Chapter Fifteen
Emotionally unprepared for this.
Mars
“How come you’re more out of breath than I am?
” I ask the moment after Ceres pulls my car into her driveway, opens the driver side door, and slams it shut.
I won. In case anyone was wondering. A headstart on these curving roads and getting a few cars piling up behind me was all it took to secure my victory.
Face red, Ceres pulls air in and clenches her fists at her sides as she marches up to me.
Slamming my keys against my chest, she hisses, “ Never do that again.” Gripping, she gathers cloth up along with my keyfob, and my vehicle locks and beeps when the buttons mash.
“You do not leave me anywhere alone like that ever again .” Her voice cracks. “Do you hear me?”
The mirth of my victory trickles away, and I catch my keys when she lets them go. “Yeah,” I offer. “Sorry. I didn’t… Sorry.”
Her teary eyes close, and sunlight shimmers across her flushed skin as she composes herself.
A swallow moves her throat, and every nerve in my body electrifies as ideas roam my skull.
I could so easily pull her in, hold her close, tight, warm, safe , and kiss the blood from her face until her heart has a chance to slow.
Instead, I grimace and force my gaze off her, because it’s really not healthy relationship goals of me to be thinking about anything like that right now. She’s scared . And it’s my fault. And I’m supposed to be repenting, not thinking about how to take advantage of the opportunities I’ve caused.
It’s not like I’d have the guts, anyway. I’m far too worried it’ll make her hate me if she’s the type you do not touch when they’re overstimulated. I understand that. As a rule, I’m not big on touch, either. Except…well…there’s that thing about exceptions to the rules again, huh?
And she will always be mine.
Collapsing in on herself, she says, “I have no idea how to go back there and tell that guy about the bikeathon now. I know his childhood trauma.” Her trembling fingers sink into her hair. “Why does this always happen to me?”
Probably because you are too loveable for words. “What’s his childhood trauma?”
She blinks at me. “His parents wanted him to be a lawyer or a doctor. He hated school, though, just wanted to be outside. The pressure was unbearable, and after never being enough for them for too long, he cut things off. It was brutal. A never-look-back sort of situation. That man—” She points, presumably toward Tristan.
“—passed the bar and still said, ‘You know what I’ll do instead? Sell things without boxes .’”
I glance toward where she’s pointing, then back at her, feeling my own heart rate climb in response to having no idea what I’m supposed to say here. All I can think of is: “I hardly see what limiting the waste that might end up in the ocean has to do with anything.”
Her lips part. Her eyes calculate. Her forehead wrinkles anyway. “Okay, fine. I’ll let the sheer lack of packaging slide, but I will not forgive him for not having a hundredths place on his receipts. That is animal.”
My brows rise, and I take my receipt out of my pocket. “Oh. Wow. Look at that.”
“You are joking.”
“About what?”
“You did not just notice this. You didn’t. You ‘just noticed’ this about as much as I ‘just noticed’ you have a bike.”
Fine. Yes. I’ve known. It bothers me. With Jove practically throwing money at people, it’s my job to make sure we don’t go “won the lottery and spent it all in one day” broke.
I track all the expenses religiously and do my absolute darndest to keep Jove from seeing just about anything with a dollar sign on it.
But, well, you know. Tracking expenses down to the penny is hard when my purchases from Dream Cycles don’t always stop at the tenths place.
Stuffing the receipt back in my pocket, I lift my attention to Ceres’s judging glare. “I bet if you’d opened your conversation with why doesn’t your machine print a stupid hundredths place on your receipts? , you wouldn’t have been subjected to tales of trauma.”
“I also, likely, would not have gotten the establishment’s help with your bikeathon.”
“Or a bike. So. You know. It really depends on what’s most important to you, I think.”
Her eyes roll, first full circle, then to her new bike, which I have lovingly settled under her front porch roof. “What am I going to do with a stupid bike?”
“Ride it?” With me. Maybe. I dunno. If you want to. I guess.
“On these roads? You held up half the town just now, and if the first guy had been coming around the wrong blind curve at the wrong moment, he wouldn’t have seen you, and you’d be a tarmac pancake.”
“Excuse me for caring about my carbon footprint.”
“Pick a less dangerous way of contributing to the good of the planet. Like recycling or a plant-based diet.”
My eye twitches, because she did not just suggest I make carrot cake vegan . Buttercream frosting contains a few rather important non-plant-based things. The very name itself is an offense to vegans everywhere. And. Yet.
Vegan carrot cake.
What an idea.
What a challenge.
“Shopping,” I say.
Ceres, slightly, melts. “I’m tired.”
“I need to get some things.” Vegan butter, possibly. I’m not sure I trust it to cream correctly, but disasters are proof that you’re trying. “You need eggs and bread.” Smiling, I shuffle a deck of cards in the pocket that doesn’t have an inner tube hanging out of it. “And juice.”
“I’ll survive on water.” She heads toward her front door, as though she’s not spent the past two weeks surviving on water .
In twelve days, I have seen her eat ten times.
That isn’t even once a day. The only reason I’ve not stomped into her kitchen before now is because she took her spare key in.
That little gesture was loud, and painful, to watch a modest seventeen times on replay.
I’m still recovering from the overthinking it caused, and consoling myself with videos on lock picking was…
likely not ideal husband behavior…but I got past the pain.
I got past the pain and marched myself to her front door today because I realized that she’s literally no more healthy without me than she is with me.
And my single concern with her isn’t whether or not I’m exhibiting the correct behavior for a man intent on courting a woman; it’s whether or not she hates me.
Since I can’t give Ceres a single chapter from this nonsense story I’m apparently “writing” without her giving me fifty options on how the male lead could be worse , I think I’m safe from her hatred, at least for right now.
So long as I play my cards right.
And speaking of cards…
Ceres startles when a card lands in the seam of her front door, right beside the lock she was reaching for. Stiff, she twists toward me.
“Come on, little goddess,” I say, flicking a new card between my fingers. “We have plans.”
“Is this a threat?” she asks.
Chuckling, I stride toward her, lean past her, and pluck my card free. “No, no, of course not. Consider it a friendly suggestion.”
“Friendly, huh?”
I meet her eyes. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”
“Business partners. And neighbors, actually,” she corrects.
“ And —” I tap her nose with my card. “—friends.”
“Closer to enemies.”
I shrug, take her hand, and drag her back to my car. “Makes no difference to me.”
Both tropes end the exact same way.
“You could have told me this is what you planned,” Ceres mumbles through my phone speaker while I navigate the Walmart aisles according to her instruction.
“Had I told you that I was planning to let you stay in the car, you would have logically stated that you could have stayed home.”
“Yes, well. Because I could have.”
I get some bread to replace the toast we had this morning and plop it in my basket. “The car ride would have been so lonely without the tension of your disapproval and the strain of your burgeoning panic filling the cracks.”
Silent moments pass, and I wince. Maybe that was too far. Maybe I should shut up. Maybe I shouldn’t ever say anything ever again. Maybe— “People exhaust me,” she says.
I swallow my worries. “Yes, that’s a natural side effect of being around the lousy buggers, I think.”
A tinge of laughter taints her voice. “Lousy buggers.”
My soul soars into the stratosphere. That’s the second time she’s laughed because of me. I don’t care that it was tiny and barely an intonation of joy. It was joy that I caused. I am a positive influence in her life, not just a natural disaster.
“It’s just so much to keep track of in person. So many things are happening. Anything could go wrong.” Breath leaves her. “I prefer environments that I control. End call buttons. Power buttons. Locks on doors without spare keys. That sort of thing.”
She prefers a box. No risks. No pain.
I can’t say I don’t understand on some level.
There’s less loss involved when you never take a chance, less grief to handle when you have nothing to mourn. No threat of rejection when no one is around to reject you.
However, that said, we seem to have opposite issues where rejection is concerned. I’ve faced it my entire life. People scorned me when I didn’t even know what I’d done wrong. I learned to use my reputation to my favor. I learned to carve a place for myself, however lonely it might be.
Ceres has a gift for reading people and saying the right things. She’s beautiful. Calm. Soothing. She unwittingly invites people in, and they dissolve into the peace that emanates from her without ever realizing how overwhelming it is to have someone thrust themselves upon your grace.
She’s left holding fragments of the souls she encounters.
I’m left wishing someone could give me a scrap of that same trust, kindness, or emotional depth.
I face rejection outright, and I don’t know how to fix it.
She masks her real self, thus fabricating an acceptance that still stings in the end.
Aren’t we just a pair?