I laugh in his face. I can’t help it. I see all that feeling in those slitted eyes, and I feel the aching answer of my own emotion and suddenly it’s just madly amusing how we are both trapped in little prisons of our own thoughts, unable to communicate anything that matters.
“You’re absolutely wasted, aren’t you,” he sighs.
I am wasted. I am a waste. A wastrel.
He releases me on the ground upwind from Roger and his flatulence and stands over me as I roll back and forth, my mirth slowly fading away under his less than happy stare. Fuck. My emotional state has become somehow linked to his. I feel bad when he feels bad. Aw, fucking goddammit. This was not supposed to happen way out in the depths of space. I was supposed to be safe from the burden of feelings. But I’ve managed to escape precisely nothing. Everything I thought I’d get away from has followed me here. It’s almost as though I’ve taken myself and all my problems with me.
I end up lying on the ground, looking up into the twin-sunned sky, and feeling a mixture of levity and melancholy. Nothing matters, and yet absolutely everything matters. I am irrelevant, and yet somehow I am also destructive. How can someone who doesn’t matter at all mess things up so very badly for so many? It can’t be a coincidence that EET and Gruff both reached the end of their tethers with me. I wonder what Gruff will eventually do? Perhaps leave me with Roger the bog troll. I would deserve it if he did.
“Sorry,” Roger says, a little embarrassed — but not a lot embarrassed. “I should be getting back to my bog. I have a bridge to rebuild. Thanks for the snack, Gruff. Good luck with the human. Harder to fence than the rest of your herd.”
Roger lumbers off into the distance, his great strides taking him into the fog of dusk, leaving only his claw-toed footprints and faint stench to indicate he was ever here. I am left sitting on the ground, half-high, half far-too-sober, wondering what the point of this all is.
“Come on,” Gruff says. “I’m taking you to bed.”
“Oh goody!”
It’s not sexy intimacy I was hoping for in my animal brain. I was hoping for the carnal forgiveness he’s unleashed on me in the past. Instead, Gruff tucks me in and looks down at me with a woeful expression.
“Please,” I say. “Stop looking so sad. I can’t stand it when you’re sad.”
“You think I am sad?”
“You look miserable.”
“I thought we were starting to come to terms with one another, Jem. I thought you were beginning to understand me and what we do here. I thought you might like to stay. But the second my back was turned, you were gone again, and now I’m realizing I will never be anything more to you than an alien jailer.”
I sit up. I can’t let him think he doesn’t matter. Because that’s not what’s happening here. It’s not that I don’t want him, or that I don’t understand how fond he is of me. It’s that there’s more to my makeup than domesticity.
“I can’t be what you want me to be,” I say. “I’m always going to be attracted to the unknown. But you’re not… you’re not nothing to me. I’m not trying to run away from you. I’m trying to run toward… something. The unknown. The exciting. I met a troll today, Gruff. A real live troll, and he came bursting out of the bog like a massive predatory whale, but one with arms and an opinion on life.”
“You could have been eaten.”
“I know. I should have been more careful. I should. I know I’m a fucking nightmare. It would be so much easier for you if you just let me go. I don’t want to hurt you, Gruff. I don’t want you to worry about me. But I also don’t want to live a small, safe life.”
“Is that what my life is to you? Small?”
And now I have insulted him. I didn’t mean to, but I can’t seem to help myself. I’m like a verbal bull in a china shop.
“Not to you, I am sure, but…”
“Let me show you something that is not small,” he growls. “Let me remind you of your place, the one time you stop fighting your own happiness.”
“Yes, please,” I ask quite politely.
“This isn’t supposed to be a reward. I’m trying to punish you.”
“Oh. Lovely.”
Gruff lets out a snort. “That’s it, isn’t it. That’s the key to you, human. You need to be punished. You need your world to hurt. You crave trouble. That’s why you keep running off, isn’t it?”
He seems to have come to a sudden epiphany, a painful epiphany for me, to be sure. His eyes are bright as he asks me an extremely probing question.
“Is that it, Jem? Is that the secret to your happiness? Pain?”
Gruff
She bites her lower lip and looks at me with sparkling eyes. I do not know if Jem knows the truth about herself. I do not know if humans know how to think about themselves all that deeply. Self-reflection and knowledge are not their fortes, and nor is the impulse for peace very strong. I must treat my human mate the same way I would treat a wild goatling. I must provide outlet for her instincts, the dark, twisted little parts bred into her by untold generations of masochistic ancestors.