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There’s a pile of mail by the door, and Phillip isn’t sure what he should do with it so he scoops it up with all of his fingers and holds it tightly together so no one can mistake him for a snoop. “Are you sure about this?” he asks Skuuti, his Kwami. Phillip thinks coming here must be a mistake.
“‘Course I’m sure,” says Skuuti, oozing bravado and dripping with sleaze. Are all gods this untrustworthy? “I can sniff out my buddies like nobody’s business, alright; I have senses like you wouldn’t believe. Aranna’s here—I know it. You gotta trust me, Skinny, okay?” Skuuti says okay like he’s saying O and K separately. Phillip does not feel very okay about this. “Look,” Skuuti adds, “if things go south, you get right out of this door and run, and then you transform and get outta dodge. Simple. Right? Easy-peasy.”
“This is not easy-peasy, Skuuti, okay; this is actually very hard.” Phillip hasn’t talked to Taylor in years. He wants to think they’ve changed since college, but he’s no optimist. He knocks on the door.
It flies open. “Can’t you ring a doorbell?”
Taylor is scolding and holding the door and looking at him, and Phillip isn’t ready for any of it. “There’s a doorbell?”
“It—” Taylor looks around the doorframe. “Is there no doorbell? Shit.” Phillip wants to think the expression on their face is apologetic, but the logical part of his brain says it’s just one of their many looks of irritation. “What do you want?”
“I, uh.” Robotically, Phillip extends his hands. “Your mail was out here.”
“Doesn’t answer the question,” Taylor says, but they take the mail—a little clumsily; their hands are smaller—and try to hide an eye-roll. “Well, come in, I guess. Wasn’t… expecting anyone.”
Phillip enters, though he feels a bit like he imagines a rabbit might feel if it mistakenly entered a fox’s burrow. Or is it the other way around?
The house is cold and lit only by sparse floor and desk lamps; the blinds are drawn and there’s a sheet pinned up over the front window. There are overlapping rugs and miscellaneous acoustic panels and posters on the walls. Phillip hates it, but it’s admittedly exactly the kind of thing he’d expect Taylor to like.
“Okay, well, this is my house. Rental. Whatever,” Taylor says, gesturing loosely and without the conviction of ownership. “You wanna catch up, or something? Is that what people do?” They haven’t turned back to face Phillip since leading him inside, and the fuzzy silhouette of them in their dark house is at once intimidating and pitiful. It sends a jolt of memory and discomfort through Phillip’s chest, and he pretends to fiddle with his cufflinks. The reminder of Skuuti’s hidden presence is a small reassurance.
“I’m a, uh, a lawyer, now,” says Phillip. His voice is clear and soft in the padded room. “What’re you doing for work?”
“Freelance graphic design,” Taylor says, still with their back turned. “Freelance sound design. Freelance… whatever comes in through email, really.” They finally look at him again. “Lawyer’s nice. You any good at it?”
From anyone else this question would have offended him. “Decent. I, uh, I only passed the bar second try.”
“Uh-huh. Nice. No, I mean, really. I, uh.” They scratch the side of their head. “I hear it’s hard.”
“It’s okay.”
They both sit in insulated silence for a long moment. Phillip is quietly amazed at how well the haphazard wall job muffles the sounds of the road outside.
“Look,” Taylor says, “I don’t think you came here to catch up.” There’s a flatness to their voice that Phillip recognizes; it sets his teeth on edge.
“No, I did,” he lies. “That’s—it’s something people do.”
“People, sure. Not us.”
“Why shouldn’t it be?”
Taylor gives him a cold stare. “You teasing me? We both know why.” Teasing is such a gentle word for it—it makes it sound like Phillip stole their shoe and is holding it a little too high for them to reach. Dancing around each other, straining.
“Listen, Taylor, it’s been a long time,” Phillip says, very bravely. “Obviously we were bad to each other.”
“Obviously.”
“We don’t have to be friends. I just wanted to see how you were doing.” Something in their posture stiffens. Phillip’s surprised when he doesn’t wince. He suddenly realizes that he does want to catch up, to see how Taylor’s doing, to see what they’re like together after growing up so much.
“I don’t buy it,” they say. “I don’t. You with your law license and your fancy cufflinks, coming to my place. You look me up somewhere?”
“You designed a website for one of—”
“I rent ‘cause this is my cousin’s place. You know that? You don’t think I could buy a house if I wanted to?”
Phillip can’t believe what they’re insinuating. “I’m sorry? I’m—I’m thirty-three. You think I’m here to brag?” He feels Skuuti clinging to the back of his shoulders, all those legs. He tries to imagine they’re some kind of force holding him back.
“So tell me why else you’d come over, hotshot!” Taylor is walking away from him, actively putting distance between them. The gesture is kind. Anger boils in Phillip’s chest. “I know you’re not trying to get back together.”
“Of fucking course not,” Phillip snaps, and takes a half-step backwards towards the door. “I don’t fucking know why I came here. What does it even matter?” It’s a dead question, flat, the same flatness that Taylor had before. “What, you want me to brag?”
“No, I don’t want you to brag.” It’s so easy to talk circles with Taylor. Nobody can do it like the two of them. “Don’t you want you to brag?—Don’t you want to brag, I mean.” Phillip has to be careful. Talking like this is one thing: he’s glad Taylor moved further away. He fell into that rhythm so fast; he doesn’t want to fall any deeper. “I mean, we drag each other down, right, lose-lose? Don’t we have to want to? On some level?”
“I mean, no,” Phillip says, but his voice is hesitant. “I mean I don’t think we do.” Do they? He’s always assumed it was more of an ‘incompatible natures’ thing. Two people who hurt each other and hurt each other back. Some pairs of people just have to be like that, right? Is there a want involved? “Anyway, I don’t want to brag.”
Taylor is standing fully behind their couch almost like a judge’s podium. “Whatever,” they say. “Man, I’m really glad we broke up.”
It breaks the tension sharply enough for Phillip to laugh. “Right,” he agrees. “And I need a lot more natural light.” And, like a light, he sees the opening for his exit. “Which, maybe I should head back out,” he gestures with his thumb towards the door, “into the natural light. You know.”
Taylor hides a laugh. It’s familiar, but Phillip doesn’t miss it. (He’s relieved that he doesn’t miss it.) They walk around him to hold the door. “Hey, go ahead and tell your office friends about me. Unless they’re assholes.”
“They know about you,” Phillip says. Skuuti flattens himself under Phillip’s shirt as he walks out. “But I think some of them are assholes.”
Taylor shakes their head. “Damn,” they say. “I just can’t win with you.”
Finally home, Phillip crashes on his bedroom floor—something about the cool, hard surface makes him feel stable. He hears Skuuti crawl up the wall, then the faint, foreign, almost musical sound of the Kwami rubbing a pair of his legs together. “Well?” Phillip asks, facedown. “Was Aranna there?”
Skuuti gives a great guffaw. “No clue.”
“What?”
“Look,” the Kwami says in a placating drawl, “you barely went in there. Just lounged around by the door. Maybe if you’d walked around the place, poked your nose in some corners—maybe then I could have gotten a read.”
Phillip smears his face across the wood to look at Skuuti blearily. “Are you saying I have to go back there?”
Skuuti’s expression might have passed for sympathy if Phillip had been raised on another planet. “No, I—aw, forget it,” he says. “We’ll just keep observing this Spider wielder. Alright?”
“I can go back if you need,” Phillip says.
“No! No. Okay? I’m serious, just—just forget it.”
“Okay.”
“Get some sleep, or something.”
“Okay.” Phillip tries saying it the way Skuuti does. O and K. It feels firm. Stable. Kind of like the floor.