The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(87)

“Jesus,” he whispered, panting. “Fucking Penny. It is real.”

It wasn’t just because he hated Penny. He really hadn’t thought it was true. But now here they were in the City. This was it, the actual Neitherlands, or something that looked uncannily like them. It was unbelievable. The most na?ve, most blissfully happy-sappy dream of his childhood was true. God, he’d been so wrong about everything.

He took a deep breath, then another. It was like white light flooding through him. He didn’t know he could be this happy. Everything that was weighing him down—Janet, Alice, Penny, everything—was suddenly insubstantial by comparison. If the City was real, then Fillory could be real, too. Last night had been a disaster, an apocalypse, but this was so much more important. It was almost funny now. There was so much joy ahead of them.

He turned to Alice. “This is exactly—”

Her fist caught him smack in his left eye. She hit like a girl, without any weight behind it, but he hadn’t seen it coming to roll with it. The left half of the world flashed white.

He bent over, half blind, the heel of his hand over his eye. She kicked him in the shins, one and then the other, with dismaying accuracy.

“Asshole! You *!”

Alice’s face was pale. Her teeth were chattering.

“You bastard. You f*cking coward.”

“Alice,” he managed. “Alice, I’m sorry. But listen … look—” He tried to point at the world around them while also verifying that his cornea was still intact.

“Don’t you f*cking speak to me!” She slapped wildly at his head and shoulders with both hands so that he ducked and put up his arms. “Don’t you even dare talk to me, you whore! You f*cking whore!”

He staggered a few steps away across the stone, trying to escape, his sopping-wet clothes flapping, but she followed him like a swarm of bees. Their voices sounded small and empty in the echoless square.

“Alice! Alice!” His orbital ridge was a ring of fire. “Forget about all that for a second! Just for a second!” She’d still been holding the button in her fist when she clocked him. It must be a lot heavier than it looked. “You don’t understand. It was just … everything—” There was a right way to say this. “I got confused. Life just seemed so empty—I mean out there—it’s like what you said, we have to live while we can. Or that’s what I thought. But it got out of control. It just got out of control.” Why was he talking in clichés? Get to the point. He definitely had one. “We were all just so drunk—”

“Really. Too drunk to f*ck?” Sh“Listen, Alice.” He had to stop her from talking. “I know it’s bad. It’s very, very bad. And I’m so sorry. You’ll never know how sorry. You have to believe me. But it’s so important that you understand!”

“What are you, a child? You got confused? Why didn’t you just end it, Quentin? You obviously lost interest a long time ago. You really are a child, aren’t you? You’re obviously not enough of a man to have a real relationship. You’re not even enough of a man to end a real relationship. Do I have to do absolutely everything for you?

“Or you know what it is? You hate yourself so much, you’ll hurt anybody who loves you. That’s it, isn’t it? Just to get even with them for loving you. I never saw that before now.”

She stopped at this, shaking her head, lost in a dream of disbelief. Her own words had brought her up short. In the silence the fact that he had cheated on her, and with Janet of all people, hit her all over again, as fully as it had the first time, two hours ago. Quentin could see it: it was like she’d been shot in the stomach.

She held up her hand, palm out, like she was shielding her eyes from his monstrous face. A lock of wet hair was plastered to her cheek. She was gasping for breath. Her lips had gone pale. But they kept moving.

“Was it worth it?” she said. “You always wanted her; you think I didn’t see that? You think I’m stupid? Answer me: do you think I’m stupid? Just tell me! I really want to know if you think I’m stupid!”

She ran at him and slapped his face. He took the full force of the blow.

“No, I don’t think you’re stupid, Alice.” Quentin felt like a boxer who was knocked out standing, out on his feet, crosses for eyes, just wishing to God that he could fall down. She was right, a thousand times right, but if he could just make her see what he saw—if she could only put things in proper perspective. Fucking women. She was walking away now, toward one of the alleys that led to another square, leaving a trail of damp squashing black footprints behind her. “But will you please look around you?” He was begging, trailing after her, his voice ragged with exhaustion. “Will you please acknowledge for a second that something more important than who stuck what body part where is going on around you?”

She wasn’t listening, or maybe she was just determined to say what she was going to say.

“You know,” she said, almost conversationally, crossing into the next square, “I bet you actually thought f*cking her was going to make you happy. You just go from one thing to the next, don’t you, and you think it’s going to make you happy. Brakebills didn’t. I didn’t. Did you really think Janet would? It’s just another fantasy, Quentin.”

She stopped and hugged her arms over her midsection, like the pain was a gastric ulcer, and sobbed bitterly. Her wet clothes clung to her; a little pool of the black stuff was forming around her. He wanted to comfort her, but he didn’t dare touch her. The stillness of the square was almost tangible around them. The Fillory books had described them as all exactly identical, but he could see they weren topic of conversation bottlety-g’t, far from it. They shared the same crypto-Italian style, but this one had a colonnade on one side, and the fountain in the center was rectangular, not round like the one they’d come in through. At one end a white marble face vomited a black torrent into it.