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Gingerly removing the ice from my ankle, I peered at what was underneath it—which still, unfortunately, looked grotesque. Just slightly less grotesque than it had before. Of course, now that I’d made my point, I got contrary. “Don’t overwhelm me with your enthusiasm or anything.”
He gave a soft huff. “It’s been a while for me, Marius. You don’t need to worry about my enthusiasm.”
“You could afford to show a little more of it.”
“It’d put you off me.”
He offered both his hands and drew me gently to my feet…well. Foot. I felt unsteady and hated it, gripping him too tightly, but he was wonderfully solid. And I found myself leaning into his chest so I could gaze up at him at close quarters—the way the soft light played upon the angles of his face and threaded gold through his tangled hair. Hair I very much wanted to tangle more. “You are feeding me quite some line of bullshit,” I murmured.
He seemed flatteringly dazed. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t mind. I like feeling special. But look at you. It can’t have been that long.”
“Oh, it can.” He smiled uncertainly. “Besides, I’m not a rock star.”
“Neither am I.”
“What, then?”
I opened my mouth to reply and then closed it again. Eventually settling on, “Nothing.”
“Nobody’s nothing.”
“Once upon a time I was an artist.”
“What changed?”
“The fact I’m not producing any art.” This shouldn’t have hurt. I’d had the same thought a million times before. Sometimes it was all I thought.
“I don’t think that means you’re not an artist.”
“And what the fuck do you know about it?”
He blinked, my prospects of sex—and possibly even a bed for the night—spiralling down the plughole with a cartoonish gurgle. Maybe I could paint that:Portrait of the Artist as an Utter Cunt.Maybe it could be another collaboration with Coal.20
“Not very much,” he said, still somehow not throwing me off his boat. “But I think it would be a messed-up world if we stopped being things the moment we stopped doing them. Or, for that matter, if we became everything we did.”
“You fuck one goat,” I said.
There was a brief pause. “Um, have you?”
“No.” I dug my nails into his forearm in half-playful retaliation. “Of course not. It’s a joke.”21
“I don’t think I get it.”
I sighed, reciting for him. “I have lived in this village all my life. I have farmed these lands for years, yet they do not call me Hans the Farmer. When our enemies came, I fought them, yet they do not call me Hans the Solider. When our village needed—”
“I think I know where this is going.”
“Not exactly a testament to your perspicacity because I’ve already told you the punch line.”
“So when your village needed…?” he prompted.
“When our village needed a school,” I finished, reluctant amusement gathering inside me as light and foolish as soap bubbles, “I helped build it, yet they do not call me Hans the School Builder. But you fuck one goat…”
His eyes did that upward flicker, which I was already finding far too charming. There was something so…sweetly helpless about it. The way he’d let himself be reduced to silence for a second or two. “It’s interesting how you’d rather talk about goat fucking than your art.”
“Isn’t it?” I agreed. “I wonder what my therapist would say about that.”
