"And that, kids, is where this particular chapter of my life comes to a close," I declare soundly to them, that little knock of eternal heartbreak flittering transiently past my eyelids.
Daisy looks like she's ready to cry, saline moisture welling up in the pearly film of her eyes. "But you loved him, Mommy," she heroically gulps back tears – she is soft, and she has the heart to match. Sometimes, I am convinced that inside her tiny ribcage resides a silk pillow, and in each threaded stitch, she keeps with her all of the things she has ever loved. I worry that when she grows up, she will find her heart coated in sutures, leaving no more space for the velvety organ to breathe.
"I loved him a whole lot," I confess unabashedly, wishing upon my darling children a great love like that someday; a love so unforgettable that it put stars in the sky, where they went to dream for eternity.
"But you said that you'll always love him," Nigel cuts in accusatorily, miniscule fingers grabbing onto the flesh of my arm. I curl my calloused palm into his downy strands, satiny like a baby bird's plush feathers. They get their hair from their father.
"I did."
"So is he Daddy?" the tangoing flames in his eyes combust, sparks of excitement spewing from the heat and landing on my skin, burning specks of secondhand enthusiasm into my veins.
"What do you think?" I challenge mischievously, glancing at the raging comet that is my son and the deeply pensive bud that is my daughter. In the language of flowers, Daisy means innocence.
"He is!" Nigel responds eagerly, exultantly, sharply curled grin painting a fitting childlike impishness on his striking features.
"I think he isn't," Daisy mutters unwillingly; as if not saying the words might somehow magically turn back the hands of time. Rearrange the pinned blueprints of fate.
"If he isn't, then how can Mommy be married to Daddy now?" Nigel retorts conceitedly.
"What do you mean, sweetie?" I ask soothingly, entirely confused by his ingenuous plain logic, the filthy talons of reality still yet to lay their claws on him.
"You can't love two people at once, right?"
I exhale smilingly, picking him up and pulling him into a momentary hug. I wish I could close my eyes and freeze them in this instant – still so beautifully naïve, hope brewing a storm in their concentrated blood.
Kasey once told me that the second we are born is when our blood is the thickest; brimming with salt and dreams and an endless capacity for love. He said, as we grow older, our blood starts to dilute from all the tears we cry out through our lives. The crushed dreams the cackling feet of reality stomp on, shattering them into millions of microscopic shards. The love and kindness we should have received floating out of the atmosphere, drifting into space and lodging themselves in the vortex of time, never to whisper against somebody's wanting ear the words they so desperately deserved to find.
"Trust me, you can," I reveal to my sweet children. They are caramel candy and strawberry shortcake and banana cream pie: everything good about the world, made of the things people sometimes have trouble believing in.
I wonder if Daisy gets that trait from me – her capability to carry in her tiny body all the people she's ever loved. All worries about her small heart not being able to take the weight of an entire life instantaneously evaporate from my mind.
"The heart isn't a box, given to you with limited space," I tell her pointedly, maternal compassion twinkling in my eyes, "The heart is a muscle that expands with everybody you find yourself loving." I think she understands what I'm trying to say. "And there are infinite types of love in this world, but never the same love twice."
"So, is he Daddy?" Nigel repeats his initial question, my point evidently having flown right over his head, face planting on the hunter green cushion beside him. It groans in defeat.
"Patience," I coo, a word that has learned to escape from my lips significantly more ever since Nigel came into our lives, "The story is long from over."
If I ever take the time to sit down and piece these stars of my life together into brilliant constellations, this would be where I flip the page. The bolded, embossed font of iridescent milky ways would stare right back at me: next chapter.
Spring creeped in, the way a cherry blossom tree dreamily unfurls its tightly coiled buds, revealing their delicate anthers in all their golden pollen-laden glory.
"You asked her out?" I all but bellowed through Ocarina Inn, rounded face absolutely beaming with girlish elation. My hazel eyes glimmered in the harsh fluorescent lighting.
"Do you have to sound so surprised?" Julius retorted, affronted. He raised one lavender eyebrow in languorous offense, lowering one powdered eyelid – dusky royal purple that made the ruby of his eyes dance – in poorly hidden amusement.
"It has been three years since your last attempt," Toby pointed out, in all his refreshing candour. Owen guffawed heartily.
"I'm never telling you guys anything ever again," Julius huffed whiningly, tossing a sleek strand of banana yellow fringe back into his mane of vibrancy. A clashingly pleasing attack on the palate of the eyes.
"We're just playing with ya," the beefy redhead grinned; temporarily ceasing his unconcealed snorts to wrap his impossibly muscled arm around Julius' sulky shoulders, kneading his thick fist into the centre of the accessory-maker's crown.
"My hair, my hair," Julius wailed through the inescapable chokehold Owen held him in. Even his luscious, moroccan oil-treated locks stood no chance against the rancorous nails of static, hastily evolving into a haystack of frizz with every swipe of the blacksmith's mountainous knuckles.
Our table of four erupted into boisterous laughter, buzzing in the usually taciturn air.
"So what did the ever-so-elusive Candace say to your act of pure bravery?" I teased mercilessly, Chase's mincing tongue evidently having rubbed off permanently on me, despite him having been gone for over a year now. Traces of him forever embedded in me.
"She said yes, of course," Julius boasted, frantically attempting to smoothen out his ruffled strands, still insulted by our apparent complete lack of faith in him.
"You shouldn't sound so assured," Toby warned, good intentions radiating from the heart of his words, as they always did, "She waited a long time, after all."
"Exactly," I chastised, faintly whacking Julius' crumpled forehead with the tough back of my hand, "You think we girls stay young forever? She's twenty-seven this year, need I remind you."
"So what?" he challenged in return, so blissfully oblivious to the looming ticking clocks hanging perilously over our heads, like drooping rainclouds all set to cry their ribs out, "So am I."
"I believe her original point still stands," Owen chimed in, before bursting into relentless roars. The inadvertent rowdiness of our bubbling table invaded every inch of Ocarina Inn. An overflowing basin flooding an entire house; lukewarm water seeping into the pores of birch plywood floorboards, burrowing into the infinitesimal cracks beneath the ivory sofa.
All at once, I felt a jolt of unadulterated iciness course through my veins, fleetingly but acutely stopping the flowing blood in their tracks, bringing their gleeful footsteps to a halting standstill. I could have sworn frost came to take its place.
Lifting my eyes to check on the others, I was greeted with the comforting knowledge that they, too, had experienced that momentary ice bolt that I could only liken to dying for the tiniest fraction of a millisecond.
"What was that?" I dared to venture, my words guardedly stumbling out of my mouth; a newborn deer that must take its first steps on a frozen over lake.
The rich rubies of Julius' eyes sprinted back and forth so quickly; I would have missed it if I had gambled a blink. "Ice queen," he hissed in a whisper.
Following the blazing trail his gemstone eyes had burned, flames entangling in a battle to the death, my own orbs swiveled until I finally met the sight that had turned the fire in our sides straight to stone.
Piercing glacial blue eyes glared dourly at us, shooting immaculately sharpened daggers in our direction, stabbing our rambunctiousness right in the chuckling throat. Deeply furrowed eyebrows and numerous neat pleats tucked into his forehead – Toby would have shook his head and sighed – as he delivered his menacing scowl, so petrifying that even Medusa would have applauded; the vipers in her sea foam mop nodded in awestruck approval.
The jagged glaciers that were Gill's eyes rolled deprecatingly away from our threatened stares; our eyes holding their hapless hands up, praying that he wouldn't pull the trigger. Before his curved jaw disappeared completely from view, behind his neat head of titanium ice blonde hair, his thin, puckered lips parted to mouth the word to himself, "Annoying."
"That's the most terrifying look I've ever seen disfigure a person's face," I breathed, barely audibly. Gill turned his repulsed eyes back to the book he held in one hand, and the tomato risotto he consumed with the other, spoon poised between his fingers with a perfectly practiced etiquette.
"If the North and South pole had a baby, and then froze it in one of those liquid nitrogen machines, then dipped it in hell – the layer of it that's cold, not hot – and then tossed it into the Arctic for twenty million years, you still wouldn't get something as cold as Gill," Owen so elaborately described for us, tangible trepidation cloaking his chocolate eyes.
"Eloquent," Toby commended, visibly impressed. Even he added on, "I've been on Castanet for nine years, and in all those years, I think he's only ever spoken five sentences to me."
"One sentence every two years, huh?" I giggled, straightened teeth appearing in a tickled smile, "He's like those onions that can take two years to grow." I imagined the upside-down bulb of a sepia brown onion taking the place of Gill's pristinely coiffed hair. The resemblance struck a chord of sardonic amusement within me.
"And also, if you tried to peel back his layers, you'd just find yourself crying the entire time, darling," Julius analogized, gloss-painted plump lips curling elegantly at the sides.
"He'd probably be some kind of mutant onion that had teeth to chomp your entire hand off before you could even get within a two-feet radius," I chortled indelicately, the skin at the corners of my eyes crinkling in merriment.
"I can hear you, you know."
I don't think I had ever seen three sets of eyes widened so enormous – if they were clothes, the elastic in the bands would have stretched out, rendering it impossible for the waistline of their eyelids to ever return to their original size again.
"Crap," someone cursed under their breath.
The onion bit back.
"So I'll just be needing you to categorize some books in alphabetical order. There are some ladders in the back if you need to reach the shelves higher up," Hamilton sung in his usual jolly humour, his voice a blend of hiccupping chuckles and bumbling stutters. Something about his nose set his entire face off balance; it was two times too wide for the comparatively minute features that were his eyes and chapped mouth. Aquamarine beads set against a porous orange.
"Sure," I nodded in response, hurriedly removing my eyes from the intent gape they held on the square middle of the chubby mayor's face. Bulbous. That would be the word to describe it. A lone nose hair stuck out from his gigantic nostrils.
"Can't Mr Gill help us with the higher shelves?" the ten-going-on-eleven-year-old Chloe chirped. Her shiny ginger hair, tinted with the pallid pink of a cracking dawn, sprouted up in two thick leaves from the soil of her head. Gravity stood no chance against the voluminous tapered tails.
"Sure he can," Hamilton grinned, glass light bulb sparking over his head, the vermillion in the filament: molten lava. "You'll help them, won't you Gill?" he called out to where his son sat, wholly invested in a book so thick, my arms ached at the mere sight of it.
"Don't count on it," he grunted haughtily in reply.
Wow. This guy was rude with a capital R. Had he been wronged in all his past lives or something?
"Don't mind him," Hamilton smiled sheepishly, before speedily excusing himself to do, well, whatever he did in his office. Probably nothing.
Town Hall always had a slightly intimidating aura to it – the stale air heaved with formality and suits and nine-to-five office jobs. A thin film of dust mottled the multitude of books that sat decidedly on the walnut wood bookcases, a running of deep burgundy and forest green and worn navy. An ever-present quiet seemed to plague your ears.
And, the human embodiment of frost seated by the window certainly did not help to enliven the musty atmosphere.
"Didn't have high hopes for that one, anyway," I muttered to Chloe, in regards to her previous request for Gill to lend a stone-cold hand in our favour to Hamilton. She might as well have tried to start a bonfire underwater.
"Mr Gill is nice," she replied sunnily, sifting through the copious lists Hamilton had left us. Childhood ignorance was such a hopeful thing.
"Is he now?" I queried, barely concealed scoff lacing my sarcasm-dripping question.
"You know, humans have these things called ears," a distinct frigid voice pierced the sheet of stagnation that sagged on our shoulders. Heavyweight curtain cloaks. "Or were you unaware of that?"
Damn it.
"Oh, I wasn't talking about you," I rushed to answer, guilty grin creeping feebly across my face, "I'm sure you're perfectly amicable. The type of person people flock to for a good gossip session." I mentally snorted.
His pale fingers soundlessly turned a page, his motions leaving columns of icicles in their wake. "What an irritating girl," he mumbled disgruntledly below his breath, purposefully crossing the line of audibility – so that it was just loud enough for me to hear.
Chloe seemed obviously caught in the middle of our soundless spat, as if her ten-year-old ears could discern the train track of unkind thoughts racing through our minds.
"So, Chloe, do you know where Owen's taking Kathy for their big date?" I swiftly changed the subject, in a shabby attempt to breathe life into the room. Today was Owen and Kathy's two-year anniversary; I had agreed to take over Owen's babysitting duty, so that the two of them could celebrate.
"They were fighting when I left," she answered, humming innocently.
"Oh," I uttered, taken aback. My efforts to lift the sour mood of the office were falling flat on their face, bruises starting to clot behind their cheeks. Flailing, I cut in, "I'm sure it was just a silly argument. Nothing to worry about."
"No, I've seen their silly arguments before," she elaborated, while her petite hands filtered yellowing books into separate stacks, "They looked really angry."
Poor Kathy. She had been updating me about her crumbling relationship status with Owen over the past year – apparently what had started off as a spark had evolved into hazardous flames. Infatuation and staying at the bar past closing time had morphed into bitterness and dying efforts and vicious cycles.
"Well, grown-ups all have their problems," I explained to her, in the most mature voice I could muster, "I'm sure they'll work through whatever it is they were fighting about."
"I hope so," she beamed genuinely, glistening purity radiating from her pores, "I like Miss Kathy."
"I do too," I echoed good-naturedly, pitying how sometimes Kathy looked like she'd had the life drained out of her – their daily fights evident in the sunken bags beneath her eyes and the blatant disarray that was her dulled ponytail. A sunflower trampled underneath the hefty weight of Owen's boot, leaving black shoeprints on the wilting petals.
"Do you like Miss Kathy, Mr Gill?" Chloe voiced out boldly to the sullen ice blonde, his fingers holding a solitary page in equilibrium, prepared to turn it at his command.
"She's alright," he responded, usual biting tone slightly thawed when addressing the ten-year-old, "Which is more than I can say for a certain other person in this room." His hostile eyes glowered tenaciously at me.
Alright, I thought, if he wanted to dance with the wolves, the claws were coming out.
I smiled at him, sickly sweet. "Oh no," I cried facetiously, batting my short eyelashes as I maintained the saccharine smile on my face, "The pompous I'm-too-good-for-anyone-and-anything mayor boy doesn't like me. Whatever am I going to do?" I drawled torturously slowly on the whatever, wha-a-at-ev-er.
An insolent sneer escaped from his lips. "When I'm mayor, good luck finding another place to live. I pity the next town that'll have to tolerate you polluting their entire ecosystem."
"Fine, good luck tricking some other poor soul into taking over the farm. It was a complete deadbeat mess when I got here, and you know it. In fact, you ought to be thanking me, instead of threatening to evict me from my home."
"Please, even I could have revived that farm."
"Is that what this is about?" I withdrew acerbically, holding my rough-skinned hand up to my chest in faux appall, "You wanted to take over the farm?" I exploded into nasty giggles. "Have you ever even gotten a scrap of dirt underneath your nails, Mr Hoity-Toity?"
"Unlike you, I don't appreciate the sensation of cow manure on me," he snapped, unrestrained abhorrence lounging in his eyes, as they flicked me up and down.
"That's what I thought," I crowed triumphantly, basking in the glow of my undisputable – at the price of being called the equivalent of a dirty farm girl – victory.
What was it about this arrogant snob that managed to bring out the absolute worst in me? The dark vortex of cruelty and axes, that his ostentatiousness poked into, spilling out in waves of snarky insults I hadn't known I was capable of.
"You two are worse than Owen and Miss Kathy," Chloe's calm squeaky voice knocked me off of my self-rewarded pedestal, abruptly reminding me about her presence.
"That's different," I immediately softened my tone as I spoke to her; a block of butter melting on a countertop. "Owen and Kathy are dating and they're in love. I'd sooner dip my eyes in acid than date Mr Gill," I elucidated smarmily.
"Stole the words right out of my mouth," Gill coughed in bristling vexation. A cat whose luscious tail had been stepped on.
"Ah, you'd rather go blind than date yourself too?" I goaded, hand resting impishly on my hip.
"Hm." He was mute as his glass eyes flickered over me again, in a way that set my nerves alight, stretching them taut as a sheet and playing jump rope with the result.
"What?" I shot back, spiraling straight into his meticulously laid web. A spider that weaves its complex networks, in preparation for its unsuspecting dinner.
"So you really are as simple minded as I thought." He smiled evilly, and for the first time, I saw the incredibly rare appearance of his teeth; of course, they were faultlessly straight, perfectly aligned and polished so spotlessly white that they gleamed in the light. The edge of his smile was sharpened enough to slice a hair.
"Mr Chase and you never used to fight like this," Chloe sounded innocuously, naively believing her input to be of assistance.
That familiar burning in my gut returned, the itch that slinked in whenever his name fell out of someone else's mouth like that; so carelessly, like they could say it a thousand times, its worth lessening with each sole syllable they casually pronounced. I wanted everybody to caress his name in their mouth – to know how precious and vulnerable it was, that underneath the blowtorched exterior lay the velveteen custard that he kept so secret. I wanted everybody to treat his name the way I treated it, safe between my lips.
"No, no, we didn't," I lulled her quietly, the sting gradually ebbing.
"Don't worry," Gill proclaimed, voice vibrating with scorn, "When your farm fails, you can always go join him." A sly snigger traversed his face.
His words bounded past the finely dotted line, so emaciated that you had to squint to discern it. A pang sniped at my heart, rendering me momentarily paralyzed. A book thudded against the floor in my shock.
"Go to hell," I growled furiously at him, his needling words pressing against my bruised peach heart. Resolutely, I turned back to the cases of shelves before me, waiting to be laden with graying books. Wanting and waiting for their pages to be tenderly stroked; the passionate lips of fingertips pressing ardent kisses against their wounded folds.
Stringent tension filled the air. The shockwave that my words had sent left the room quivering with deadly silence.
Nobody in this world wanted their fears to be breathed into life, especially when they sprung from another person's lips. Yes, my farm was prospering now, and I loved it with every inch of my soul, but there was no guarantee that it wouldn't all crumble tomorrow. Not a single person on earth could go to sleep and be absolutely sure that they would wake up the next morning. Fears were demons that became all the more real when they became tangible, chalkboard words.
An hour must have passed, interspersed with muffled chatter with the ever-cheery Chloe and the occasional thump of a heavy book against a walnut ledge.
The Legend of the Goddess Tree was carved into the cover of a particularly dense book, intricate vines coiling around the corkscrewing words. As my eyes admired the elaborate engraving, the book slipped from my grasp and landed noisily on the floor. Perched atop two steps of a ladder, I sighed as I started to make my descent down.
Soundlessly, Gill got out of his seat and picked the tome up. He walked with perfect posture, broad shoulders angularly squared at the sides, pinned straight from where they started above his clavicles: hidden beneath his crisp periwinkle collar. Its sturdy corners disappeared into his steel blue cashmere sweater vest, soft enough to bury your face in. Mutely, he placed the displaced book back into its position on the shelf, eyes carefully averted from my gaze while he did so.
When his words failed him, as they were oft to do, he chose actions to utter for him the things his pride would never allow him to say.
Sorry, his nimble fingers moaned with each delicate lift; repentance littered across his palms.
"I didn't mean it," he murmured, so imperceptibly that I wouldn't have caught it, had Town Hall not been drowning in all-consuming silence. Salty bubbles screaming for help from below the watery surface.
"I know," I mumbled back, my hushed acceptance of his unspoken apology.
"You've actually done really well on the farm."
"I know that too," I replied smilingly, getting down from the short ladder, so that we stood face to face, "So, you have a heart after all. Even though I still get the feeling that you mean most of the nasty things you say."
"First thing you'd be right about," he critiqued, lips lifting ever so slightly. I blinked, witnessing the periphery of the great ice king impossibly defrosting. He held out his slim hand, the skin so thin, it was almost translucent – royal blue ran through his veins. His nail beds: tidily manicured, pushed into neat curved squares. "Enemies?" he offered, a metaphorical truce; a white flag raised and thrown onto the ground.
Raising my hand to fit against his, the contrast was striking. A faint mauve scar ran along half the width of the back of my palm, from a time when I had been less than familiar with my now trusty sickle. Callouses scattered themselves liberally across my fingers, raised mountains on the valley of my hand. Indeed, a morsel of dirt wedged itself beneath a lone fingernail. My tanned skin painted a juxtaposing picture against his; wholly untainted by glittering sunbeams.
Laughing, I shook his hand. "Enemies."
In the corner of the room, Chloe smiled.
I do not own 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Author's Note: To be honest, this is my very first time ever writing about Gill's character, so I'm pretty sure I accidentally made him ten times meaner than he actually is. I know there are a ton of Gill fans out there, so here – I proudly present the Gill chapters! They'll get better (I hope so, at least.) As always, please review and let me know what you thought! I love hearing from you all!