Chapter Twenty-Three
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Three hours after their meeting with Delora, just as the night put the city in a choke hold, Olline was standing at Casimir’s apartment. Her legs were tense and her hands curled into fists, as she convinced herself to stop being a coward and knock on the damn door.
The ease with which she could retrace her steps from only one visit mildly impressed herself, but it wasn’t enough to steel her nerves. Taking a deep, ragged breath, she screwed her eyes shut and knocked. She shifted from foot to foot, her heart racing, as she waited for Casimir to open the door.
The seconds trickled by. Hours seemed to pass as she stood there, convincing herself that he wasn’t home despite hearing the faint rustle of movement from inside.
Maybe he has company.
Her heart tripped over itself with the thought and she was about to scurry away, the weight of the mini-stick heavy in her pocket, when Casimir opened the door a crack. “Olline? What’re you . . .” he trailed off, frowning, and opened the door a bit more to look up and down the vacant hallway. “Are you all right?”
She nodded and said, “Yup!” far too brightly. She cringed and rubbed the back of her neck. “Can I come in? I have something for you and I want to . . . I need to talk to you. Is now a good time?”
He blinked at her slowly before opening the door wider, allowing her inside. She tried not to sigh in relief at seeing his apartment empty. “Another gift? Really, Olline darling, you’re far too kind.” When she flashed him a smile that was more grimace, Casimir asked again, “Are you sure everything’s all right? If you wanted to talk, you only needed to message me. You didn’t need to trudge all the way down here.”
She lifted a shoulder in a shrug, but stopped when she saw the black orchid on his nightstand. It was so perfectly in the center of the table that she imagined him painstakingly placing it with care. Warmth bloomed in the center of her chest, calming her nerves. “It’s not really a gift, so don’t get too excited. Besides, that’s not really the reason I’m here. It was just a nice excuse to talk to you. Or, really, to explain in person. Because if I don’t get this off my chest now, I’m going to go crazy and, honestly, I’m tired of always being the one chasing people.”
Already off to a great start, way to go, Olline.
He gestured for her to sit, his expression slightly bemused. She perched on the edge of his bed, and tried not to notice how smooth and cool the fabric was. Olline locked her gaze on her hands, which was safer than Casimir’s face by leagues. She couldn’t bear to look up and face his mask of marble right now. “I need you to know why I keep trying to get you to say, or admit, to this feeling between us. Or acknowledge if it’s all in my head, because who knows, it may be. Which is why I’m here.” She couldn’t believe she was actually saying this, but she was here now and if she didn’t get it all out, as fast as possible, she never would. Wringing her hands, Olline took a deep breath. “But first, for you to even know why this is so important to me, given the shit ton of drama we’ve going on around us, you have to understand why I took a contract in Antal. You know, beyond the obscene amounts of money they threw at me.”
Casimir moved so he was leaning against his little kitchen island, giving her enough space to not feel crowded. It felt like a kindness of sorts and she appreciated the consideration.
“There was this guy, Achan,” she began, her words stilted, slowly gaining strength. “I liked him and thought the feeling was mutual. I shared . . . everything with him. Showed him all the secret projects I was developing for our supervisor. I even showed him my garden. Tried to give him a plant and everything.” She jerked her chin at the orchid, letting her gaze rest there instead of her hands. “Turns out, he already had a girlfriend. All he wanted from me was my work. He thought my hobbies were silly and a waste of time and talent. He stole more and more of my magitech programs, my codes. Each time I brought him into my home, he stole a little more and I was too enamored with the idea of him to want to see all the red flags he was waving.”
There was a ragged breath, a thump like Casimir bumped into something, but she didn’t dare look up and meet his gaze. Olline sighed, balling her hands into fists, refusing to let the memory make her frayed and raw all over again. That was the past. She was only looking forward from now on.
“I was heartbroken. I felt so stupid. But that wasn’t even the worst of it.” She cringed; she was more annoyed by what happened then hurt by it now. “Achan took my work, shared it with his girlfriend, and together they passed it off as their own. They stole it and cut me out and went to our bosses and said I was the one trying to cut them out of what I’d spent so long developing. I was so blindsided, so hurt, that I guess I didn’t make a compelling case to corporate. They fired me on the spot.”
She heard Casimir shift, moving closer. Olline stalled him with a sharp jerk of her head. She needed to finish. If she didn’t get this all out now, she didn’t think she ever would.
Olline kept her eyes firmly on the orchid as she pressed on. “To be rejected like that, to have my loyalty so misplaced and to have my work stolen . . . It’s made me want to hide from everyone. To throw myself into work because it’s safer than needing anyone else. I’m sure I was partially to blame for it all, being that gullible isn’t anyone’s doing but my own. But since then, I look for signs of betrayal in others so I can leave first.”
She took a breath, ran a clammy hand over her thigh and the slight impression of the mini-stick in her pocket, and finally met Casimir’s eyes. They were watery, fixated on her as if he hadn’t even blinked while she spoke. “Something feels off. There’s this distance and I need to know if it’s because you don’t see me in any kind of special way or, I don’t know. This sounded better when I was practicing what to say on the way here,” she said with a forced little laugh. Casimir didn’t respond, and she cleared her throat, tilting her face away. “I need to know before I start really falling for you, Cas. Because that’s what’s happening. You can blame Achan for how incredibly awkward this all is, but I can’t go through that kind of humiliation again. I need to know if what I’m feeling is one-sided, because I can’t trust myself anymore.”
She shut her eyes for a moment, put iron in her backbone, turned to face Casimir, and opened her eyes. The pain she saw in Casimir’s gaze gave her hope, so she pressed on quickly before the iron in her spine melted away and she pretended none of this ever happened. “There’re things that don’t make sense about how we met, why you were at my office to begin with. About what you said to Bode when he thought I was, well, I don’t know what he thought I was, but we never got a chance to talk about it, either.”
Taking one last fortifying breath, she said, “Before things end with Etzel, I need to know what’s happening between us. I don’t want to waste my time, wreck my heart, over a fantasy again.”
Casimir didn’t respond for a second, every muscle taut as he remained leaning against the counter. He took a deep breath, and something seemed to break as his shoulders slowly sagged. Yet he remained silent for a moment more.
The iron in Olline’s spine finally crumbled, and she shot to her feet. “It’s silly, I know. I’m being overly dramatic. You’ve dealt with so much, and so much worse than anything Achan ever did, so it’s not fair for me to put you on the spot like this. I’m sorry, I’ll just . . . I should go.”
He stopped her with a gentle hand on her shoulder before she could dart past. He carefully pulled her back to sit on the bed where he lightly held her arms so she could wriggle away if she wanted to.
She didn’t want to, but it was nice that he gave her the choice.
“It’s not a contest, you know,” Casimir said with a sad smile, “between who has gone through worse. Emotional wounds bleed all the same.” Casimir searched her eyes, but for what, Olline wasn’t sure.
She bit her lip, silently withstanding his scrutiny, waiting, hoping, when, with a heavy sigh, Casimir said, “There’s something I need to confess to you, too.”