Page 44 of The Diamond in the Rough

“Oh. Right.” She blinked a couple times. “You’d get something from that short a trip?” she asked.

I shrugged, swallowed, then answered. “Maybe.”

“That’s…” She paused, blue goat-eyes sympathetic. “Shitty,” she finished.

I snorted. “It’s kind of annoying,” I admitted.

“How about I bring the pot back here?” she asked. “You take creamer or anything?”

“It’s fine, thank you,” I told her, pleased that she’d made the offer, but not wanting to get too complicated. Because I did take creamer, but then she’d have to carry that, too, and then I wouldn’t be able to touch it, because it had my name on it in the fridge, so nobody else would use it. I remembered something Ward had said about politeness. “But thank you for the offer.”

She looked like she wanted to say something else, or touch me, but she wasn’t sure she should. She offered a smile, then disappeared back into the kitchen with the mug she had borrowed in one hand and another mug that I recognized as Ward’s in the other.

That was something I rarely did—take someone else’s coffee cup to the kitchen, either to wash or refill. Because if I touched it, then I’d probably end up dropping it.

I’d lost a lot of coffee mugs that way in the last handful of years, which was why I’d ended up giving up and making my own. It had been part of a class in throwing pottery at the Visual Arts Center, and I’d enjoyed it just fine, but I’d really done it to get a few coffee cups andsome bowls out of it that only I had ever touched, which I did.

It was nice to be able to have things that only I had touched from start to finish. It was hard to explain exactly why—there were plenty of things you could buy without memories attached, either by shopping at psychic-specific shops and websites or by getting stuff that was mass-produced and pre-packaged so that only machines had ever handled it.

But objects that had been magically cleaned, carefully handled only with gloves, or machine-made all feltsterile. Things that I had made or that someone had made for me with fairly pleasant thoughts—like the socks, sweaters, and scarves made by Pearl—felt like they had metaphysical weight to them. That was also true of things that I’d owned for a while. They felt like they hadpresencein the world. Like they were more than just dead, empty things.

It was hard to explain, especially to other people.

I wasn’t very good at explaining much of anything to other people. I always seemed to be unable to find the right words, causing anger or confusion or offense.

Ward always told me that it was just a matter of time—that it wasn’t my fault that I’d missed out on fourteen years of socialization and living with people. I wasn’t entirely sure that’s all there was to it.

I still talked to some of the others from Tranquil Brook. Melissa Unser, a medium and water witch, and Sam Eisner, whose family owned a local farm that made specialty sausages—pork, turkey, and beef, although they only raised the pigs and turkeys themselves. They seemed to have found their way back into society just fine—or, in Sam’s case, as fine as any ghoul could.

His family sold their sausages at farmers’ markets, but Iknew Sam didn’t go with them because people thought that ghouls were unsanitary. They aren’t, for the record. They might look a little like zombies, but ghouls don’t lose bits and they aren’t rotting, even though their skin and muscle hang lax in places. So nobody told the customers that Sam was the genius behind some of their most popular new sausages—a basil and oregano summer sausage, a smoked bratwurst, and a sausage they called the Stuffed Turkey that was basically a Thanksgiving dinner in sausage form—smoked turkey, sage, sweet potato, onion, garlic, and tiny slivers of dried cranberry.

They were really good.

Sam liked to cook for us when we got together—no matter whose place we went to. Melissa and I had never complained.

I reminded myself that I should text them about getting together again—it had been at least a month since the last time at Melissa’s.

You’d think going to other people’s apartments—or farm houses—would bother me more than it did, but as long as the people were reasonably content with their lives, it wasn’t too bad. Or, at least, it hadn’t been. I got suddenly nervous about the idea. I liked Melissa and Sam, and they liked me (I’d accidentally touched enough things here and there that had confirmed this over the past four years), so I was pretty comfortable with their possessions. And they knew to try to minimize the amount of touching-of-things that I’d have to do.

But we’d done none of that without my carefully-built mental walls, and now I was afraid to find out what I hadn’t been getting from their tables and dishes and doorways. And I was worried they wouldn’t want me around if I decided to keep my new heightened sensitivity.

I was already becoming a problem at work, with people who knew me and had already gone out of their way to accommodate my issues, and now they were worse…

“Hey, Rayn.” Ward’s voice was gentle. He always was with me, even when I could tell he was annoyed.

“Yes?” I asked him, pulling myself out of my own head to look at him.

“You okay?”

I nodded.

His grey eyes narrowed. “Really?”

I shrugged. “Okay enough,” I answered. I wasn’t okay, not really, but I’d made the choices that had gotten me here, and I didn’t want to undo them, so I was just going tohaveto be okay with the consequences.

“You want more coffee?”

“I can get it.”