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.
"Why?" Lillie asks. "Do you know where it came from?"
Felix shakes his head. "It's just a curse as old as time."
"If it is a curse," Lillie says, "it's beautiful."
The word unsettles him, like it's a joke, like it's in a place it doesn't fit. He sits back again, gaze straight ahead. The parking lot they're in is mostly empty, a bleak expanse of gray asphalt, fringed by fields. "It's not," he says, and he's surprised at how staunch his own voice sounds. "I can't really see at all out of this eye, and rain follows me around everywhere. Believe me. If there was a way to get rid of it, I would. I'd do almost anything."
"What have you tried?"
"There's nothing to try," Felix says. "There's no way to get rid of it. No one ever has before."
She pauses for a long time, as if she's expecting him to elaborate. When he doesn't, she says, "What do you do for a living, Felix?"
"What?" he glances at her in confusion, perplexed as to how they made the jump from there to here. "I'm a researcher. Natural medicine, broadly speaking."
"That makes sense," Lillie says, and Felix pauses a second, unsure whether that's a good or bad thing. "Then you should know better than anyone that no one's ever done it before is not a good or even a logical reason to not try. They teach you all that science stuff starting in like, second grade. You have a question. You make a hypothesis. And then you experiment."
"That's grossly oversimplified."
"I disagree. I've just cut out the bullshit."
Felix looks at her squarely this time. He expects her to flinch—even his own siblings flinch when he looks at them without his eyepatch on—but her face is still calm, as still as the glass surface of a pond. "Something doesn't make sense to me," he admits. "We're strangers, practically, and yet you've accepted all this like it's nothing. Then you make a big deal about trying to, what, break this curse—which by this point is centuries old, maybe older than that. What's going on, Lillie? What's in it for you?"
He has her. He can see it in the way her expression changes, the smallest of shifts, worry a small dot of ink bleeding onto the page of her eyes. She seems smaller then, shrunken beneath the weight of something. Felix softens his voice. "Oh God," he exhales. "There really is something going on, isn't there?"
"I think it started the night of my reading," Lillie confesses, her eyes low, trained down at her feet. "I don't know why, but lately...the things I write in my poetry, the images I describe, the metaphors I create, whatever—they're actually coming into existence."
Felix keeps looking at her, his shoulders turned in her direction even as something deep in his body wants to pull away. Perhaps if it were someone else it would be a joke, some tone deaf poke at his outrageous existence, but not Lillie. He doesn't know how he knows, but he does. "What?" he asks. He coughs, clears his throat. "What exactly does that mean?"
Instead of answering, Lillie pushes a soft little breath through her teeth and drags her purse up onto her lap, digging around inside of it. A moment later she pulls out what looks like a jagged shard of glass, like the remnants of a shattered mirror.
"You might remember from one of the poems I read," Lillie says, gesturing at Felix to hold out his hand. When he does, she places the glass upon his palm, whispering to be careful with its sharp edge. "I talked about rain slicing something, I believe. The next morning, my brother found this next to my bed."
Slowly, Felix's gaze shifts from Lillie's wary face down to the stone in his hand. Through the constant fog of the storm swirling about his vision he must squint to see it, but once he does it's like his breath stops in his chest and for that moment he is simply existing rather than breathing.
"Lillie," Felix starts, before he knows the rest of what he's about to say. "I—"
"Don't," she says. "It's not—there have been other things. Terrible things. I can't keep doing this, Felix, and I don't know how it started or how to stop it."
The picture reveals itself to Felix then: stunning and clear, undeniable as his own reflection. "Lillie, you...you have to understand. Our situations aren't the same. Yours happened suddenly, didn't it? This curse—mine's been going on for years. The depths it reaches are much deeper. There's no way to know—"
"There's no way to know anything except for the fact that neither of us know anything, Felix. Something strange, something...I don't know, supernatural is going on here, and it might be related and it might not, but we can't figure that out by not doing anything," Lillie interrupts. She takes the stone back from him, dashing it in her purse again. "You won't even try? You're telling me you've never even thought about trying?"
Felix turns away then, facing out the window again, through which the sky is almost clear. He tries to picture it, a life without the storm, without the need to constantly hide it, but he can't. He can't even picture his own face without the eyepatch. It belongs to a stranger, not to him. "I don't think I can, Lillie."
Felix glances at her; her round eyes burn with intensity for a moment, something on the brink of explosion inside her, before the fierceness settles again just as suddenly. "Think about it," she says. "For a few days, just sit on it, sleep on it, whatever. Will you at least do that?"
At this point Felix thinks all he does is think and overthink and overthink again, his mind a steep and complicated terrain of thought he still doesn't know how to navigate. The idea of traversing it, and for something like this, is terrifying.
Still, there is something earnest in Lillie's expression that Felix hasn't really seen, not for a while. It looks like energy, like hope, and he must admit there is a big part of him that is craving it, that would hate to see it die.
Felix leans his head against the window. Outside, the rain has finally stopped. "Okay," he tells Lillie. "I'll think about it."