Honey Girl(43)

“Yuki—” Grace interrupts, fingers gripping the edge of the dock tight enough her knuckles bulge.

“I don’t know,” Yuki says abruptly. She looks at Grace. Her fingers reach out, stopping just shy of Grace’s hair, frizzy under the cap from the humidity. A small lake breeze blows, and the strands blow, too, as if completing what Yuki does not. “Do I believe the sun favored you enough to turn your hair that shade of honey? I don’t know, Grace Porter. Maybe it’s just a story, or maybe I think it’s true.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“The story is,” Yuki barrels on, “there’s a monster in this lake. People have said it looks like a reptile. They don’t know, maybe a serpent. There’s a guy that wrote a book about the thing. Says it resembles something prehistoric, and maybe this thing has been lurking under the waves for millennia, waiting.”

“Waiting for what?” Grace asks before she can stop herself. She feels foolish for questioning any of it, because isn’t she here because she followed her own creature, her own siren?

Yuki shrugs. “I don’t know. They call the fucking thing Champ. Maybe it’s waiting for someone to find a better name.”

Grace breathes out, shoulders slumping. “So, people have seen it?”

“The guy that emailed me said he saw it,” Yuki says. “Said he couldn’t sleep, which—” She throws a wry look at Grace. “That’s kind of the point, you know? So, he couldn’t sleep, and he’s just driving. He said he just drove, until he ended up here. Didn’t know where he was driving to when he started.” Yuki kicks at the wood dock, where it begins to buckle from age.

“I’ve always wondered about that,” she says quietly. “I’ve had a few listeners say that’s how they found my show. Can’t sleep, get in the car and drive. Fuck around with the radio until somehow, they land on me. When I can’t sleep, I’ve ridden the train before. It’s stupid, riding it alone late at night, but. Sorry,” she says suddenly, to Grace. “None of this is what you asked me.”

“Tell me,” she says, her voice rough. Her hands claw into the warm planks beneath her thighs. “I’m listening.”

Yuki looks down at the water beneath them. It shimmers blue-green and dark. The water is a swamp-like mystery, and Yuki stares at it like she can see straight through.

“The walls blur so fast, you don’t notice that when it’s rush hour and the train is packed. Sometimes it’s just me in an empty car, and it goes by so fast, I can’t even recognize my own reflection.” She shakes her head, and the fringe under her ball cap shifts into her eyes. “I wonder if it’s the same when you’re driving. So tired that you can feel it, like, like a cloak or something.” She looks at Grace. “Have you ever felt like that?”

When Grace can’t sleep, she counts. She counts tiles and stars and the number of cars that pass once she relegates herself out to the balcony. When Grace can’t sleep, time does not blur so much as stand still. It is frozen, as Grace is. Her eyes prickle and her chest aches and sleep hovers just out of reach, just like the stars that meander across the sky.

“Yeah,” she says simply, blinking fast. “I think I get it.”

Yuki nods, and maybe she can hear how much Grace does truly get it. Maybe lonely creatures can hear it in other lonely creatures. That thing in their voices that says, I am like you.

“So, he was driving, and he ended up here,” Yuki finishes with a shrug. “Says he sat on a dock and stared out into the water and something stared back. Something else was awake and hiding in the dark. I don’t know,” she says again. “It’s just a story he told me. But I wanted to see. I wanted—I wanted him to know that I was listening and believed him, so here we are.”

That’s all Yuki says for the rest of the time they sit there. The sun beams steadily, and they sit, and they wait, and they watch. Yuki stares resolutely out into the water, her fingers tapping an incessant, infrequent beat.

Grace finds herself wanting to tell Yuki stories about the moons orbiting Jupiter, named after the god’s lovers. She wants to tell Yuki about vain Cassiopeia, condemned to the sky, and the eagle Aquila, who threw thunderbolts in Zeus’s name. Maybe she can see it now, the thin line that connects fact to a story passed down.

She extends her hand in the space between them and hopes that a tentative touch serves as a story of its own. She waits, and Yuki reaches out, too, their fingers tangled together over warm wood and under a vast sky.

“Find anything?” Yuki asks when they get back to the car.

Sani shakes his head, lifting his sunglasses to reveal a bruise from training that seems extra dark in the sunshine. “It seems as if our monster was quiet today,” he says. “Fickle little things, aren’t they?”

“Aren’t we all?” Yuki sighs, lugging her and Grace’s backpacks into the trunk.

“This was the most peaceful and relaxing monster hunt we have ever done,” Dhorian says, rubbing his eyes. “Let’s do more like these.”

“What?” Fletcher starts, rolling over carefully so he hovers over Dhorian, teasing. His long hair has been braided, little leaves and flowers tucked in the strands. “You didn’t like breaking into funeral homes like that one time?”