Page 10 of Longing for the Minotaur
“And Val, honey?”
Val looks up from her phone. “What is it?”
“Go with him, will you? Make sure he doesn’t buy Gummi Worms, and that he comes back with the right brand.”
Tina groans, as if she couldn’t be more obvious that she’d rather do anything besides walk to the store with me.
“Fine,” she says, already heading over to the doorway to grab her coat. She shoots me a glare. “You coming?”
Quickly I get my own coat, then head out after her.
We walk in silence for the first few blocks, even though I know I need to break it and say something. But what? I don’t take back what I said the other night. I just could have phrased it better.
“I’m sorry about the other night,” I finally say. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Maybe you didn’t, but you said what was true to you.”
She doesn’t look up as she says it. Her shoulders are slumped, like she’s resigned.
I kick a rock. I despise that she feels this way, when I’m the one who caused it.
“Just because you aren’t my blood sister doesn’t mean that I don’t… that I don’t see you as someone close to me. As my friend.”
Instead of heading down the busy streets, I lead us more out of the way, through the park. There’s almost nobody out and about on Thanksgiving—the path is completely empty.
“I’ve never gotten that impression,” she says dryly.
I don’t want to fight with her today. “It’s true. I’ve always cared about you a lot.”
“Whatever you say.”
We fall silent again as we keep walking, deeper into the park. There are a few benches here and there, with a wide green space for dogs to play in and people to lie on blankets and read.
Sometimes I’ve wondered what it would be like to have that life with Val. To lie on the grass with her and read our books, her head resting on my chest, my hand tangled in her hair.
Something normal. Something where I didn’t have to always hide, always try to pretend like I don’t crave her, like I don’t want to eat her and absorb her inside myself and never let her go again.
I think that maybe it’s slowly killing me. Every moment that passes where she hates me, where she thinks I don’t love her the way I do, is grinding my bones into a fine dust.
And it may never stop eating me alive unless I do something about it. She will probably react with horror, with disgust. She might even tell our parents. But what else can I do? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life regretting what things could be like if I’d not been such a coward.
Whatever the ramifications are, it’s better than Val believing I hate her forever. I don’t know that I could bear it.
“Val.” I pause in front of one of the park benches. “Can we, um, sit?”
She glares at me. “We’re going to get condensed milk. Marissa needs it, and there’s a lot of cooking to do today. I didn’t even start on the sweet potato?—”
“Please.” I hold out my hand to her, and she appears confused by it. Slowly, while I wait, she extends her own hand and sets it in my palm. I wrap my fingers around it, using it to pull her in closer. Finally, she succumbs and sits down on the bench beside me.
“What is it?” she says with a tired sigh. “We’ve hashed this out already. Twice.”
“Valentina,” I say, my voice traveling over every syllable of her full name carefully, testing it. “I should call you that more often.”
She blinks up at me, perplexed. “Why?”
“Because it’s a beautiful name.”
I have to tell her. Fuck, I have to, but it’s hard. It’s so impossibly hard to break this barrier between us—the one I made, the one society has constructed around us. It feels utterly idiotic to ruin things even more with her, when it could have such disastrous ramifications for our family.
