overdrawing | The Ace of Cups [Open to All]

It's Mira's mother, he thinks. She's left things in the guest room for him in the past. Little things, really, like a packet of cookies or a book he's never been allowed to read. Today it's a deck of cards with a sticky note explaining that shuffling them might help his nervous fidgeting. He'd been pleased, tentatively grateful, until realizing that these hadn't been normal playing cards.

They had been Tarot cards.

Shuffling them helps, certainly. Gabe cuts the deck, cascades it, shuffles the cards back and forth constantly in his little corner at Quill while he waits for his shift to start at Finn's. In all his shuffling, he's been avoiding actually looking at the cards or the booklet with them to explains their meanings. They're occult, pagan...Wrong. He shouldn't look.

Then a card falls out and Gabe's breath catches in surprise. A golden goblet crowned with a dove. It looks like something he'd see in church except that it's on a tarot card. His brain tries to reconcile the familiar symbolism and he can't help it, paging through the booklet to find the Ace of Cups.

Ace cards always mean new beginnings. The Ace of Cups are a new beginning in one's emotional life, finding love, trust, and blessings. This is a card of happiness.

Gabe is pretty sure it wrong to feel this way, but it's comforting that this is the card that's fallen out.

Curious, he spreads the cards on the table and starts reading through their meanings.

[[Find him at Quill all by his lonesome]]

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Immediately, Gabe sweeps the cards back into a stack and set them nervously aside. "Yes, please, go ahead and sit," he says. "Are you still okay to drink coffee?" he asks, genuinely curious and concerned. "My mom stopped drinking coffee in the third trimester of all her pregnancies."

He almost can't remember a time when his mother hadn't been pregnant or holding a newborn in her arms.

She raises an eyebrow at the way he hurriedly sweeps the cards away, as though they were a secret to be ashamed of. But when she considers how she found him praying desperately in a church, she realizes she shouldn't be so surprised.

"Well, I've never heard anything about not being able to drink coffee while pregnant," she says with a shrug, bringing the cup to her mouth and taking a small sip of the still-hot liquid.

"So what's with the hiding of the cards? I'm not here to judge," she tells him.

"They're not Christian," he says, deliberately looking away from the cards now. Bereft of the shuffling, Gabe tries not to pick at his watch or the hangnails that torment his bitten, ruined nails. "They're...I mean..."

Suddenly referring to them as devilry, as his parents would have, sounds embarrassing and naive.

"I think that they make tarot cards specifically with Christian images, if that's what has you worried," she points out. "I think I've seen angel tarot cards in bookstores before. And I've met Christians who use stuff like these cards and healing stones. Stuff that wouldn't necessarily be considered 'Christian' in nature."

She watches him with an encouraging smile, hoping she's not making him more nervous than he already seems to be.

"Either way, I like tarot cards," she says. "They're beautiful."

Not all Christians are righteous enough, Gabe doesn't say. Some of them rely on saints and superstition without even really following the law of the Bible. Just because some Christians used them didn't make them acceptable.

Slowly, Gabe pushes the deck across the table. "Go ahead, if you like them."

Marina pauses, raising an eyebrow at Gabe. She'd been under the impression that they were his cards. Not to mention, he seemed to have wrapped himself up in reading them, prior to her interrupting him.

"Aren't they your cards?" She asks, pushing them right back towards him. She can't tell what he's thinking, but surely, he ought to know that reading tarot cards wasn't going to send up straight to Hell.

"They were left for me to shuffle," he explains. When he looks down, he realizes his hands are drumming nervously at the table and Gabe curls them into fists that he sets firmly down. "I need things to do with my hands..."

He hadn't been reading them. Not really. "I just got curious."

"Well, would you mind shuffling them for me?" She asks, voice soft. She sees the way he drums his hands against the table; she also sees how quickly he turns them into fists.

"There's nothing wrong with curiosity," she tells him, sipping from her drink with an encouraging smile. "Even just a little of it can go a long way."

He receives the cards back gratefully and shuffles them, sending the cards through several cascades and never glancing down at their contents.

"Curiosity has always caused trouble," he says. "Look at Eve."

"I've always liked Eve," Marina mentions, watching Gabe shuffle the cards. "Besides, it wasn't just her that ate that apple; it's horsesh- crap that Adam hardly gets any of the blame. No one made him eat the apple; he made the same choice as Eve."

In hindsight, she'll realize this isn't the best topic of conversation, but she finds herself feeling surprisingly passionate, once he mentions Eve's name.

Gabe drops the cards and looks up at Marina, his eyes going wide. What she's just said amounts to blasphemy. "But it was Eve who first sinned. She knew better and she tempted Adam..."

But did she really? The Bible doesn't say she tricked Adam or forced him to eat. What lurks between the lines there?

"First sinned, maybe," Marina shrugs, though she feels a twinge of guilt at the look on Gabe's face. "Why does that make her crime greater than Adam's, though? They both bit into that apple; they should both share the blame."

Marina doesn't know why, but a sense of personal connection to the Creation myth unfurls in her thoughts. There is a reason she cares so much for Eve. She just can't pinpoint it.

"Because that's just...that's how it was written," Gabe says. "The Bible is God's literal truth." His heart is beating too fast and the water in his glass suddenly ripples on the still table.

"It's the Bible!"

"Okay, okay," Marina says, lowering her voice. She's tempted to reach over and place a calming hand over his, but she doubts he'd appreciate the gesture. Not after basically refuting everything he's ever believed in.

"I'm sorry," she says, trying to meet his eyes. "I don't mean to upset you. That was...careless of me, to disrespect your beliefs like that. I'm sorry."

Looking down, Gabe is suddenly deeply, deeply uncomfortable with eye contact. There mere reality of other humans in the building suddenly feels stifling. Gripping the edge of the table he tries to breathe.

To his side, the water glass cracks.

"It's supposed to be true," he says. "It's not my belief. It's just supposed to be true."

She watches him, suddenly keenly aware of the tension of his hands gripped on the table and the way he doesn't meet her eyes. It's a sight that tugs on her already worn-out heartstrings.

She raises an eyebrow when the water glass cracks but says nothing, not wanting to unnerve him further.

"Okay," she says. "It's true then. If you say it's true, it's true."

She wishes she could think of something more comforting to say.

It's all supposed to be true, except Gabe feels like his faith becomes flimsier and flimsier every time he has to explain himself.

"I should get going," he mumbles. "I have work soon." Soon he can submerge his hands in soapy water and lose himself in the unending task of dishes and plates piling up around him.

"Alright," Marina says, watching him with concern. "But hey." She grabs a napkin and a pen from her purse, quickly scrabbling her cellphone number on it before sliding it along to Gabe. "If you ever want to talk or if you need anything, let me know, okay?"

The Ace of Cups [Open to All]

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