Page 40 of Torn

“That sounds beautiful.” Merry snuggles into the hammock. “And maybe a gap in the ceiling, so you can see Sagittarius or your own birth star.”

“Remind me never to play a guessing game with you.”

“Aha! Yet you doubt that we’re soul mates.”

She’s only half-jesting, but Anger sobers. He makes no reply, swinging his gaze toward the skyline.

This morning, he’d wanted her light back. Not her, but her light.

More than that, he wants her to have dark eyes and black hair. He wants her to have a white dress and archer’s hands. He wants her to be so small that she’d have to stand on tiptoes for a kiss.

It’s not that he wants Merry. He just doesn’t want to be derelict anymore. He wants the life, the other person he lost. He wants what he’ll never have.

Merry doesn’t deserve to be treated like this. To be used.

“Uh-oh,” Merry says. “You’re grumpy. Is it insomnia? I have a cure for that.” She produces a player and a double set of earbuds from the robe’s pocket. “My headphones are better, but these’ll do for us both.”

“You were born with speakers in your ears, is that it?”

“Music soothes the weary soul.”

“None of that pop dribble. No glitz, no ballads, no electro—”

“Anger, trust me.”

He cannot resist when she extends a set for him. A melodic voice and the fluctuations of a guitar vibrate through his ears. Anger and Merry burrow into their own ends of the hammock and stare at the canopy, the song swirling from the speakers.

It’s a hypnotic tune. The lyrics lack reason but not substance. In between tracks, Merry analyzes humans’ abilities to express themselves through music and how intensely they feel.

Deities detect emotions in mortals through taste, touch, texture, sound, and sight. It helps with targeting humans, the ones who need those emotions managed, who need the dosage of an arrow. But Merry says empathizing with them takes more than that.

It takes understanding.

“The senses only identify feelings,” she says. “Music lunges deeper into the soul, reaching into a place that we all have.”

“Not me,” Anger mumbles.

“That’s because you’re a misanthrope with no imagination.”

“It’s because I’m a rational immortal.”

“Another word for it is snobby.”

“And another word for you is loony.”

She flicks him with the wire. “Be quiet and listen.”

He does, and there is something tangible there, something relatable. And not just in the music, but in this exchange. This moment and the female at its epicenter.

The music drowns him. He sinks, his eyelids growing heavy and his feet linking with a cumulus set of slippers.

When he awakens, dawn threads across the sky outside the alcove. He feels rested, the buds lodged in his ears. Against him, Merry stirs, flashing the gap in her front teeth. By divine intervention, they’d convened on one side of the hammock during the night.

Presently, they rest on her end, which means Anger had unconsciously crawled over to Merry. They’re entwined now. With her calf slumped over his, her face nestled beneath his jaw, and his arm enfolding her, Anger feels contentment and a novel sort of peace. Neither of them utters a word, but they smile awkwardly at one another.

She’s pretty, he realizes.

“Let’s go see the sunrise,” she whispers.

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