Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, #5)(6)
Dominic says he’s willing to wait until he earns their trust. I say they’re punishing him, and by extension, me, for getting married by an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas, rather than having a fancy ceremony for everyone in the family to attend and pass judgment on.
My parents have no respect for the classics.
(To be fair, they’re correct in assuming that Dominic and I got married the way we did in order to make it harder for them to reject him out of hand. We also did it because we really wanted to get married, and we were passing through Vegas on the way to Portland anyway, so why not? No Las Vegas wedding is complete without a chupacabra dressed as Elvis asking if you’re planning to love, honor, obey, and finish eating your banana sandwich.)
We slipped through the front door and crossed the living room to the kitchen, where not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. At this hour of the morning, most of the Aeslin were asleep, and the ones that weren’t would be preparing the temples for the day ahead. Our family colony of polytheistic mice kept a very strict calendar of religious observances, one that included every day of the year, as well as a few days they had shoehorned in there, just to get a bit of extra worshipping in. It must have been exhausting, being an Aeslin mouse.
Once the kitchen door was closed, I sighed, sagged against the counter, and asked, “What are your feelings on breakfast? We need to eat something before we go to bed, or we’re going to wake up gnawing on each other.”
“Waffles,” said Dominic, opening the freezer and producing a familiar yellow Eggo box. “No effort. No cleanup. Good delivery mechanism for peanut butter.”
“Sold.” I took the box and peered inside. There were four waffles remaining. Miraculously, that was also the number of slots on our family-sized toaster. I dropped them in. “We need something else. This is insufficient waffles.”
“Oh, no. This is not your territory.” Dominic’s hands closed on my shoulders, pulling me back before I could start investigating the contents of the fridge. “Go sit down. I will figure out breakfast.”
“But I want to help,” I protested.
“The last time you scavenged for breakfast, we wound up with leftover pizza omelets.” Dominic pushed me toward the table. “That’s not a meal. That’s a punishment for bad behavior. I’ll make something intended to be eaten by humans, and I’ll bring it to you, and then we can go to bed.”
“Fine.” I grabbed a laptop off the counter and sulked away. Dominic watched me go, shaking his head fondly. He knew I hadn’t really wanted to win; I knew he enjoyed the fight. Of such little understandings are a solid relationship built.
I dropped my butt into a seat and opened the laptop. Each of us in the family has our own computer—how else could we have ever felt comfortable looking at porn?—but there are always a few loaner machines floating around, courtesy of Antimony’s constant equipment upgrades and Artie’s equally constant glee at nuking their contents and turning them into helpful shells. We don’t use the spares for anything secure. They’re still extremely convenient when, say, I want to check my email without going upstairs to my bedroom.
(Not that my bedroom was particularly livable at the moment. We were in the process of prepping the guesthouse out back for me and Dominic. It meant we wouldn’t be as well-equipped for actual guests, but I didn’t care if it meant having a bathroom we wouldn’t need to share with my younger sister. Half my things were in boxes, and the remaining half were strewn across the room like there’d been some sort of localized explosion. It was all going to be worth it when we didn’t have to cram ourselves into a twin bed every night. I loved the man, but I was starting to feel like one of us needed to remove an arm before either of us would be able to sleep comfortably.)
Dominic muttered and rattled around the kitchen while the laptop loaded my settings. When it was done, I pulled up my email, skimming the subject lines to see if anything needed my immediate attention. Nothing did. The thing about being in the family business is that you never really strike out as an independent contractor: you’re always going to be running things through the central clearing house that is your older relatives. I’d been able to find problems that needed fixing without their help while I was in New York, but I wasn’t in New York anymore. I was back in Portland, back in the place where people remembered me as a three-foot-tall moppet running to her ballet recital, and when they had problems, they took them to my dad or my Aunt Jane. Not to me.
I sighed and clicked over to Valerie’s email. Valerie was my mundane alter ego, a redheaded Latin ballroom specialist who never had to worry about getting blood out of sequins or whether it was appropriate to go clubbing after beating the crap out of a ghoul. Valerie was half my imaginary friend and half my imaginary self. She slept in when she wanted to. She danced every day. Most importantly, she lived her life on her terms, with no one telling her who she had to be or what she had to love.
There was a time when all I wanted was to find a way to become Valerie, even if it meant leaving Verity behind. I would’ve missed my family, but I had every faith we’d have been able to find a way to be together, even once I was no longer considered a Price. I would have been dancing. For me, on some level, that would have been enough . . . at least for a while.
It could never have been enough forever, which was why when the choice was actually put in front of me—be a cryptozoologist, and help people, or be a professional dancer, and never do the work I’d been raised to do ever again—I’d made the only choice I really could. I’d put Valerie aside and become Verity for good.