Chapter 1
I have made four cups of coffee. I have finished none of them. The mugs are lined up in my sink, and I am looking at them the way you look at evidence at a crime scene when you are the primary suspect. The crime is unclear. The feeling is not.
In Hungary we have a saying—majd lesz valahogy. Roughly, it means it’ll work out somehow. In the true spirit of Hungarian culture, however, it doesn’t mean that the ‘somehow’ will be good. It means things will continue to exist in some form, which is the most you can reasonably expect from the universe. My grandmother said it at funerals. My father said it when the economy collapsed. I am saying it now, to four cold coffees on a Sunday afternoon in Chicago, because I feel like I’ve been hollowed out with a spoon and majd lesz valahogy is the most comfort I’m willing to extend to myself right now.
The weekend was good. Objectively good. That is the part that makes no sense, or makes complete sense, depending on how honest I’m being.
Every scene was consensual. Every partner enthusiastic, every boundary established and observed, every check-in handled with what I would call, in a professional assessment of myself, genuine care. I was—and this is the part I keep returning to—good at it. I am good at it. Very good at it. I enjoy it. Three days of complete control and confidence and certainty, and then the drive back this morning with the highway grey and the city grayer and somewhere around exit 43 the certainty just… went somewhere else. Left me in the driver’s seat with untouched coffee in the cupholder and that specific hollow feeling I’ve been pretending is tiredness.
The hollow feeling lives just below my sternum. I’ve been pressing on it all afternoon like a bruise, trying to understand its particular geometry. That is, I’m aware, not how feelings work. Feelings are not subject to the kind of measurement that produces useful data. I know this. I am pressing on it anyway.
It’s not tiredness. I know what it is.
Dom drop. The phrase sits in my head with the particular smugness of a correctly diagnosed problem that still hasn’t resolved. I looked it up six weeks ago, read approximately four paragraphs before I recognized myself too completely to continue, and closed the browser. It’s a documented phenomenon, it has a name, other people experience it, and the recommended management strategies include community, aftercare, and honest self-reflection.
Honest self-reflection. I am a Hungarian man who was raised believing that discussing your feelings is something you do on your deathbed if you absolutely must and even then, briefly. My people survived the Mongols, the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, two world wars, and forty years of Soviet occupation. We did not survive all that by sitting around having feelings about it, my grandmother would say. We survived it by making very dark jokes and getting on with things.
So it is the worst sort of irony that I am currently sitting around having feelings about it.
My phone buzzes. Three times in rapid succession. Kieran.
Kieran Walsh texts in threes on Sundays. I have known him long enough to understand the system. And he has known me long enough to know when I’m having feelings and avoiding them. I have been ignoring the system for the last forty minutes, hence the triple text, and now I have approximately eight minutes before he calls and I have to explain myself with my actual voice.
We met two years ago at a humanities faculty mixer I attended because starving post-docs don’t turn down free food, even when it means pretending your body of research is not in computational physics. He introduced himself as a linguist, which I told him was interesting, and he looked at me the way people look at you when you’ve accidentally said the right thing. He was quick to realize that I was, in fact, not writing my thesis on post-modern Hungarian poetry. We spent twenty minutes arguing about why computational approaches to language were epistemologically limited— something I found genuinely worth arguing about. He seemed pleased by this.
I liked him immediately. This turned out to be a whole situation.
What we had was real and I ended it badly. Which is to say that I didn’t end it; I just became increasingly unavailable for the parts that required me to say certain things out loud, in daylight, to other people. Things like: yes, I’m bisexual. And Kieran Walsh is my boyfriend.
Kieran waited eight months, which is seven months longer than he should have, and then he stopped waiting. What remains, surprisingly, is a D&D group that is technically his and that I attend every week, a complicated friendship, and a man who texts me three times on bad Sundays because he cares more about my wellbeing than I’ve earned.
I pick up my phone.
My place tonight. 7pm. Don’t argue.
I think about arguing. I think about not arguing. I type: Not good company right now.
I know. 7pm.
There’s a whole conversation in there. I know means I know exactly what’s happening with you and I’m not asking you to perform being fine. I’m asking you to show up, roll some dice, and stop looking at your sink like the brooding Hungarian bastard you like to be when you have to deal with anything more complicated than your experiment variables not lining up. 7pm means you’re coming.
Majd lesz valahogy, I think. Somehow.
I show up at Kieran’s townhouse at six-forty five with beer. Even when I’m wallowing, I arrive early and I don’t arrive empty-handed. My mother instilled this in me with the persistence of a woman who considered arriving without a gift a moral failing on the level of public dishonesty. I’m sure she’d be gratified to know that the particular inheritance of my conservative, Catholic, Eastern European upbringing has at least translated to being an admirable guest. Among other things.
Kieran opens the door. Looks at me. Says nothing for a moment in his usual way of assessing before speaking.
I know what he’s seeing. Dark hair that has mostly escaped the bun I put it into earlier. A worn flannel with pushed up sleeves—the riot of my tattoos on full display—because that is the compromise I’ve reached with the current Chicago weather. Jeans worn thin. A far cry from the blazers and button-downs I wore at the beginning of my postdoc.
“You look like shit,” he says.
Kieran, of course, looks perfectly put together. Sweater and slacks, medium build, wire-rim glasses. He’s got the kind of quiet good looks that accumulate rather than announce. You notice them fifteen minutes into a conversation and then can’t stop noticing them. Sharp blue-gray eyes. A pouty mouth that’s currently twisted into a neat frown.
I give him a wry smile.
“Thanks. I showered.”
“Recently?”
“Kieran.”
“I’m establishing a baseline.” He pushes up his glasses and invites me in. The silver in his blond hair catches the light. “By the end of the session, the baseline will have improved. That’s the hypothesis.”
I follow him inside instead of countering him, which I’m sure Kieran interprets as its own kind of answer.
“How was the weekend,” he says. Not a question despite the inflection.
“Fine.”
“Mm.” He drifts to the table where we play, glancing at his binder. It’s meticulous, filled with notes and character sheets and hand drawn maps that look like they could fit in a medieval history textbook. “New player tonight.”
“Gio mentioned.”
“ER doctor from his hospital. Playing a barbarian.” A page turns. “Owen’s cancelled again.”
“Long text?” I ask, cracking open a can. Something to do with my hands.
“Operatic.” Kieran smiles a little. “I’ll read it later with the appropriate gravitas.”
The Owen text reading is one of the finer traditions of this group. Owen Park is a good person who cancels on us with the reliability of a physical law and compensates with increasingly literary apology texts that Kieran reads aloud at the start of each session he misses with the flat solemnity of a man presenting findings to a tribunal.
Teddy bursts in without knocking five minutes later, which is the only way she knows how to enter a room. She operates on the philosophical assumption that she is welcome everywhere until proven otherwise, which so far has not been disproven. Annotated and dog-eared handbook tucked under her arm, her tongue ring clicks as she storms in and takes a good look at me.
“You look like shit.”
Kieran snorts from behind his binder. The bastard.
“Yeah,” I say dryly. “I’ve been told. Thanks.”
“You’re going to scare off Gio’s friend if you’re not nice.”
“I’m always nice.”
Teddy and Kieran share one of their looks. The specific, silent conversation of two people who’ve known each other since they were children and have long since stopped needing the inconvenience of words for it. It’s not malicious. It’s just extremely annoying.
“I am,” I protest. Half-heartedly.
Kieran snorts again.
I almost want to argue that consensual sadism is not the same thing as unkindness—if anything, I am exceptionally nice when it comes to satisfying my partners. Meticulous, even—but I take a mouthful of beer instead.
“Béla here?” Sofia calls as she lets herself in. “Oh good, I was worried.”
Sofia shrugs off her jacket and comes to look me over. She does not, however, tell me I look like shit. I appreciate Sofia. She carries warmth the way other people carry keys—automatically, always present, not something she thinks about. She kisses Kieran’s cheek, squeezes Teddy’s shoulder, and turns to me with her usual easy smile and dark-eyed attention.
“How was your weekend?” she asks.
“Fine.”
Sofia accepts this at face value and moves on. This is what I mean about Sofia: she always knows the exact right amount to push, and she pushes that amount and not one word more.
Despite the fact that this is Kieran’s D&D group, I am grateful that his friends adopted me. New to this country, trying to figure out a new city and new social etiquette and parts of my identity that had no room to exist before I left—and I lucked into a perfect group for it.
Steady Kieran. Enthusiastic Teddy. Warm Sofia. And—
The door bangs open.
“She’s on her way!”
Gio. Sofia’s little brother. Late, naturally, carrying enough snacks to feed twice our number.
“She just texted. Shift ran late.” He puts everything down on the table, heedless of Kieran’s protest about chip bags on the forest map. “She’s going to be great. Everyone be normal.”
Teddy laughs at that. “Define normal.”
“Normal for us.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“It’s extremely reassuring.” Gio points at me. “You. Be nice.”
I almost laugh. It feels foreign next to the hollow sensation behind my sternum. “I’m always nice,” I repeat. “Why do people keep saying that?”
“The grad student?” Teddy asks, turning to the middle of her campaign notes.
“Don’t bring up the grad student,” I groan.
“He didn’t come back,” Kieran says mildly from behind his binder. His eyes are sharp but his lips twitch.
The room is quiet for a moment as we all reflect on why said grad student did not come back to play again. The grad student had not come back, and while this was arguably not entirely my fault, the group had collectively decided that is was a least partially my fault. I have been unable to mount a successful defense of my innocence in the three months since. The defense would require explaining things I’d rather not examine. So I take another mouthful of beer and accept the verdict.
“Nice,” Gio repeats, and goes to relocate the food at Kieran’s insistence.
I pull out my character sheet.
Avaros looks back at me from the page—the broody druid, rendered in Teddy’s slightly merciless hand. My features exaggerated and transformed and whittled into something arcane. Vine tattoos that read as ancient rather than decorative, an expression of contained authority that I recognize as the version of myself that doesn’t stare at a sink of untouched coffee cups. This version of me doesn’t have the hollow feeling or the complicated history or the ongoing low-grade argument with his own psychology about what he is and what he’s allowed to want.
He just exists, in the forest, knowing things, being occasionally devastating about it. It’s a good life.
Me, the druid. Teddy, the hafling rogue with a catastrophically tragic backstory. Sofia, the tiefling cleric. Gio, the chaotic human bard who has managed to seduce NPCs Kieran specifically designed to be unseducable. Owen, the fighter, currently played in absentia by Kieran with a competence that is, I suspect, faintly pointed.
And now—Gio’s friend.
We’ve had people come and go from the group, which explains why we’re a little unoptimized—more magic than might. I tell myself that a fresh player will be fun. That I like playing this game. That this is what normal people do. Spend time with friends. Laugh. Relax.
Gio pours chips into bowls and promises that the combination of sour cream and a powdered soup mix is edible. He describes his new friend in the way he describes everything. Enthusiastically. Out of order. Something about running codes and a good sense of humor. And a transfer between residency programs.
“You’re going to like her,” he says. “She’s cool. Doesn’t yell at the nurses.”
Gio, who is an emergency department nurse, says that like it’s the highest possible standard a human being can be held to. Maybe it is.
She arrives at seven twenty-two with a tentative knock on the door that sends Gio off his perch on the counter.
I hear her before I see her—something she says in the hallway, low and dry, makes Gio laugh. A real one, surprised out of him.
Then she appears in the living room and I understand, immediately and inconveniently, that I am in trouble.
She is tall. That’s the first specific thought I manage, which is a stupid thought, but it’s the one I have. Brown hair in a bun only marginally less chaotic than mine. A gray hoodie—the that was tied around Gio’s waist two minutes ago—zipped all the way up over light blue scrubs. Light blue scrubs that have a spatter of something on the pants that I’m fairly confident is blood. Her face is angular with broad cheekbones, pointed chin, and slightly slanted brown eyes that do a full circuit of the room before they reach me.
Hold.
Something in her expression does something small and fast that I can’t fully read before it’s gone.
Then she smiles.
Nem lehet. Because I have spent this entire Sunday building a very thorough case for why I am in no condition to be interested in anyone or anything—complete with supporting references, a comprehensive appendix, and what I consider a fairly airtight methodology—and the universe has apparently reviewed by case, ruled against me, and sent me this instead: a woman at the end of a long shift in someone else’s hoodie with blood on her scrubs who makes me stop pressing the bruise behind my sternum.
I file this under noted and irrelevant and I’m immediately aware that my filing system has produced an error.
You’re going to see her every week, some part of my brain offers, helpfully.
Yes, I think. I noticed. Thank you. Very useful contribution.
“Everyone,” Gio announces, “this is Camille. Camille, everyone.”
She waves. Small, easy. Teddy smiles. Sofia rises to hug her in greeting. Kieran nods. Names get traded. I say, “Béla”—and then I’m supposed to say something else, something nice, something normal—and what comes out is:
“Good to have a barbarian. We’ve been critically short on people willing to hit things.”
The corner of her mouth moves.
“Happy to hit things.”
Dry. Unhesitating. Like she’s been making herself at home in rooms full of strangers her whole life and the skill has become so practiced she doesn’t notice she’s doing it. I don’t know why I’m certain it costs her something. I’m certain anyway.
“Come sit,” Sofia says, steering her toward the empty chair.
The empty chair directly across the table from mine.
I look at Gio. He is arranging chips with the focused innocence of a man who has never once had an ulterior motive.
I look at Kieran. He is reading his notes with the serenity of a man who has engineered none of this and wants that on record.
I look at Teddy. She smiles at me with an expression of pure teasing satisfaction. Like she knows the universe is taunting me and is perfectly on board with it.
Across the table, Camille accepts a beer from Gio and laughs at something Teddy says. Laughter that’s unguarded, that gets out before she’s finished listening. Her fingers drum on the can. Her smile is too easy for someone who showed up here not knowing anyone. She is, objectively, just some woman who showed up to a stranger’s home because a friend asked her.
She is, in some way I don’t have good language for yet, a problem.
The specific kind that arrives at the wrong time in exactly the right shape.
Majd lesz valahogy, I think, and I mean it more than I’ve meant anything all weekend.
