My Boyfriend is a Bigfoot?

Chapter Nine

I waited at the edge of the forest til I became sufficiently convinced Brad would not show himself during that particular watch. I hadn't expected him to appear so quickly, not while there was still sunlight to see by, and yet I was still pinched by a singe of rejection as I turned my back to the trees. I returned to the house and distracted myself from the slowness of time by constructing a slightly more elaborate dinner than was standard for me.

I packed away the leftovers of my sweet potato quinoa salad in two separate Tupperwares: one for the fridge, and the other for Brad, thinking the smell of food might draw him out as it had before. Darla's path crossed mine for the first time since we'd arrived home on my way back up the stairs. We both stopped. Nothing I'd been doing was secret, though I still felt that I'd been caught red-handed, up to no good.

She leant coolly against the railing as my spine backed into the wall. She reached for the back of her head, nervous to speak. Once again, I felt left out of the full picture. "Hey, Blair, uh, could I actually get you something to bring with you? Before you go?"

"What did you have in mind?"

"I'd... feel better if you had something to keep you safe."

I followed her back through the basement suite and into her drably furnished room. She pulled a drawer out from the bottom of her nightstand and retrieved a tall canister with expansive paragraphs of tiny black print wrapped around its yellow label, setting it beside her lamp. "Bear spray," she announced matter-of-factly. Her other hand continued to fish through the heap of small miscellaneous items.

"Oh," I replied flatly.

Darla eventually produced three more objects, each clutched precariously in same hand: a black candle, a vial filled to its capacity with an opaque, inky fluid, and a terrifyingly long needle that did not gleam in the light of the lamp as would've been natural for a metallic object. It was strangely matte, and fashioned in the deepest, darkest black of all three items.

"You have any tattoos, Saff?"

All my focus turned to the needle. I thought about the cartoon cupcake with oversized eyes and and tiny tongue-out smirk between them I'd gotten in culinary school just above my hip and weighed whether or not I really wanted to disclose its existence. I eventually settled on, "Uh... a small one, yeah," hoping she wouldn't pursue any further details.

Darla had more than a few tattoos herself, many of them plainly visible along the skin exposed by her tank top. She rarely wore short sleeves shirts, and when she did, I'd never examined the tattoos they revealed closely, having always tried to avoid seeming like I was staring when they caught my eye. Sitting across from her as she knelt before the nightstand, I permitted myself a more thorough study of the elaborate depictions weaving around her arms.

Her left forearm was consumed almost entirely by an alchemical periodic table. Where there was vacant space, symbols of greater intricacy and scale bloomed in careful artistry, none of which struck me as familiar. Further up her left arm were similarly hieroglyph-esque renditions of trees and suns and moons and birds and yet more unfamiliar symbols. The method of tattooing seemed to differ between fore and upper arm, the images of nature appearing to have been carved with a blunter tool and healed more roughly, with thick, raised scars forming the designs.

Her right arm had four columns of vertically descending sigils and runes, most of which were composed of interlocking triangles and circles, occasionally shot through with solitary black lines. She'd never stricken me as the majorly tattooed sort (not that I was the sort to pass judgement on stuff like that) and I had to admit that her being a witch (jarring a fact as that remained) did explain a lot.