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"Shit, me too," Cassidy enthused. "Not in a creepy way."
"Me neither. No creeps here."
"Okay, what are you making," Cassidy asked, "and who’s our dead person?"
"I think it’s gonna be the blonde’s brother," River theorized.
"Yeah, and at first she’ll be like 'I miss him so much,' but then—"
"It’ll turn out he, like, lost their whole inheritance in Atlantic City," River finished.
They both grinned at each other and River’s cheeks heated.
River and Cassidy spent the next hour eating cheese, cutting things out of magazines from the late 1970s, and making increasingly absurd guesses about the happenings on Secaucus Psychic.
Cracker by cracker, joke by joke, and touch by touch, River relaxed.
CHAPTER 20
Cassidy
Cassidy was on the best date of his life. It had begun with death and crying, and now found him sprawled on the floor, fighting a cat called Mushroom for the last of the brie, but it was definitely the best.
Although he’d been the one to plan a dinner date, they weren’t what he preferred. There was so much pressure on everything you said or did—the attempt to save yourself the pain of heartbreak by extrapolating who this person across from you was from a favorite book or their taste in salad dressing.
His ADHD went wild in such places, and he struggled to pick out his date’s voice from among the hundreds of other sounds also present.
"Somehow," Cassidy said, razoring a capital B from its backdrop of orange dunes, "it never occurred to me that you were allowed to have a date where you just hang out and do crafts and play with cats."
"I know, right? I got the idea from my niece. She says grown-ups are stupid about fun and I think she might be right. I hate most of the stuff considered fun for adults, anyway."
"Yeah, I spend my time playing with animal skins and digging through bulk lots of glass eyes, so I’m with you there."
"Do you listen to music while you work on taxidermy projects?"
"I just started listening to audiobooks in the last few months when Nora showed me that you can change the speed. I had no idea. I’d get so distracted in the space between the words or sentences because I’d start thinking about other things. But now that I can listen to them double fast they finally going the speed of my brain. It’s great."
"What are you reading right now?"
"A history of books that have been bound in human skin."
"Ooh, taxidermy adjacent."
"Yeah. I really like microhistories."
"And skin, apparently."
"You don’t have to worry. You have beautiful skin, but the taxidermy of humans is illegal in all fifty states."
Cassidy grinned. River shot him an amused, flirtatious look that made him want to explore every inch of their skin (in a totally non-murdery way).
He peeked at what River was doing. While he had gone looking for color to use like strokes of paint, River had meticulously cut out objects and people and was playing with their arrangement by moving them around.
"What are you making?"
"Oh, uh. Every year my friend makes a vision board. I know, it’s so cheesy, but she says it helps when she forces herself to get specific about her desires. It’s easy to not acknowledge a goal or desire because we’re scared we can’t have it. So the act of making a vision board is about getting specific about what you want and what your dreams are. Then you hang it somewhere you’ll see it a lot so you’re always reminded of them."
River ran their fingertips over the images they’d cut out. Onscreen, a new episode of Secaucus Psychic began.
"Banger of a theme," River said, suddenly self-conscious.
"I love this idea," Cassidy said, shoving his palette of magazine colors to the side and grabbing the next magazine off the stack, mind already flooded with goals, dreams, questions.
They watched the episode companionably, each working on their own vision board. As Jackie, the medium, communed with the spirit of a dog-walker who loved gambling and Billy Joel, they passed scissors, glue sticks, and markers back and forth. By unspoken agreement, they kept their eyes on their own papers.
Mostly.
As that episode turned into another, Cassidy started peeking over at River’s vision board.
"Will you tell me about this?"
River nodded, hair falling in waves that hid their face. Cassidy leaned in and ever so slowly tucked River’s hair behind their ear. They shivered and pressed closer. The space between them felt warmer than the ambient air in that way that promised chemistry.
"Mine’s general, not just about this coming year."
They pointed to an image of a huge red barn in the middle of rolling hills, a jagged tree line in the background. They’d glued pictures of chicken coops, raised garden beds, and flowers surrounding it.
"I really want my own place someday," they said, voice tender and eyes dreamy. "I want to be able to have as many animals as I want, and pick flowers in my yard. I read a book once where this lady would buy fresh flowers for her whole house every week and I’ve always wanted to have them. I want to be able to adopt a hundred cats if I feel like it."
