Waiting for Sunday

chapter 6 - a promise or close enough

They sit in Lillie's car while the rain outside slows to a leisurely pace, and then to a sprinkle, the mere ghost of drops hitting the window. Felix's eyepatch is still damp with coffee and therefore out of commission. He keeps his face turned away.

There is a word for the cold, sinking feeling currently vacuuming out his stomach, perhaps multiple. Terror covers it, he thinks, and so does dread. When Lillie followed him outside and called after him, he turned around because he knew it would abridge whatever game they'd been playing, as fun as it had seemed for a second. She would get scared. She would run off. He could stop pretending.

Instead, Lillie handed him a towel, rummaged around in her bag until she'd found an umbrella, wrinkled and semi-broken, but usable. She asked him, the edges of her voice thin and breakable, Are you okay?

So now he is here, examining the cherry air freshener hanging from Lillie's rearview mirror, not daring to look at Lillie's face: knowing the dread will grow and grow and swallow him whole if he does.

"The rain's slowed," Lillie starts, slowly. "Is that...are you, um, doing that?"

"Maybe," Felix says, keeping his voice even. "Probably. Yes. I'm calmer now."

"That's good. I'm glad."

Silence.

Felix wants to disappear. Instead, he says softly, "Lillie."

"Yeah?"

"Why are you doing this?" Felix asks. He leans his face against the window, closes both his eyes. He crumples the stained eyepatch within his fist. "You're barely asking me anything. Matter of fact, you barely reacted at all. I mean, God, are we really not going to talk about it? What you just saw?"

A pause. "I didn't know if you wanted to talk about it."

"It doesn't matter what I want. We can't dance around it, can we? It just doesn't make sense."

There's a hum, a slight beat of hesitation in the air. He feels the weight of Lillie's hand on his shoulder, just for a second. "Felix," she says. "I would love to talk about it, but you won't even look at me. I'm not going to have a conversation with the back of your head."

Felix shudders. He can feel the dread growing now, digging its talons into him. He never should've done this. Why did he do this?

It takes him another second to force his body to move, but he does, slowly, curving his shoulders away from the window, adjusting so he can look at her. He keeps his hand glued over his cursed eye, like he's playing half a game of peek-a-boo.

Lillie's round eyes are earnest and brown as rain-soaked earth. Dark moles dot her skin like stray strokes of paint: below her eye, on the bridge of her nose, the perimeter of her lip. The little black curls at her hairline have frizzed slightly from the humidity. Her face is so calm. Felix likes looking at it.

"May I?" she asks, and Felix doesn't know why, but he nods.

She moves his hand away from his face, a sharp little exhale leaving her mouth the moment she does. "I've never seen anything like this."

"I have," Felix says softly. "Every generation, someone in my family is born with an eye like this. This time it was me. Before that it was my mother. Then her father, my grandfather, before her. It just keeps going, and it will keep going."

There were two children born curse-free before Felix, his sister Reina first, and then his brother Angel. In this way, Felix was and still is the disappointment. His earliest memory is the sound of his mother weeping.