Chapter 5 Nasrin #2
Tilly broke into sudden choking coughs, which had Warrek rounding on her anxiously. She waved his attention away, taking a shaky breath.
“Um. His what?” I asked, wondering if something had gone wrong in translation.
Though we were both speaking the Sea Sand language, and confusion only seemed to arise these days when we used a human word of some sort, or ran into a difference in the Deep Sky dialect.
I knew Fiona had looked a little mussed when she’d come back with Dalk earlier, but I hadn’t imagined things had gone that far…
“His hard cock,” Oxriel clarified without missing a beat. “She was very interested in stroking it earlier.”
Zoren sent a scathing look of betrayal Oxriel’s way. “You did not tell me this!”
“Of course not,” Oxriel scoffed. “I was sworn to secrecy. I promised Dalk and Fiona both that I saw nothing. And that even if I had seen something, I would never divulge it to the end of my days.”
“Ox, sweetie,” I said, stuck somewhere between cringing and laughing. “You just divulged it to us.”
Oxriel’s jaw went slack with shock, his sight stars trembling.
“No!” he said after a confused hesitation.
“No, I did not! I would never break my vow of secrecy, even to one as loathsome as Dalk! And certainly not to Fiona!” His tail swiped across the stone in agitation.
“Perhaps you all merely…intuited what happened! You must have. For I have a very subtle and secretive way about me, and there is no way you have learned this knowledge from my tongues.”
“You just told us that she was stroking Dalk’s hard cock,” Zoren said bluntly.
“Certainly not!” Oxriel stammered. “’Twas not I, Zoren! You must be very clever indeed to have figured out what happened on your own! Without a word about it passing from my lips!”
While Zoren and Oxriel argued about it, with Tilly occasionally jumping in and playing referee, I couldn’t help but risk a glance at Gahn Thaleo to see what his reaction would be to this news.
To see if he was unhappy with the fact that one of the unmated human women was clearly making choices about who to hook up with, and that her choice was not a male of his tribe.
But he didn’t appear to be angry or surprised.
Of course, that said nothing about what he might actually feel about this turn of events. His face was flinty, unreadable.
I found myself once again breathless with the need to ask him what he thought, what he felt. What he’d do about this, if anything. I had a twisting urge to poke and prod him. As if to make him admit to all the things I didn’t like about him. To confirm everything I already knew.
“You don’t seem surprised,” I said.
“I do not see how I could be surprised,” Gahn Thaleo replied on a low rumble. “Both of them smelled like spilled seed upon their return to the vaklok.”
My stomach tightened. Something about the cold Gahn Thaleo talking about a concept as deeply sexual as spilled seed was jarring and infuriatingly erotic.
“You did not notice, warrior?” he asked Zoren.
That finally shut Zoren and Oxriel up. Zoren’s tail thwapped no in response to the question. “My nose was injured in the combat rounds,” he said. “All I can smell is my own blood.”
“Did you notice?” Tilly asked, peering up at Warrek. There was a truly massive height difference between them. Tilly was on the short side for a human woman, and Warrek was tall even for a Zaphrinax male.
“I did,” he admitted, his eyes shifting to Gahn Thaleo for a moment, as if seeking confirmation that it was alright to admit such a thing. “I doubt any man with a working nose could have been ignorant of the fact.”
Well. That was awkward. Even if you had some privacy for the main event, these guys could literally smell a hook-up on you afterwards…
I shifted from foot to foot, embarrassed on Fiona’s behalf.
“Let’s go see her,” I said firmly to Tilly.
We began walking into the large mountain’s main entrance.
Oxriel and Zoren followed, as their sleeping cave was attached to ours.
Warrek and Gahn Thaleo remained outside together, likely to have some private conversation amongst themselves.
I knew that Warrek was basically Gahn Thaleo’s right-hand man.
But not his friend, apparently.
I was already thinking ahead to finding Fiona, so I almost missed the low murmur of, “Goodnight, Nazreen,” from behind me. “To you and your friends.”
Fiona was a weepy mess when we found her.
“I just sucked Dalk’s dick,” she blurted when Tilly and I entered the cave.
“And then I mucked it all up asking him all these deep questions about what he’d do if someone else ended up being my mate.
And then he said he’d murder them. And then I kind of freaked out.
And then Valeria came, and…” A sob choked off her words as Tilly and I hurried towards her.
We sat down on either side of her on the bed, like bookends around a tearstained little book we both loved.
“And…And now…he’s gone!” Fiona rambled between stuttering breaths.
“Not forever,” Tilly assured her, patting her rhythmically on her upper back.
“How do you know?” Fiona shot back, swiping tears from her face.
“Because no one who’s seen how Dalk looks at you would believe him capable of staying away,” I said confidently.
Fiona sniffed, seeming at least somewhat comforted by this.
“Like how Gahn Thaleo looks at you,” Tilly said.
It took me a second to realize that the subject of conversation had shifted to me.
“We’re talking about Fiona right now!” I said, feeling strangely attacked. Which was stupid, because Tilly was one of the cheeriest people I knew. She got up early and whistled and hummed and liked to make soft crafts and clothes. Though she could be very blunt. Like right now.
But maybe she had a plan with this. Because suddenly Fiona wasn’t looking so mopey and instead was blinking away her tears, gazing at me with interest.
Oh, God, Tilly.
She knew I wouldn’t want to change the subject if it was distracting our friend from her own woes. Tilly raised her eyebrows encouragingly at me. I pursed my lips. She was too damn cute and clever for her own good. And mine, apparently.
“Was he doing his usual laser-eyes, Nasrin-stalker thing?” Fiona asked. “He hasn’t told you you’re his mate yet, has he?”
“Jesus, no!” I exclaimed, my heart leaping into my throat at the thought.
“Yeah, fair. If he’d already had a mate vision of you,” Fiona said, “there’s no way he’d let you go live in Gahn Errok’s mountain part-time.
That was the whole basis for the taklok thing, after all.
Gahn Errok challenged Gahn Thaleo to a death match just for inviting Steph over for dinner!
If Gahn Thaleo had had a vision of you, he’d be doing everything in his power to keep you here. ”
“And that is precisely the problem,” I said. “The fact that, just because some magic alien dragon might choose me for him, or any other man, that suddenly I’m bound to them. Just like that.” I snapped my fingers.
Tilly nodded thoughtfully.
“Well, at this point, we have the shuttle and the strength of numbers. If you ended up with a Deep Sky mate and truly didn’t want him, or you didn’t want to stay here, I believe that Valeria and many others would stand behind you.
We’ve never allowed any of the other women to just be foisted off onto someone they weren’t sure about. ”
“Yeah, I know,” I replied. “But it isn’t just that!”
“What else is it?” Fiona asked.
I mulled over how to put it into words. Something I hadn’t really thought about precisely, but that had always been lurking at the back of my mind. An innate rejection of the idea of a fated mate bond.
“I just think…I think love is something you should choose,” I said.
“Every single day.” My throat grew unexpectedly tight as images of my parents flashed before me.
Of my mom slipping Iranian sweets into Baba’s lunch every morning – cookies or little squares of cake flavoured with pistachios and saffron and rose petals.
Of Baba leaving scraps of paper around the house scrawled with lines from Persian love poems for Maman to find, secret whispers of what he felt for her.
No one told them to feel that way. No magic bond snapped suddenly into place.
Real love was built between two people slowly, resolutely, shored up against strife with little actions, little choices, every day.
At least, that was how it had been for my parents.
And they were basically the most in-love people I’d ever met.
So much so that it became impossible for me to ever have a long-term relationship of my own that lived up to it.
I’d never met a man who inspired me to commit the way they did.
I’d never met a man who left me lines from love poems as little gifts, either. So maybe that was part of the problem.
“Well,” Fiona said with a big sigh, flopping onto her back on the bed, forcing Tilly and I to look down at her. “You could be in my position instead. Where you’ve chosen who to love, but you don’t know if that will be enough.”
“Do you love him?” I asked her softly.
She winced, like I’d asked her to admit something deeply painful. Or humiliating.
“I dooo,” she moaned, drawing out the syllable and smacking her hands over her face, covering her eyes. “I love that big, grumpy dope.”
“Then have a little faith in him,” Tilly said kindly but also somewhat brusquely, like she was lovingly readying Fiona to step out into an unavoidable cold wind. “That he, too, will make his choice, and return to you when he can.”
“I think he has made his choice,” Fiona said from behind her hands. “Did I mention that he said he’d murder any other man who tried to claim me?”
Tilly snorted. Our eyes met over Fiona’s sprawled form.
“You did,” I reminded her, stroking the top of her head. “And I don’t think a man with that kind of determination is going to let anything get in his way, Fiona. Not even the Lavrika.”
But it wasn’t thoughts of Dalk or the Lavrika that stayed with me when I finally left Fiona – all cried out and asleep in the big bed she shared with Tilly – and returned to my own deeper cave.
It was thoughts of Gahn Thaleo. Fiona was right.
If he’d had a mate vision of me, I’d know about it by now.
He’d never let me leave his mountain. Not if he could stop me, anyway.
He didn’t think I was his mate and he didn’t want to be my friend.
Despite whatever Tilly said about the way he stared at me (which I knew he did, because it was impossible to be ignorant of the constant vigilance of his attention on me.) But where Dalk stared at Fiona with a mute and stormy sort of longing, Gahn Thaleo watched me with unnerving stillness and unknowable intentions.
I could just as easily believe that he actively disliked me over something like an interest or attraction towards me.
But he held your hands when you complained that they were cold.
My fingers clenched into involuntary fists.
The same frozen fists Gahn Thaleo had entirely enveloped in his own.
Even now, I could vividly recall the heat that had throbbed from him.
It had shocked me. It had seemed so at odds with the cool control of his demeanour.
Some part of me must have expected his skin to be as cold as his sight stars.
He’d been gentle, too. Cradling my hands like they were breakable – which to him, they probably were. That had also been unexpected.
I didn’t like when he surprised me. It made him into even more of an enigma.
At least he was an enigma I’d only have to deal with for a week before we got a break and went back to Gahn Errok’s. Hopefully, it would be a week spent without seeing him too much.
With that in mind, I finally got into bed.