Wake

Chapter 5

Vinny

I'd lost track of how many days I'd made pancakes for breakfast in the past month. It had started out as two days in a row, and then had grown to a week, and then continued to stretch to an amount I could no longer count. It probably was terrible to be consuming that much sugar every morning, but I was getting good at making them, and it was hard to stop now.

I had the recipe memorized by now, knew just how much flour, how much milk, the right way to mix it so that all the air bubbles were trapped. It was how I spent my mornings now, pouring and mixing and flipping.

The early morning was the best time to be there, in the kitchen. I was always up before Cian or Mom, so I had it to myself, the timid sunlight highlighting the brass pots and pans, the clinking and clanging of spoons and whisks a careful countermelody to the chirping birds beyond the window. It wasn't like it was at night. Night was frigid and eerie. Morning was the epitome of comfortable heat.

The griddle hissed as I dripped a scoop of batter over it, spatula in my other hand. As a pocket of sweet-scented steam rose into my nostrils, I heard Cian shuffle in with a sleep-drunken groan.

My back was to him, but I saw the disbelief, if not annoyance, on his face. "Pancakes?" he said. "Again?"

"I won't stop," I said, drizzling a handful of chocolate chips over the flapjacks, then watching as the batter swallowed them whole. "Not until I've mastered it."

"It's literally been a month," Cian responded. "Of pancakes. Just pancakes. I think you've mastered it fine."

I flipped a finished one onto a plate. "Do you have something against them?"

"Well, no."

"Then quit complaining."

I waited until I'd made a considerably-sized stack before turning and sliding the plate over to Cian. He was still in his rocket ship pajama pants, the same pair Eden had bought him for his sixteenth birthday, and had tossed a wrinkled, only half-zipped jacket over his bare chest. Yawning, he scrubbed his hand through his hair and went to work, slicing his meal into neat triangles. "You know," he said then, a minuscule smile tickling his mouth, "the day I told Lucie...about us, I took her to a diner."

"Oh?"

"Yeah," he replied. "I know. It seems stupid to tell her about something that dark while eating pancakes, but that's exactly what I did."

I frowned, finishing off another flapjack. The griddle was still steaming; I reached one hand to click the stovetop off, setting my spatula aside for a moment. Not turning towards Cian, I braced my hands against the counter. "She took all of it pretty well, don't you think? To learn that much about what happened to us, and still want to stick around? She must have been crazy—"

"Vinny," snapped Cian. "Don't talk about her like that."

I turned, squinting at him. He had paused with his fork halfway to his mouth, his expression stern enough to frighten me. "Like what?"

"Like she's dead. She's not dead. She's not going to be dead, not anytime soon."

"I didn't mean it that way," I said, but Cian just shook his head, already busying himself with finishing off his pancake stack. It was obvious that the subject of Lucie wasn't on the schedule any longer, and I understood that. The more we talked about her, the more we thought about her, the more her ache her absence caused us. I wanted to believe ignoring it all was going to get rid of the hole in my chest, in Cian's chest, but even I knew the attempt was futile.