A home that’s my own. A job that fulfills me, that gives me something to occupy my time. I might like to travel later, when there’s time. There’s so much to see and do. But I think, at the root of it all, I want something… extraordinarily boring.”
He says the last word with enough relish that I’m eying his wine glass. I think my lovely Fae house-guest may be a teeny bit tipsy.
Shit.House-guest. I still don’t know where I’m going to put these two. Which reminds me…
I glance around until I spot Calida, and can’t help but giggle. She’s laying on her back, wings splayed out on each side, snoring softly. She has pizza sauce on her snout and all four feet up in the air.
“I think our friend is in a food coma.” I say, gesturingwith my chin. Flint follows my gaze and smiles, softly.He’s so pretty when he smiles like that, I think, taking another sip of my wine.
Pretty? Okay, maybe he isn’t the only one who’s a little tipsy. What the hell? It’s been a very long, very weird day. On that thought, I refill my own glass.
As we finish our pizza and continue to work on killing off the wine, Flint continues to ask questions. I think he’s mostly trying to stop me from asking him any of my own. I tell him about how I met Betsy after I dropped out of college due to asshole professors who were doing their level best to squash the joy of the story out of me. I tell him about finding Willow Creek by chance, how I’d met Betsy. “She handed me a handful of cash, kissed my cheek, and went on her way. I’ve been at Wanderlust since.”
“She sounds wonderful.” he comments, as he helps clear up the meal and put the room to rights.
"She really is. She almost makes me believe fairy godmothers exist.”
Flint seems to choke a bit on his latest glass of wine.
“You ok?” I ask.
He nods, settling on the couch and clearing his throat. “I just swallowed wrong, that’s all.” He takes a more careful sip. “Can you tell me about the story you’re working on?” He gestures with his glass towards my small writing set up.
I take a seat next to him on the couch and tuck my feet under me. “Well, if you’re to be believed, it’s about your homeland.”
He tries to wave his arm in a sweeping motion, but lists a little too far to the side. “Forget that. Tell me the story you’re writing.”
“Well, it’s about a distant land, where the Fae reside. Every Fae has some sort of power, like in so many books. It’s tried and true for a reason, right? Anyway, there’s this princess who has the ability to draw power from emotion and she goes to battle…” I lay out the very crude synopsis I have in my head. “Of course, I have huge missing chunks and so much I don’t know or, well, I guess I really haven’t figured a lot of the plot out yet and I don’t know how to write battle scenes because I’ve never actually been to battle before and at one point there was a giant cat…” I realize I’m just rambling, barely taking a breath.
Flint is squinting at me, his eyebrows drawing together. “A giant cat?”
Glumly, I nod. “See? Even some of what I’ve actually managed to write doesn’t make any sense.” I pause. “Wait. You mean therearen’tgiant cats where you come from?”
He pauses to think. “There are large cats, to be sure, but nothing I would classify as ‘giant.’”
