“I really like you,” I said softly.
Artie didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know how many times we have to go over this. Your pheromones don’t work on me. I’m too biologically different.”
“You’re a mammal,” he said. “You have hair, you have three bones inside your inner ear, you can—” He caught himself, suddenly radiating embarrassment.
“Lactate, yes; so I’ve been told. Not that it’s ever going to happen. Can you imagine me hanging around with a cuckoo man long enough to get pregnant, even if I wanted children?” I shuddered. “If I want to subject myself to toxic people, I’ll just read the comments on literally any article about female-led comic book properties. It’ll be a fun reminder of why I should never, ever read the comments.”
“Your life is reading the comments.”
“Yes, and the things people think when they don’t know anyone can hear them are even worse than the things they’re willing to write down. Thanks but no thanks.” I took a deep breath, still staring at the dresser. “We’re getting away from the point, Artie. I’m a mammal, maybe, but I’m not a mammal from anywhere around here. You’re a mammal from around here.”
“That’s not what Dad thinks,” Artie said. “He thinks Johrlac aren’t the only ones who figured out a way to move between dimensions.”
“Okay, not from around here, but maybe from the next town over,” I said. “It’s close enough. Lilu are cross-fertile with humans. That means you can’t have traveled far.”
“It’s the cross-fertility that’s the problem,” said Artie.
“I don’t know. I think I like a world with you in it better than I’d like a world without you.”
Silence answered me, broken by the slow, roiling boil of his thoughts, which were too jumbled and fragmentary to let me pull anything specific out of them. Most people are like that, most of the time. Humans don’t walk around narrating their actions to themselves unless they’re trying not to forget a step in some unfamiliar chore; I’ve seen Annie load the dishwasher, wipe down the counters, and make herself a sandwich, all while thinking about nothing but the plot of some anime she’s been watching. Conscious thought and habitual action aren’t always friends.
Finally, Artie said, “I don’t want to have never existed. I just wish parts of this weren’t so hard.”
“They’re hard for everyone.”
“Try having everybody you meet fall in love with you even when they don’t want to.”
I twisted around, finally looking at him. “You mean the reason they really kept me in the house for five years? That’s what cuckoos do. You want to talk about violation? You make people fall in love with you. Fine. Only really, they’re falling in lust with you, and that’s gross, it’s icky and inappropriate and unfair, but all you have to do is walk away from them. You’ve been you for your entire life. How many people have you taken advantage of?”
Artie shook his head. “None.”
“I took advantage of at least four people today. That’s how I got here. And yeah, I tried to make sure they were people who deserved to be taken advantage of, but you know how I did that? I rooted around inside their heads, in their private thoughts, where they thought they were safe, and I found the things that would convince me it was okay to do whatever I wanted to them. I’m so much worse than you are. All I need to do is let my guard down and everyone falls in love with me. The whole world falls in love with me. I just have to want it and it’s mine. You really want to tell me you’re worse? Really?”
“At least you can go outside,” he said, refusing to meet my eyes.
“So could you, if you wanted to learn how to deal with what you are,” I snapped. “Elsie goes outside. Elsie spends all her time with roller derby girls. She has the same pheromones you do. She has the same problems dealing with humans as you do. She still dates. She still talks to people. You’re making choices, Artie. Here’s a fun one for you: if you’d been willing to choose to fly to Ohio, and choose to take a cab to the house, Mom would never have left you standing on the porch. You could have come to me a long time ago. So why didn’t you?”
He stared at me, trembling, eyes so wide that even I could pick up on his distress. Finally, in a small voice, he said, “You didn’t want me there.”
I considered closing my eyes. It wouldn’t do me any good. He’d still be in the room if I did that, thoughts still audible, turmoil still echoing through my head like a small, captive storm. I clenched my hands in the covers, balling them between my fingers until my wrists began to ache.
“I wanted you there,” I said. “Every day, I wanted you there. Except on the days when I was afraid that I’d never be myself again, because I was too broken, and I knew that if you came, you’d turn around and walk away and never want to talk to me again. And I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t survive that. That’s why I didn’t ask you. It’s why I didn’t beg. I wanted to beg. I knew I couldn’t beg. If I begged, you might actually come, and if you came, you’d never want to see me again, and if I lost you on top of everything else, that would be it. I’d be done. I’d be over. I couldn’t lose my best friend. I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t—”
Artie suddenly leaned over and grabbed my hands, pressing them deeper into the mattress. I stopped talking and stared at him. He stared back.
This close, I could see every detail of his irises, every line and tiny gradation of color. They were beautiful. I didn’t need to be able to read his expression to know that they were beautiful, or that I wanted to keep staring at them for the rest of my life.
With his skin touching mine, his mind was barely shy of an open book. He was thinking of how much he’d missed me, how much he hated that I was right, and how wrong I was at the same time, because he would never have run away from me, no matter how broken I’d been; he would never have rejected me, because he . . .
He.
And here it was again, the thing I’d felt from him downstairs, the thing I hadn’t been ready to deal with then. The thing I wasn’t ready to deal with now. The thing I might never be ready to deal with.
“No, you don’t,” I said miserably. “You think you do, because I’m a cuckoo. You can’t help it.”
“My pheromones don’t work on you,” he said. “That’s what you keep telling me over and over, like it matters. I can’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”
Silent, I nodded.
“Do you remember my side of the family tree?”