Annie seemed frustrated that I had spoiled his plans. “I don’t—like you.” He grumbled to himself.
“You love me, come on,” I said. I kicked his leg playful as he glared at the ground.
“I don’t.”
“You do.”
“I do,” he said, smiling to himself. Then he tensed. He was still looking at the ground when he said, “That’s very bad, Chrissa.”
“Ugh. Why?”
He was already lumbering back toward the cave, shaking his head. “I can’t—!”
“Can’t what?” I followed at a trot. “Can’t what, Annie?”
He stopped at the cave entrance and sat down to climb back inside. “I can’t care about others.” He dangled his legs into the hole.
He was about to push himself off into the darkness, when I caught him by the shoulder. “No, you need Vitamin D. And you need to explain. Up here, please,” I commanded, tapping my foot.
He didn’t move from the lip of the entrance. Instead, he gestured for me to sit on the moss beside him. I begrudgingly sat down, knowing my jeans were the perfect shade of grey to make a glaringly obvious water stain when I sunk into the soggy moss. My feet dangled into the hole beside his.
“Well?” I coaxed him.
He sat there for a moment, fiddling with the book in his lap.
“Well?”
“I have a curse,” he said, briefly.
“Right into the weeds, I see.”
“I do. I have a curse. Asphyxia cursed me when I left her domain to never be allowed to love anyone again. If I care for someone, they die. I don’t know when the curse started, but ever since I realized I was cursed, I knew I couldn’t let anyone else be close to me.”
“Oh my god, dude,” I said. I put my head in my hands. “That’s a lot of baggage to throw at me all at once. You think you're cursed? Like literally cursed? By the goddess of death?”
“Yeah,” he said, ignoring the skepticism in my voice. He cracked open the book and flipped through pages of scribbled lines. He jabbed at a paragraph with his finger. “I have been keeping track for years. I realize I care about someone and then their death date. I can’t find an exact measurement or correlation or anything timeline-wise but they always die. That’s why I don’t love Jacalynn.” He paused there, and looked inward at himself. “I’m not allowed to.”
I rocked my weight around, suddenly feeling extremely uncomfortable with how my body was proportioned, and the general placement of my hands, and the weight of my head on my shoulders. “You don’t—?”
“I don’t.” Annie glared at me intensely. He looked downward and I noticed how his eyelids and eyelashes were completely white, as if only the patches around his eyes were experiencing albinism. Such thick yet fragile eyelashes. “I’m not allowed to care about Jacalynn. I got her this far on an oath and now I don’t need to see her anymore. I don’t—I don’t want to see her anymore.”
I could sense his anguish, like it had built up inside him and now that he was speaking it, the feelings came out of him in waves. “Curses aren’t real, Annie. You’re allowed to care about people. Jacky misses you. I—”
“Asphyxia hates me, Chrissa.”
“Asphyxia isn’t super…real.”
“She hates you too.” He looked up at me again, red eyes searing me like real flames. “Because I’ve admitted that I care about you. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? Sorry for what?” I let out an uneasy laugh.
“I’m sorry, because now you are doomed to die.”