Back when I was eleven, when Susie who lived in the apartment down the hall from mine finally invited me to her birthday party I ended up breaking my ankle on the ice on the stair stoop outside the front door.

When I was seventeen and Tanya who I’d kind of had a thing for unexpectedly fell on her head and decided to ask ‘me’ out instead of literally anybody else, I ended up getting hit by a car the next day.

There were other instance of similar things happening, but the one that takes the cake was my twenty-third(?) year, after I’d graduated college , when Rita who worked in the cubicle next to mine, left me a funny, maybe, possibly, even flirty note.

I didn’t even get to so much as fantasize about asking her out before I was suddenly thrown into the bad place.

It never fails to go down this way, I’m not sure if I’m cursed, or if I was some NTR asshole in a past life and this is just how I’m being made to pay for it. Me having any kind of positive entanglement with the opposite sex, whether romantic or platonic, has generally boded ill for me.

I know enough math to understand that correlation doesn’t equal causation, but excuse me if I can’t help seeing some sort of connection there.

*****

I was lying in bed, the parts of me that didn’t ache, were alarmingly numb. My undead resilience wasn’t up for handling this. Not completely anyway.

I was holding together like a badly shattered teapot. And if we were sticking with that simile, I was probably more glue than porcelain at this point.

It was bad enough that the only reason I wasn’t dead, was because I was a monster. The impossible and exaggerated portions of my being stepping in while the frail human parts of me struggled to convalesce.

My partial humanity meant, that there were consequences whenever I did something that a normal person shouldn’t be able to. I was kind of a glass cannon that way. (A real paper shotgun.)

A full force bang, would blow me to pieces. Sure I was strong, but I could only do as much as my poor, human-revenant body would allow.

If I did too much, I’d break. Lifting the several hundred, thousand tons of a wasteland skyscraper and hurling it like a javelin, apparently counted as doing too much.

I actually woke up paralyzed today, locked into my head, because the only thing that had been keeping my body together three days ago, was my monster-ness, and some very optimistic thinking.

This was actually an improvement on how I woke up on the first of my three day mend. It took three days for me to get to the point where I could so much as wiggle my big toe.

Fortunately, I got back use of my extremities around noon.

I was lying in bed thinking about how to keep this from happening again. Mainly coming up with a lot of common sense notions, leveling up, using essence to forcibly reinforce my body…(Not picking fights with giant monsters)...Obvious things.

Then there was a knock at my door. I got, and I wasn’t sure which was worse, the bed sores or the general discomfort. Either way I knew I kind of hated whoever was at the door. Then I opened the door and a little bit of that hate went away. Agnes stood there, like a gloomy ray of sunshine.

“Er...uh...sorry. I hope I wasn’t interrupting you or anything.” she said.

It took me second, to realize what she meant, if I weren’t such a lovely shade of brown, I might have turned pink. It dawned on me, that all my groaning and moaning might have made it sound like my misery was something a little more festive.

I hoped that this was me reading too deeply into her words because otherwise I’d probably die of embarrassment. A thing that sounds like hyperbole but isn’t. (Monsters ‘are’ creatures of ego afterall.)

“Um….Nope?” said I.

Apparently neither of us were all that good with this whole ‘social’ interaction thing, because we spent a good two minutes just staring at each other.

Now I’d always been barely passable at it. Generally speaking only enough to confirm for the people around me that I was indeed ‘not’ a mute, but Agnes worked in customer service.

Which makes me think she probably should have been better at it. Maybe...Probably…I wasn’t going to call her out on it or anything, but it seemed like a waste of expertise.

Finally I coughed and she spoke, remembering what it was she’d come in here to say,

“Um, I uh...noticed that we haven’t been seeing other much and a friend gave me these tickets to a place.....D-, do you have any plans for tonight, Cornelius?”

*****

Two hours later I found myself in the glam and glits of the city of Radomir’s own Lambert’ Kitchen. A chic little restaurant that served Southern Isle faire with a slight Alvissian twist.

I was here, despite being so beat up that I could literally hear parts of me that should have been moored and anchored, jangling around. But I could understand that.

This was Agnes that we’re talking about, and she’d asked me out. Whether it was my crush, or the original’s Corny’s mixture of guilt, love and possessiveness, I’m pretty sure’d I’d have been out here even if I was on the verge of dying.

The thing I didn’t understand was why she’d asked me out. I was just a thing riding around in her husband’s skin. Correction, I was just a thing riding around in her abusive husband’s skin.

Even I kind of didn’t want to have anything to do with me. Corny’s head carried some fairly despicable memories. They weren’t quite serial killer, birthday clown, pedophile bad, but they were bad enough, that I kind of just let them glom onto the pit of forcefully distant, awfulness, where I stored my experiences from the bad place.

There was no reason for us to hang out and I was planning on bringing up my moving out again by the years end. Aside from the meatsuit I was wearing we were pretty much strangers.

*****

Our silverware scraped across the fine china in front of us. We ate the first course in near complete silence. When that part of the meal was down and a waiter came and took away our plates.

I remained silent, concentrating on trying not to visibly shrink in on myself. I don’t do good in bright open places, with lots of people. It’s not quite a social phobia, but it’s close enough, that I wasn’t really having all that good a time.

I kept wondering what she wanted or why she’d invited me here. I couldn’t think of a good reason, which meant I just kept getting more and more nervous. My anxieties climbing.

“...So….How’s your hunter work been going?” said Agnes. Sipping her gingered ale.

“Uh...it’s going good?” said I.

“Great.” said Agnes. Responding to my reply with a warm smile.

“Er...so I saw that your Mother sent a package for you in the mail. Did you see it?”

“....Y-, yeah.” I lied.

The conversation only got smoother from there. Eventually we opened up to each other and explored our feelings. We hit a dozen riveting topics that spanned the breadth of who we were and what we wanted in our lives.

After I impressed her with my ability to play the nose flute, I worked up the nerve to ask her about her and my daughter/sister in law. Then I managed to wrap things up with a clever joke.

Well...actually none of that of happened. (Of course it didn’t.)

Agnes carried us through things by running through a series of topics that were shallowly spoken about, before we quickly abandoned them.

There was this moment where I thought she might have maybe wanted to say something. Like we weren’t talking about what she really wanted to talk about.

I couldn’t really know, since I wasn’t really reading her mind, or ‘perceiving’ her anymore. ( Since it’s rude to do it to your friends.)

I didn’t know what it was she wanted to say, but I knew she wanted to say ‘something’.

Things continued to limp on painfully, till we finished the meal. Then she picked up the check and I left the tip, dropping a few hundred bucks on the table. I wasn’t trying to pretend I was a big spender.

The inflation on Novem is just crazy high. High enough that the two hundred bucks I left was roughly akin to leaving ten dollars on the table in a saner world.

We got back home and I barely knew it, because Agnes was the one who’d driven us and I was still castigating myself for my crappy performance.

We got inside and just before I was about to head to my side of the house, she stopped me. Simply putting her hand on my shoulder, though it might as well have been a thick, million pound chain that had been moored to the sea floor, considering how stuck in place I was.

“Um...Cornelius…” said Agnes.

“What?”

“.....N-, nothing.” said Agnes.

She frowned and then she smiled and then after a moment of hesitation, she got up on tiptoe, and gave me a real awkward (...warm...soft….wonderful…) peck on the cheek. Like the sort you’d get from an Aunt, or an older first cousin.

“Goodnight Cornelius….You’ve been alright. Thanks for...Anyway. Just thanks.” said Agnes.

“Er...It was nothing...You’ve been Al-..alright, also. ’.” said I.

I sort of got it then. It occurred to me, that if she was a little bit of a monster as well then she could probably feel me. She could feel me, feeling her.

It was one of ‘those’ games. Where each player has a secret and they dance around getting the other person to spill theirs first. I think she knew I knew about her and Innes.

In which case maybe she was trying to gauge my response. Except why would what I thought matter? Or why would I care? I wasn’t the real Cornelius. And they, or at least Agnes, had been super nice to me.

Then she went up the stairs and I went to my room. I watched her go and then I shuffled off, feeling like my face was on fire. Struggling to convince myself that ‘she’ hadn’t heard how loud my heart was beating.

And wishing that I was someone cooler who knew how to string more than half a sentence together.