Page 94 of Thirsty

“Yeah, it did,” Rachel said softly. “But...I don’t think hemeantto hurt you. People...” she sighed. “People fuck up.They make mistakes.” Her eyes went distant. “They reach for what they shouldn’t.”

“Mistakes,” Lorenzo scoffed. “He deceived me.”

“He made a bad call,” Rachel said softly. “He—for whatever reason, he lied to you, and that was wrong. But he obviously cared about you.”

Lorenzo shook his head.

“He didn’t mean to betray you,” Rachel said.

“But he did,” he snapped.

“Yeah,” Rachel said, deflating a bit. “I know.”

Then she spotted Isolde across the room, and her entire body stiffened.

“And look what he did to you two,” Lorenzo muttered. “Meddling, butting in, and...ruining things.”

“It’s not Charlie’s fault,” Rachel said with a sigh, her eyes never leaving Isolde. “If anything, he...”

“What?” Lorenzo demanded.

Rachel was silent a moment. “I don’t know,” she said at length, chewing her lower lip. “I guess you’re right. I probably never would have kissed her if it wasn’t for him.”

Lorenzo looked from Isolde’s perfect, glimmering form back to Rachel, who had a dark, complicated look on her face as she gazed at the other woman. “And that’s...bad,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, sounding distracted. “I gotta go get...something.”

She flitted away, and Maggie rubbed him on the back comfortingly. “Why don’t you go take a quick breather?” she suggested. “It’s filling up fast.”

Lorenzo sighed and went to straighten the drinks table. He went through the motions of the gracious host—introducingfolks who hadn’t met, keeping the music going, making small talk.

He was counting down the minutes until he could be alone with his sorrow again.

A while later he found himself in a quiet corner with Isolde. She looked a bit less glittery than usual, wrapped in a silky soft sweater, her hair in a neat, flat braid along one shoulder. And though her skin still held the secret glow of the evening forest, she chewed on a nail as she flicked a glance at the rest of the party over Lorenzo’s shoulder. “Rachel’s not here, is she?”

“Youbothpromised to not be weird,” he reminded her.

Isolde slumped a bit and said, “...okay.”

A glum silence fell. “You’re sad about Charlie,” Isolde said.

“You can sense that?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I just noticed.”

He grunted.

“Human emotions are complicated,” she went on. He started to clarify that he was not, in fact, human, but she continued, ignoring him. “They’re fractal. Little Matryoshka dolls of...doubt and fantasy. Desire and...torment.”

“That’s true,” Lorenzo said lowly. They nodded, united for a moment in their morose contemplation.

Then something occurred to Lorenzo. “Hang on,” he said. “You read people. You read auras. You never got anything off of Charlie that he was—” He swallowed. “That he was lying to everyone?”

In a tone that was slow and a bit embarrassed, as if Lorenzo had asked her what color the sky was, Isolde said, “I sensed he was holding himself back from you in some way. And that he felt...ashamed.”

She flicked her eyes back up to his. “But I felt the same from you.”

“He used me,” he said.